I'm really praying for them to do something about this. I don't know anyone who's happy with the current situation. We're all lost and in heavy "photo debt".
Absolutely. I gave both iPhoto and Aperture a spin, but they're really really horrible when it comes to managing copies and eating drive space.
In the end I settled for using the OS X "Image Capture" to transfer .jpegs and .mp4s into my own directory structure, so I can rsync it to my linux backup server or copy them to an USB drive and _see the images are there_, instead of some magic "photo.library single-file-folder-hidden-contents".
And then I settled for Picasa to browse them. I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews.
Unfortunately Picasa still wants to cache thumbnails and it takes up quite some space, but I'm still coming out ahead.
Photo streams are a brilliant idea, but horribly executed. The article hits the nail straight on the head.
I'm on the road, can't verify where it is, but off top of my head, right click the project, disable generate previews. May also be in File menu when a project is selected. Be sure to turn off auto generate previews on import. There are tons of blogs about this, Google for screenshots.
That stinks. I've been using it on android for a while now and have had a great experience. It's really cool to be able to pull up a picture from a vacation you took ten years ago that happened to randomly come up in your current conversation.
It's sad that companies have to come up with these kinds of hacks just to get around stupid limitations imposed by Apple.
I really regret buying an iPhone last year. I had been avoiding them for the longest time but at some point I needed a new phone and gave in because everyone keep touting how awesome and convenient it is. Well, maybe for an average layman but not for a power user.
My friend bought an Android for half the price of an iPhone and his phone feels like a spaceship compared to this fancy looking but ultimately extremely limited device. Apple my ass.
Android/PC can do what the article wants, albeit with an initial investment of research and set-up but that's the choice... do you want buttoned up, everything 'just works' but only a certain way? or do you want customizable with tinkering required?
Isn't that part of the point? This is a totally normal thing to want, but no it is forbidden. Could a third party developer fix it? They could on Android.
They could, but it's strictly speaking not needed. It's already solved/fixed.
Just enable/install Google+/Picasa sync and you have all your pictures on all your Android-devices, and on the web, just in case you need it outside this semi-closed Google system.
What are the complaints in the original article about not being able to treat your data as your own?
The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than improve the situation.
All of them, I think. If any vendor were allowed to drop photo management software (as a first class citizen) on Apple machines, software that would even be allowed to manipulate their current cloud library through an open API - would anybody be asking Apple for anything?
I have over a terabyte of photos in Aperture, family has half a terabyte in iPhoto, whole family uses photostreams, nobody has your issues.
Apple doesn't have a great guide for best practice, and should fix that. But most of the troubles you outline, I feel you're "doing it wrong" or are actually flat wrong about how it works. This may be a training issue Apple should address.
As just one example, I very specifically want my device camera roll and combined photo stream separate. Combining them as you suggest has severely negative consequences your article doesn't consider. Edits on iOS carry over to desktop, you can edit on the loo all day if that suits your style. You never ever have to delete photos from your photo stream and no Apple dialog tells you to delete from photostream. If you set prefs right, you'll get photos imported exactly once.
Your letter raises awareness that people like photos. That's good.
But while waiting, look into some of the prefs dialogs in Aperture or iPhoto. I'm comfortable that every need you mentioned is handled.
But if you still can't find satisfaction for your particular workflow (e.g. photo pro doing commercial work in studio and on laptop in field), check out Image Capture plus the lesser known Auto Importer scriptable tool. You may have to mindlessly plug in a cable after a shoot or at least once in 30 days, but you won't have to press a key.
But this is a pretty darned standard use case, isn't it? It's not like he's asking for the sun and the moon; he's just asking for a way to easily organize photos taken with multiple Apple devices, without using up all the storage in those devices.
That said, my family has the exact same photo problem, but only half of the devices involved are from Apple. A solution which was not limited to a closed ecosystem would be much better than an Apple-specific solution, in my opinion.
It's a standard use case for an average consumer who probably doesn't take that many photos and doesn't have much of a clue about backups. It's not a standard use case for anybody who is either a serious photographer or a geek....
Exactly this kind of service is where the closed Apple ecosystem should excel. Unfortunately, Apple has missed the transition from the Mac as a "media hub" to the cloud. iCloud came a bit late and they fail to keep up with the rapid innovation speed of other online services.
But how is the scenario described in the article not the standard use case for everyone who has more than one (internet connected) device that takes pictures?
It's not as non-standard as you think - I've got this exact pain-point. As well as my sister, who is not technical at all. I've gotten a couple of calls from her "Where are my pictures going?" and all I can tell her is "Hell if I know."
Hell for that matter, just try sharing your photos with your family on a home network. Both iTunes and Windows Media Player seem designed to frustrate that very common scenario.
I also tried using the Dropbox backup approach but it's a massive waste of time syncing endless photos to multiple devices. I don't actually want the files on all my devices, I just want them stored somewhere I can access them later.
So I've started using https://www.everpix.com/ backup from multiple sources Facebook, Flickr, iPhoto, Insagram etc, finds de-duplicates and I don't have to ever worry about running out of storage.
It's a bit annoying since you have to opt each device out, but you can use the Selective Sync feature in Dropbox to not sync your photos folder to each device that you have Dropbox installed on.
And don't even think about going down the path of multiple users sharing an iPhoto Library across multiple devices, because you know...I want/need a separate photo library than my wife.
Apple isn't using smaller and smaller drives for the MacBook Air. The current release goes up to 512GB which is the max so far. And 10 years worth of high res photos and movies is always going to take up space. Why doesn't he just buy an external hard drive like a normal person or use Dropbox/S3 etc ?
I just posted this as well. Some people just like to complain. A 3TB external HDD is pretty cheap nowadays, and if that is not enough room, he could always buy another one.... You never know though, he might complain about that as well!
Last time I tried aperture/iphoto, it created ~30gb of worthless thumbnails and previews out of a ~20gb photo library. That hurts on a 256GB macbook air (largest size available about a year ago). Plus, the Apple photo apps seem to go to great lengths to hide where photos are physically stored, as if you're not supposed to think about .jpeg files or volumes.
Thumbnails get generated because most cameras are outputting multi-GB JPEG/RAW which take too long generate in real time on low end Macs whilst scrolling the thumbnail view.
And Apple apps don't go to great lengths to hide photos. They are stored in your Pictures folder in a package e.g. Aperture Library. Just right click and your photos are there. Packages are great for inexperienced users since it is easier to backup and less opportunities to mess up the metadata.
I thought most camera JPEGs contained a thumbnail in the EXIF. And there's absolutely no reason to store 1024x1024 "preview" versions either, or whatever it is it is doing to to take up so many gigabytes. Last time I looked at iPhoto, there were no obvious ways to move images around volumes (in fact, there were no obvious ways to even have folders within folders) (actually - i don't think it even supports folders; the "albums" it generated seemed to be only stored in some opaque hidden meta-database? Talk about lock-in!)
It is up to individual cameras to support thumbnails and the resolution either way is postage stamped. The large 1024x1024 previews are for the large thumbnail view of your photos/albums (try it in iPhoto and you will see).
And the metadata is stored inside the iPhoto/Aperture library package. For Aperture at least it is an open standard XML file so there is no 'lock in' what so ever.
Ah yes, I'll just tell my mom to write an XML-parsing script to move the files around in case she ever changes her setup. ;)
And even Finder quicklook seem to render the full .jpegs just fine and fast enough, so wasting so much disk space on a useless preview/thumbnail feature (to me) is a dealbreaker. I'd even be willing to accept missing or postage stamped thumbnails, rather than having to uninstall applications and remove music to make room for my photos.
Handily, Aperture lets you use the camera generated preview from the EXIF.
Aperture and iPhoto use same library DB packages now, and Aperture's a cheap upgrade if you've outgrown iPhoto's consumer family interface. Aperture lets your organize any way you want, to any depth, with nesting of any kind within any kind.
Personally, I like that Aperture (and iPhoto, for that matter) use packages instead of folders. It took away my desire to be a "file location control freak" and just focus on the photos.
Other enthusiast friends of mine hate the package approach because they're very used to the file management approach, so YMMV.
Yes, he could have been phrased that better. But it definitely is the case that high megapixel cameras plus years of libraries plus SSDs makes my computer feel smaller than ever.
And adding a separate drive is cumbersome, and slow, and not a solution for a tablet at all. Plus iPhoto doesn't easily support libraries on a external drives. I think you need to launch it while holding Option or something arcane like that.
Amen. I'm right in the middle of figuring out how to set my mother up with an iPad - as her only computer. No mac, no iTunes sync.
The only problem? She's got an iPhoto library almost as large as the iPad drive, and there's currently no way to store her iPhoto library remotely.
I'm looking at Space Monkey - but it's not clear yet just how it works or if it will be a truly seamless experience. (People like my parents can't be bothered to manually move photos around - it just needs to work.)
NB: In my research, I've noticed that 99% of iPad users think iCloud backs up all their photos on all devices, which of course it does not.
Everpix is mentioned in another comment. I tried Everpix last year, and it looks like since then they've made it possible to basically store photos in the cloud (without keeping a local copy). Could be an option...
Don't want to keep banging on about it, but yeah Everpix is the solution. Install it on the desktop and Sync the iPhoto library. Install the Everpix app on the iPad, £3 a month, job done.
Last time I checked though Everpix doesn't do video. I have all sorts of little video clips and I desperately wish Everpix would handle them as well as my photos, I don't want to have to split them up or deal with them differently.
From their website, I see no mention of how much quota or space you get to store photos with them. Am I correct to assume that you have infinite space?
Wow, yeah, it looks like Everpix is exactly what he asked for, and more, including multi-platform support (not just iOS), and for exactly the price he specs -- $5/month.
Yes, I use Everpix and I've been really happy with it. However, I like the photo upload tools that come with Dropbox, so now I collect, sort, and edit photos in Dropbox, then I transfer them to a static(ish) Everpix library that distributes them back to my iPhone/iPad/browser. Seems kind of circular, but it works really well. And I have 170,000 photos in the cloud for less than the cost of a Dropbox upgrade.
This is also a problem with movies. On my Apple TV it seems to stream movies, but if I want to watch the same movie on my iPad I have to have the correct amount of space left to download it first.
This is one thing I like about Android/Google+. All the photos I take are uploaded automatically and I can access them on any of my other Android devices.
Snapjoy seemed to be taking the right approach to dealing with this issue. Dropbox bought them, so maybe this will end up a solved problem - though the last thing I want is to be able to 'sync' photos out of existence which is why Dropbox itself is a bad solution to photo storage. Agree that right now it's surprisingly hard to keep all your photos in one place.
There are two problems with this. One, it's another physical device to manage which is a pain in the ass. Two, what happens if the external HDD breaks?
Backup the HDD and you'll be fine. Copy and paste and walk away. Personally, I have private pictures that I would never want put on any cloud service. Nothing in the world is 100% protected. There could be a bomb that drops on the building housing the servers. A fire could burn down your house/dwelling. It happens.
You can use backup/sync software to copy stuff across automatically. Otherwise, I didn't say your pain-in-the-ass idevices went away, I just said you could reduce their pain-in-the-assness.
> MacBook Air so that after 10 years of taking high-res photos and videos I couldn’t actually fit them on your my desktop hard drive
The MacBook Air isn't a desktop, and the iPad isn't a remote control for iPhoto. Besides, wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup. Also, Photo Streams aren't the only way to get things in to iPhoto, if that's not your flavor. Image Capture will pull the full files off the camera and iPhoto can import anything it understands from anywhere (like, ~/Pictures/ImageCaptureDump). A small change in workflow would solve this guy's problems.
> Wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup.
I think his use-case is a lot more common than yours! 99%+ of consumers don't have an external Thunderbolt RAID array, or even know what it is. They just want their photos all in one place, accessible from everywhere, in the same way you can have your music on all devices with iTunes match.
It seems safe to assume anything involving "external Thunderbolt RAID array" is not "popular" either.
I think "All my photos are safe, and available on all my devices, including when I upgrade devices" probably IS a popular need -- but many/most people don't even realize it's not currently being met, or don't even think about it -- which may make it hard to build a business of it. They don't care from "the cloud", but the cloud seems the logical way to meet this need.
Really? I think the HN bubble would lead to thinking more people have desktops than laptops. Many casual computer users don't even have desks to put that desktop on, they just use a laptop on the couch, when they run into something they can't do on their phone or tablet.
Agreed. Since the days of the $400 laptop started, most non-techies I meet don't have working desktops anymore. Almost all techies I know have one or more.
Yes, I don't have 70GB yet, but my Google Drive account currently has 100GB of allocated space in it. I can get up to 1TB If I want. I can access all of them from the gallery app on my phone ,and a web page on my desktop. I can print them via any number of services. Also if I use ChromeOS I have essentially filesystem native access to them.
With this setup, however, do you end up with local backups of the files? Whatever picture solution I choose, it's important that I have all the files local (because I still consider it a distinct possibility that Google will cancel my account someday ... accident or not).
No you don't which I count as a feature, but I understand the opposite side. I can export my photos locally, but already my photo collection is larger then the storage space on my phone, tablet or Chromebook so a syncing solution wouldn't help on those platforms.
It sounds like he is fairly involved and satisfied with the platform, but has some suggestions on improvements. A wholesale platform switch to solve one specific issue is not a reasonable solution.
It doesn't have a great way to upload from the desktop to G+, does it? I've been trying to figure this out for pics that don't originate on an android/iOS device.
I guess picasa can do it, but picasa leaves a lot to be desired.
I use Shotwell to upload to Picasa which is really a thin wrapper around G+. I also still use Picasa to do any prints I might want since G+ doesn't have that as part of its interface yet.
I could not agree more, the whole iPhone, iPhoto (mac), photo stream situation actually confuses the hell out of me. We're generally smart people on HN and if we don't get, try explaining it to parents and it's a whole world of confusion - normally ending with "You suggested we buy Apple because it was simple to use". My only reply at the moment is "Yeah, I know ... it's complicated".
To anyone making closed ecosystem comments, it's even harder to explain how to do any of this photo management to a parent (the dominant market with disposable income at the moment) with Android and Dropbox.
There really is no way back from "So wait, your telling me Google is IN my phone and so people can search my photos?"
I love the iPhone camera. I have largely stopped using my other cameras because the iPhone camera is just so convenient.
However, the iPhone Photo App is extremely terrible. Everything exists in the Camera Roll, and you can't physically move them from there, so you have to search through the entire Camera Roll every time. I have 4000 photos and videos, and trying to find anything is impossible, to the point where I have given up. They have Albums, but those are merely pointers, so it doesn't really help organize the Camera Roll itself. Plus, you can't do simple things like see when the photo was taken, or search only for videos. You should be able to pull up a calendar, and see the number of photos on a per day, per month, or per year basis. It seems to be another example of an app that the developers themselves don't use extensively, otherwise they would fix these simple issues.
Same here. I have about half as many photos as you, but my iPhone is my only camera. It's very frustrating that my only option for photo management is to just remove old photos from my phone until I hit a sweet spot of maybe 500 or so.
I don't know of any automated solutions, but I routinely use QuickSSHd to wirelessly scp photos to my computer from my Android phone. It will also let you get a shell on the phone and delete the old photos.
Yes, somewhat. The gallery shows both camera pictures and albums from Google+ Pictures. You can probably get a similar effect with the Google+ app on iOS and deleting pictures from your camera roll.
You are essentially just tagging photos as being in a certain album, and the "Camera Roll" is always the view of all photos taken with the camera on the device.
The Camera Roll stores only the pictures you've taken since your last sync to iPhoto. The intended (pre-Photo Stream) workflow seems to be:
1. Take picture with the phone -> iPhone's "Camera Roll".
2. Sync phone with iPhoto and delete pics from phone -> iPhoto's "Last Import".
3. Organize pics in iPhoto -> iPhoto's "Albums" and "Events".
4. Sync phone with iTunes, including pics -> iPhone's "Events".
Note that iPhoto will automatically group pics into events by date, which along with the "Last 3 Months" and "Last 12 Months" albums giving you at least some ability to find photos chronologically.
I'm not claiming that this is a good workflow, or that it was designed with the user's best interests in mind! Rather, it seems to be one of the many obvious and annoying inconveniences that show how much importance places on locking users into iTunes as their media-management tool.
(The primary example of which is that Apple will sell you a giant hard drive in a WiFi backup appliance, and a WiFi->HDMI box that pipes content from your Mac to your TV... but not a media/backup server with HDMI and a giant hard drive, which is all we really want, right?)
I recently released a new app that makes it easy to sort, organize and share your iOS photos by date and location.
Photowerks scans your Camera Roll and displays your photos similarly to the Apple Photos app, but groups them by date taken or photo location.
Features:
• Quickly sort photos by date taken, city, state, country, camera make, or camera model.
• View photos in a grid or list view.
• Tap photo to view date taken and location (city, state)
• Share photos via email, Facebook, Twitter (with photo captions listing photo date and location)
• Create new albums in the Apple Photos app.
• View photo details with standard pinch to zoom gestures and swipe to view previous/next photo.
There's real opportunity for Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything everywhere), or Flickr (if they suddenly made really great native clients) to sew this up.
Google probably hasn't a chance in hell given the neglect that they're showing to Picasa.
Isn't Google+ pretty good for photos? You can even auto-sync photos to it. In fact it was one of the very first to do it, long before Dropbox and iCloud.
I think it is the best design. I don't even think about uploading or sharing photo's. They're just there! Plus, set it to Wifi only and you'll not waste your precious 3/4G's.
Google+'s photo sharing/storing system is great. Unfortunately, right now you have to use a third-party app if you want your G+ Instant Upload album to automatically sync to a Google Drive folder. I'm surprised Google hasn't added this feature yet. Perhaps they are intentionally refraining in order to try to induce people to share on G+?
Google probably hasn't a chance in hell given the neglect that they're showing to Picasa.
Ironically enough, none of the ones you suggest handles this well yet, but this is already handled decently enough via your one rejected candidate: Google+/Picasa sync on Android.
I never used Picasa on Windows nor Linux, but all the pictures are available via Picasa Web as well, and you can download full albums there.
Not a full on sync solution with client-PCs, but you do get access to the pictures (via the web) which means you don't get locked in like people using Apple-stuff.
They do offer selective sync which can be configured on a folder level in the settings. I've been using this for a while now to save space on device like the MBA with limited space on solid state drives.
As in on device X don't sync folder Y. If you have a photos folder with 100GB of images you can set it so that your MacBook Air does not sync that folder but does get your other Dropbox folders.
I have a Dell Mini with a tiny SSD, and I use selective sync to only sync my Documents folder. I then symlinked ~/Documents to ~/Dropbox/Documents. It works quite nicely. (and I do sync a few other folders, this is just an example)
It's not the same, if you don't sync the folder then you can't easily add to it or view the contents? On mobile you can add and view files in unsynced folders easily - they just download on demand.
It has recently become popular on HN to write "this" as if it is a complete thought. I don't understand this usage of "this". Can someone enlighten me?
"This" when used by itself means the poster agrees with a parent poster; it's an obnoxious upvote really. "This" when used with a preceding quote means that the poster agrees with the quote in particular. Such usage is more of an upvote for select part of the comment.
Not to get too meta but I've seen it a lot on Reddit and essentially someone is trying to say the thought was so completely expressed that they just need to suggest "This" as it is exactly how they feel as well.
And iTunes... My wife spent hours last night trying to clear PodCasts off her iPhone. There are setting for how many episodes to keep in: iTunes, iPhone Settings, the individual PodCast in iTunes, and on the individual PodCast in the iPhone. How these settings play together, well, who the heck knows!
Apple is not bad at sync. I have run nearly 100k photos through photostreams without a single glitch. I have thousands of photos in shared photostreams (dynamic albums) shared to a dozen family members without a single glitch. Set and forget, just works.
What I learned for this thread is a few people have obviously gathered that all this works great, most have not. So Apple needs a good best practices guide to cover the use cases between casual and pro.
iPhoto is the worst, just a straight up terrible photo management program. Adobe Lightroom is not that expensive and is far and away better - mainly for the fact that it actually allows you to manage your photo files, instead of hiding them god knows where. Also, it doesn't cache your entire collection of photos so I can actually open and use Lightroom with 14k+ photos. iPhoto would shit the bed and crash my computer if I tried to do that.
Adobe Revel does all this for $5.99 per month. They have a free version for 50 photos a month. it syncs low-res version on iPhone for those out of sync cases.. see http://www.adoberevel.com/
This is the single biggest technology related point of pain in my life, as well as the lives of many people I know.
Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired it and appears to be doing something...
But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in update after update.
The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto, and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.
Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.
Albums that originate on one machine are different from albums that originate on another machine. One must decide to manually sync albums, but the canonical copy of a photo lives on only one of the computers in question, not in the cloud.
This poses problems for creating albums from photos whose canonical copy lives on different machines. One must first sync, then duplicate items that did not originate on the local computer.
> Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.
This might just be my device experience, but with automatic upload on, this is a non-issue for me; pictures taken on an Android device or uploaded to Picasa are available everywhere my Google account is.
It sounds like you (and possibly the author of the article) turned off the iPhoto option to automatically import photo stream images to your library. See:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2712
Other than videos not being included (yes, that's annoying), it does exactly what I need. Am I missing some other aspect?
Nope. All photos (and screenshots) are added to iPhoto automatically as long as iPhoto is actually running, even if the iPhone is on wifi in a different country, meaning its not just a local sync. Only videos require physical cable.
Suppose you have two computers, each with its own iPhoto library. Picasa does not unify all the photos into one repository and allow you to use them (for edits, or for composition into specialized collections of photos for sharing).
Also, it does not solve the problem of the iPhoto library filling up most of the hard drive and the user still wanting to seamlessly use the photos as described above.
I recently went through this as well. My wife and I shared iPhoto libraries for ~10 years and then they got to big.
So I started splitting them into multiple libraries. Then the libraries (with dslr video) filled up the hard drive and my wife had trouble finding pictures she knew were there (but not in the current library ) After this a a couple of other things I settle on out current strategy:
All old and new iPhoto libraries on an external HD connected to the home network. Aperture - I'm still learning how to use this so I can show my wife but it lets multiple people access multiple iPhoto libraries on multiple computers. The hard drive is wet her by the Crashplan daemon and everything gets backed up.
As for phones and tablets, I'm pessimistic when it comes to photo stream: I see it as nice but ephemeral and regularly import the device images into the libraries. We will see how it goes as I learn more about Aperture.
People in this thread have had workarounds and solutions that would work but would not work on an iPhone. Such as leaving drop box syncing in the background. If you could change the background app policy...
Its not as much that another ecosystem is better, but that if yours is closed you will hit limits.
I have over 20k photos in my iPhoto library. The problems he describes here are real. For me, it's more of a problem of retrieval. I want to search on more attributes than just date, location, face, and a flat tag structure.
Examples: show me...
- all of the photos of people from my uncle Harold's side of the family (cousins, etc.)
- all of the photos containing the blue car I used to own.
- all of the photos containing both person1 and person 2.
This would require a significant expansion both in the complexity of metadata as well as automated tagging. I wish Apple would make it happen.
304 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadIn the end I settled for using the OS X "Image Capture" to transfer .jpegs and .mp4s into my own directory structure, so I can rsync it to my linux backup server or copy them to an USB drive and _see the images are there_, instead of some magic "photo.library single-file-folder-hidden-contents".
And then I settled for Picasa to browse them. I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews.
Unfortunately Picasa still wants to cache thumbnails and it takes up quite some space, but I'm still coming out ahead.
Photo streams are a brilliant idea, but horribly executed. The article hits the nail straight on the head.
Presumably you know you can turn both of those off and not use any space for them at all, just gen on the fly from the JPEGs own built in preview.
https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en
I really regret buying an iPhone last year. I had been avoiding them for the longest time but at some point I needed a new phone and gave in because everyone keep touting how awesome and convenient it is. Well, maybe for an average layman but not for a power user.
My friend bought an Android for half the price of an iPhone and his phone feels like a spaceship compared to this fancy looking but ultimately extremely limited device. Apple my ass.
2) Have a non-standard use case
3) Beg Ecosystem owners to change to meet your needs
Android/PC can do what the article wants, albeit with an initial investment of research and set-up but that's the choice... do you want buttoned up, everything 'just works' but only a certain way? or do you want customizable with tinkering required?
Just enable/install Google+/Picasa sync and you have all your pictures on all your Android-devices, and on the web, just in case you need it outside this semi-closed Google system.
1. Pick the best (free) iOS management tool for the job at the time
2. Invest eight years of curation and 70Gb of photos in it
3. Use the setup with more than one device and the same way that 20M+ other users use it
4. Expect that I shouldn't have to be a contortionist to continue to do so
And voila, you have found yourself a closed system which wont let you treat your data as yours, just as pointed out in the comment you replied to.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out that Apple has a closed solution here, and that the solution is seriously lacking.
The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than improve the situation.
Apple doesn't have a great guide for best practice, and should fix that. But most of the troubles you outline, I feel you're "doing it wrong" or are actually flat wrong about how it works. This may be a training issue Apple should address.
As just one example, I very specifically want my device camera roll and combined photo stream separate. Combining them as you suggest has severely negative consequences your article doesn't consider. Edits on iOS carry over to desktop, you can edit on the loo all day if that suits your style. You never ever have to delete photos from your photo stream and no Apple dialog tells you to delete from photostream. If you set prefs right, you'll get photos imported exactly once.
Your letter raises awareness that people like photos. That's good.
But while waiting, look into some of the prefs dialogs in Aperture or iPhoto. I'm comfortable that every need you mentioned is handled.
But if you still can't find satisfaction for your particular workflow (e.g. photo pro doing commercial work in studio and on laptop in field), check out Image Capture plus the lesser known Auto Importer scriptable tool. You may have to mindlessly plug in a cable after a shoot or at least once in 30 days, but you won't have to press a key.
That said, my family has the exact same photo problem, but only half of the devices involved are from Apple. A solution which was not limited to a closed ecosystem would be much better than an Apple-specific solution, in my opinion.
2) Ignore those points and make a cynical/spurious criticism
3) Derail the discussion away from anything useful
But how is the scenario described in the article not the standard use case for everyone who has more than one (internet connected) device that takes pictures?
So I've started using https://www.everpix.com/ backup from multiple sources Facebook, Flickr, iPhoto, Insagram etc, finds de-duplicates and I don't have to ever worry about running out of storage.
Current setup is to use the Dropbox Camera Sync with Everpix, then just cull the start of the folder when it gets over 5GBs / every few months.
Apple isn't using smaller and smaller drives for the MacBook Air. The current release goes up to 512GB which is the max so far. And 10 years worth of high res photos and movies is always going to take up space. Why doesn't he just buy an external hard drive like a normal person or use Dropbox/S3 etc ?
It's like attaching an anchor to a 13" Macbook or Air.
And Apple apps don't go to great lengths to hide photos. They are stored in your Pictures folder in a package e.g. Aperture Library. Just right click and your photos are there. Packages are great for inexperienced users since it is easier to backup and less opportunities to mess up the metadata.
And the metadata is stored inside the iPhoto/Aperture library package. For Aperture at least it is an open standard XML file so there is no 'lock in' what so ever.
And even Finder quicklook seem to render the full .jpegs just fine and fast enough, so wasting so much disk space on a useless preview/thumbnail feature (to me) is a dealbreaker. I'd even be willing to accept missing or postage stamped thumbnails, rather than having to uninstall applications and remove music to make room for my photos.
Aperture and iPhoto use same library DB packages now, and Aperture's a cheap upgrade if you've outgrown iPhoto's consumer family interface. Aperture lets your organize any way you want, to any depth, with nesting of any kind within any kind.
Split across different folders depending on whether you have edited them or not.
Other enthusiast friends of mine hate the package approach because they're very used to the file management approach, so YMMV.
And adding a separate drive is cumbersome, and slow, and not a solution for a tablet at all. Plus iPhoto doesn't easily support libraries on a external drives. I think you need to launch it while holding Option or something arcane like that.
The only problem? She's got an iPhoto library almost as large as the iPad drive, and there's currently no way to store her iPhoto library remotely.
I'm looking at Space Monkey - but it's not clear yet just how it works or if it will be a truly seamless experience. (People like my parents can't be bothered to manually move photos around - it just needs to work.)
NB: In my research, I've noticed that 99% of iPad users think iCloud backs up all their photos on all devices, which of course it does not.
This is one thing I like about Android/Google+. All the photos I take are uploaded automatically and I can access them on any of my other Android devices.
Another common misconception by family and friends iDevice users is that everything is automatically backed up.
They don't get that you have to set things up, specifically, and that you must not ignore the warning messages about iCloud storage.
However, note that if you just move all your photos to an external hard drive, you don't have a backup.
Mirrored drives on your desktop plus an account with Blackblaze (~$5/mo. for unlimited storage), and you're covered. Done and done.
The MacBook Air isn't a desktop, and the iPad isn't a remote control for iPhoto. Besides, wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup. Also, Photo Streams aren't the only way to get things in to iPhoto, if that's not your flavor. Image Capture will pull the full files off the camera and iPhoto can import anything it understands from anywhere (like, ~/Pictures/ImageCaptureDump). A small change in workflow would solve this guy's problems.
I think his use-case is a lot more common than yours! 99%+ of consumers don't have an external Thunderbolt RAID array, or even know what it is. They just want their photos all in one place, accessible from everywhere, in the same way you can have your music on all devices with iTunes match.
I think "All my photos are safe, and available on all my devices, including when I upgrade devices" probably IS a popular need -- but many/most people don't even realize it's not currently being met, or don't even think about it -- which may make it hard to build a business of it. They don't care from "the cloud", but the cloud seems the logical way to meet this need.
True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on it.
Yes, most people still have a desktop.
I guess picasa can do it, but picasa leaves a lot to be desired.
To anyone making closed ecosystem comments, it's even harder to explain how to do any of this photo management to a parent (the dominant market with disposable income at the moment) with Android and Dropbox.
There really is no way back from "So wait, your telling me Google is IN my phone and so people can search my photos?"
However, the iPhone Photo App is extremely terrible. Everything exists in the Camera Roll, and you can't physically move them from there, so you have to search through the entire Camera Roll every time. I have 4000 photos and videos, and trying to find anything is impossible, to the point where I have given up. They have Albums, but those are merely pointers, so it doesn't really help organize the Camera Roll itself. Plus, you can't do simple things like see when the photo was taken, or search only for videos. You should be able to pull up a calendar, and see the number of photos on a per day, per month, or per year basis. It seems to be another example of an app that the developers themselves don't use extensively, otherwise they would fix these simple issues.
Is Android any better?
1. Take picture with the phone -> iPhone's "Camera Roll". 2. Sync phone with iPhoto and delete pics from phone -> iPhoto's "Last Import". 3. Organize pics in iPhoto -> iPhoto's "Albums" and "Events". 4. Sync phone with iTunes, including pics -> iPhone's "Events".
Note that iPhoto will automatically group pics into events by date, which along with the "Last 3 Months" and "Last 12 Months" albums giving you at least some ability to find photos chronologically.
I'm not claiming that this is a good workflow, or that it was designed with the user's best interests in mind! Rather, it seems to be one of the many obvious and annoying inconveniences that show how much importance places on locking users into iTunes as their media-management tool.
(The primary example of which is that Apple will sell you a giant hard drive in a WiFi backup appliance, and a WiFi->HDMI box that pipes content from your Mac to your TV... but not a media/backup server with HDMI and a giant hard drive, which is all we really want, right?)
I recently released a new app that makes it easy to sort, organize and share your iOS photos by date and location.
Photowerks scans your Camera Roll and displays your photos similarly to the Apple Photos app, but groups them by date taken or photo location.
Features:
• Quickly sort photos by date taken, city, state, country, camera make, or camera model. • View photos in a grid or list view. • Tap photo to view date taken and location (city, state) • Share photos via email, Facebook, Twitter (with photo captions listing photo date and location) • Create new albums in the Apple Photos app. • View photo details with standard pinch to zoom gestures and swipe to view previous/next photo.
Here's the app store link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photowerks/id643351365?mt=8
Price is US$.99.
I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks, Steve Orth
There's real opportunity for Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything everywhere), or Flickr (if they suddenly made really great native clients) to sew this up.
Google probably hasn't a chance in hell given the neglect that they're showing to Picasa.
https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos
Dropbox has offered selective sync for a while now.
Ironically enough, none of the ones you suggest handles this well yet, but this is already handled decently enough via your one rejected candidate: Google+/Picasa sync on Android.
Not a full on sync solution with client-PCs, but you do get access to the pictures (via the web) which means you don't get locked in like people using Apple-stuff.
The problem is that Apple seemingly cannot escape from the users-owns-1-computer-which-is-the-master-to-1-iPod setup from eons past.
What I learned for this thread is a few people have obviously gathered that all this works great, most have not. So Apple needs a good best practices guide to cover the use cases between casual and pro.
1. Photos he takes are added to a library automatically (for internet connected devices).
2. That library exists in the cloud.
3. He can access that library from all of his devices.
I also have this problem, and I'd add a 4th point: Please let me back up the cloud based library.
You can't do this with lightroom, either.
Btw, Lightroom has a scripting interface using which I'm pretty sure you can roll what this guy wants.
Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired it and appears to be doing something...
But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in update after update.
The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto, and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.
Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the account.
This poses problems for creating albums from photos whose canonical copy lives on different machines. One must first sync, then duplicate items that did not originate on the local computer.
This might just be my device experience, but with automatic upload on, this is a non-issue for me; pictures taken on an Android device or uploaded to Picasa are available everywhere my Google account is.
Other than videos not being included (yes, that's annoying), it does exactly what I need. Am I missing some other aspect?
Also, it does not solve the problem of the iPhoto library filling up most of the hard drive and the user still wanting to seamlessly use the photos as described above.
So I started splitting them into multiple libraries. Then the libraries (with dslr video) filled up the hard drive and my wife had trouble finding pictures she knew were there (but not in the current library ) After this a a couple of other things I settle on out current strategy:
All old and new iPhoto libraries on an external HD connected to the home network. Aperture - I'm still learning how to use this so I can show my wife but it lets multiple people access multiple iPhoto libraries on multiple computers. The hard drive is wet her by the Crashplan daemon and everything gets backed up.
As for phones and tablets, I'm pessimistic when it comes to photo stream: I see it as nice but ephemeral and regularly import the device images into the libraries. We will see how it goes as I learn more about Aperture.
Its not as much that another ecosystem is better, but that if yours is closed you will hit limits.
Examples: show me... - all of the photos of people from my uncle Harold's side of the family (cousins, etc.) - all of the photos containing the blue car I used to own. - all of the photos containing both person1 and person 2.
This would require a significant expansion both in the complexity of metadata as well as automated tagging. I wish Apple would make it happen.