15 ms·

Dear Apple, let's talk about photos

429 points by robheaton 13y ago

caiusdurling 13y ago
Hear Hear. Currently I just don't bother with curating pictures I've shot, aside from tweeting or facebooking them at the point I take them.
kalleboo 13y ago
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".
- 0x0 13y ago
  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.
  - Terretta 13y ago
    > I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews. 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.
    - 0x0 13y ago
      I looked around really hard for this option but failed to find it. Where is it?
      - Terretta 13y ago
        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.
nos4A2 13y ago
Doesn't the dropbox instant upload already do this (one album\store that all devices have master access to)? I am not sure if it works on iDevices
- lucian1900 13y ago
  It doesn't really work because of iOS's stupid ban on background processes. You have to start Dropbox and keep it open for it to sync photos ...
  - samolang 13y ago
    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.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    Dropbox WILL upload in the background for IIRC 10 mins as well as when you move around. https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en
    - VexXtreme 13y ago
      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.
    - lucian1900 13y ago
      Ah. I guess I wouldn't have noticed that on an iPad (I don't have/use an iPhone).
workbench 13y ago
Apples price gorging on disk space is a complete joke when PhotoStream is needlessly duplicating all my photos.
riotingpscifis 13y ago
1) Pick a closed ecosystem 2) Have a non-standard use case 3) Beg Ecosystem owners to change to meet your needs
- gr3yh47 13y ago
  +1 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?
- MasterScrat 13y ago
  How non-standard is his use case? And what then would be the standard use case when using laptop, iPhone and iPad?
  - pi18n 13y ago
    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.
    - josteink 13y ago
      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.
- petenixey 13y ago
  Or, for another perspective: 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
  - 13y ago
tombot 13y ago
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/ 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.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  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.
  - tombot 13y ago
    Yup, but I'm right in thinking that also prevents you from adding new photos on that device? 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.
- tommoor 13y ago
  You're not the only one, if the Dropbox desktop clients acted more like the mobile clients then it would work well...
smallegan 13y ago
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.
threeseed 13y ago
Not really sure what he means. 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 ?
- yoster 13y ago
  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!
  - andybak 13y ago
    External drives rather conflict with the ideal of hyper-portable laptops. It's like attaching an anchor to a 13" Macbook or Air.
    - Hontano 13y ago
      It's not ideal, but there's a happy enough compromise in USB-powered 2TB 2.5" external drives.
    - yoster 13y ago
      If that's the case, why not use a 1TB USB 3.0 flash drive? Cant get more "hyper-portable" than that.
- 0x0 13y ago
  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.
  - 13y ago
subpixel 13y ago
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.
- subpixel 13y ago
  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...
  - tombot 13y ago
    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.
    - konradb 13y ago
      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.
    - brown9-2 13y ago
      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?
      - tombot 13y ago
jrkelly 13y ago
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.
yoster 13y ago
Do what everyone else does when they run out of space, buy an external HDD.
- samolang 13y ago
  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?
  - scholia 13y ago
    It reduces the triplicate pains in the ass caused by trying to manage three physical devices bought from Apple.... However, note that if you just move all your photos to an external hard drive, you don't have a backup.
    - samolang 13y ago
      No it doesn't. You still have those devices. They don't go away. Now you have expend time manually copying your photos to the device.
      - yoster 13y ago
        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.
      - scholia 13y ago
        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.
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    Nothing bad, if you've done backup properly (i.e. three copies; two local, one remote.) Mirrored drives on your desktop plus an account with Blackblaze (~$5/mo. for unlimited storage), and you're covered. Done and done.
moha297 13y ago
True that!
eddieroger 13y ago
> 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.
- zerovox 13y ago
  > 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.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  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.
- smackfu 13y ago
  >The MacBook Air isn't a desktop True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on it.
  - acheron 13y ago
dkhenry 13y ago
Funny, Google+ and my android phone do everything he just mentioned. Why not just switch ?
- threeseed 13y ago
  Google+ and your Android phone can manage 70GB of photos and ensure that they properly synced to multiple devices including a Mac ?
  - dkhenry 13y ago
    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.
    - gallamine 13y ago
      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).
      - dkhenry 13y ago
        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.
- corresation 13y ago
  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.
simonbarker87 13y ago
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?"
steven2012 13y ago
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.
- whichdan 13y ago
  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. Is Android any better?
  - colomon 13y ago
    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.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    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.
- cmsj 13y ago
  I don't think that's true, you can create more albums on the device and move photos to those albums?
buro9 13y ago
This isn't even an Apple specific use-case. 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.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Dropbox definitely knows about it. https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos
- kmfrk 13y ago
  Flickr's new client is pretty bad all-around. I wouldn't bet on them to get it right, much as I would.
- mathias 13y ago
  > Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything everywhere) Dropbox has offered selective sync for a while now.
- mtgx 13y ago
  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.
  - twistedpair 13y ago
    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.
  - bjhoops1 13y ago
    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+?
euroclydon 13y ago
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!
Marazan 13y ago
In this thread we learn that Apple is really bad at sync. Again. 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.
- Terretta 13y ago
  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.
spiek 13y ago
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.
- furyg3 13y ago
  But you still can't do what he wants to do, which is pretty straightforward: 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.
  - luser001 13y ago
    You can get close. Check out Photosmith (http://www.photosmithapp.com/ http://www.photosmithapp.com/). Btw, Lightroom has a scripting interface using which I'm pretty sure you can roll what this guy wants.
atishay811 13y ago
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/ http://www.adoberevel.com/
grandalf 13y ago
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.
- DonnyV 13y ago
  I use Picasa to sync to Google+ Photos(Picasa Web) and it works great. What doesn't work for you?
  - grandalf 13y ago
    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.
- cheald 13y ago
  > 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.
- GrantS 13y ago
  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 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?
hippee-lee 13y ago
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.
- gallamine 13y ago
  I found network access to an iPhoto library to be rather slow. Can you describe your setup? Is everything wired or wireless?
moron4hire 13y ago
Hate to say it (not really, I love it), but "see, we told you so". This is what you get with closed platforms.
- geon 13y ago
  I'm not defending closed platforms, but... What open platform does it better?
  - wnight 13y ago
    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.
ratsbane 13y ago
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.
FatalBaboon 13y ago
Ah, when the firmly closed ecosystem turns against its master. That or Apple sucks at programming, I never quite know.
jpswade 13y ago
Apple mobile devices were never intended to be about being creative, it was always designed to be a consumer device. The creative devices are the MacBook and iMac. It's this reason you can't organise your songs on your iPod without using iTunes.
- officer_gotcha 13y ago
  How is organizing your music "creative" and not a part of its "consumption"?
  - jpswade 13y ago
    It's as simple as "doing" (creative) vs "using" (consuming). It's the difference between, say writing notes (creative) and watching TV (consuming). It's my understanding that this is the view that Steve Jobs took when creating these devices.
    - draugadrotten 13y ago
      Your logic is wrong, because iPhones and iPads are creative devices where photos are created. Therefore, your understand of Steve Jobs intentions are wrong.
      - jpswade 13y ago
        Yeah sure they are trying to play catch up now, as they underestimated how they would be used, but bare in mind first gen iPads did not have a camera.
    - officer_gotcha 13y ago
      I am probably too plain for this, but to me there is usually very little creativity involved in re-ordering a playlist. The rather massive replacement of radio DJs with automated systems is a testament to that.
      - 13y ago
jack_trades 13y ago
So you want: - unlimited storage for a large collection of images - additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video - minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI - to do me the favor of profit at $5/mo I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video. Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB, let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop videos.
- Terretta 13y ago
  Thank you for the dose of reality. People forget the technical realities of video vs photos.
- tommoor 13y ago
  This is true, but storage is dropping and don't forget Amazon makes a profit on those prices so the cost is cheaper. It would potentially be a loss leader - generally people still don't take much video compared to photos.
- adrr 13y ago
  S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those 9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half that price like imgur.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jack_trades 13y ago
    I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing. Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video. When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem. This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.
fumar 13y ago
Post like these, about Apple's ecosystem, are like a jab in the gut. I know, I know, that I should have not invested time and resources into a closed loop, but it stinks that what I thought was the correct thing to do, is wrong. I have slowly transitioned to using other services. I use Android, and have a Surface RT. I figured that if I own devices from separate ecosystems, it will make me find a better solution for my needs. For example, using Google + to store all my photos. It keeps them organized and in the cloud. If I so happen to need them, I can download them all or individually. I started using Skydrive for documents, and its been great so far.
- Terretta 13y ago
  Perhaps surprisingly, Apple's iOS "closed system" lets you run G+ and auto upload your camera roll. Also perhaps surprisingly, a copy of your photo stream lives in a local system folder so you can easily script your own auto workflow for every photo you shoot without an API. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your-photo-stream-without-iphoto-on-os-x/ http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your...
- SoftwareMaven 13y ago
  Because things are better elsewhere? Photos are in my top three reasons for owning a smartphone, so if you have a solution, my aperture is open wide!
  - chokolad 13y ago
    Well, Windows Phone uploads photos to skydrive and you can sync skydrive onto your desktop/tablet,etc.
    - TheAnimus 13y ago
      It syncs nicely out of the box, in fact using a WiFi sync'ing SD card, SkyDrive now even supports my Pentax Proprietary RAW format images. Pretty damned cool, take a photo and when camera is next in WiFi, it appears on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop.....
largesse 13y ago
Apple is a hardware company. Notably, it is not a software company and it does not understand the internet.
frogpelt 13y ago
I've stopped messing with iPhoto for the most part. I now use the Image Capture utility that still comes on every Mac to transfer my pictures to the computer. That way I know where they are and I can import them to iPhoto myself if I feel the need.
- asynchronous13 13y ago
  Look into a referenced library for iPhoto. You can organize your photos on your hard drive as you see fit. And iPhoto will reference those files in place without duplicating the files when you import.
orofino 13y ago
Add a family to this and it only compounds. My wife takes pictures with her phone, I take pictures with mine, we've got a Sony NEX that I took 4,500 pictures with last year (we traveled a lot), not to mention the years of photos from before... And unlike a "normal" person, I want to review and edit this stuff in lightroom. Perhaps dropbox is the solution, but I've probably got something like 120GB of photos... and only 132GB of space there. Now what... I have to pay still more to dropbox to get their 200GB plan. I'll be buying a NAS in a couple weeks. This should be awesome, but wait, I want the wide integration that dropbox provides. Is the solution to save everything to dropbox and move it out on a regular basis onto the NAS? In short, I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby. (And worse, based on this thread, no one seems to have solved it)
- mikepurvis 13y ago
  I feel like home NAS + btsync could be the killer setup for this.
- Terretta 13y ago
  I'm traveling this week, but email me a reminder next Monday and I'll share a workflow using solely Apple free tools to get your photos into Lightroom. I'm a little surprised how much misinformation is in this thread. (Btw, I feel Dropbox is an outrageously expensive solution to this.)
  - orofino 13y ago
    Thanks, will do. I agree about Dropbox, I have no intention of adding additional space for this, however, I like the integration it offers on phones etc.
- verytrivial 13y ago
  Take fewer, better photos.
  - rythie 13y ago
avenueb 13y ago
I took one look at how iPhoto stores the pictures years ago and said "no way" (same with storing my music in iTunes). My SMB network share has been working quite well for me, connect all my Windows and Mac computers and my Android phone and tablets to my share.. backed up to another USB drive. Has been working well for over a decade for me. iTunes and iPhoto are primary reasons I don't do Apple products.
- Terretta 13y ago
  How iPhoto stored photos years ago and now are very different. Today iPhoto uses the scalable Aperture library SQLite DB for fast indexing and searching (open same library in both programs), but stores photos in simple directory structure (folders dated by import date) as original untouched files.
- zerohm 13y ago
  Yeah, I had the same heartburn with iphoto years ago. I was still in the mindset of wanting to do file management myself. Now I'm buying in to the principle of letting the app manage the files in a DB. Or just generally taking file management away from user, but no one has really cracked the nut of how to that across multiple services and multiple devices.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    You really do have to get over that psychological block about managing files to enjoy using iPhoto and Aperture. Personally, I don't mind it, because it's one less thing to think about. I would prefer to buy a bigger drive than to worry about the placement of my photo files beyond the iPhoto/Aperture library package. On the other hand, I know people with that file management mentality that hate, hate, hate iPhoto and Aperture's way of doing things.
scosman 13y ago
For anyone having this problem, check out MyShoebox. It's exactly what Peter is suggesting, plus it works on Android and Windows as well. 1) Full collection in the cloud with access or upload from any device 2) Unlimited backup... for free! Okay, slight caveat, the free plan is downsized, but for $5 a month it keeps original resolution. 3) A merged camera roll across all devices (including old devices) 4) API coming soon 5) Lots of clever auto-sorting. We search and sort on about 25 filters, and use that data to automatically find interesting sets to surface on the explore page http://shoeboxapp.com http://shoeboxapp.com
- sib 13y ago
  Unfortunately MyShoebox - even the paid, "Pro" tier - limits photos to 20MB per image. It also only supports JPEG and PNG formats, not RAW. Both of these constraints prevent usage by photographers with modern DSLRs.
  - iuliab 13y ago
    I don't think they're going after the photographer market. It's more for regular people who take photos with their iPhone, etc. A ton of people don't shoot RAW.
Matsta 13y ago
I guess this a little bit of a hacky, complicated way to do it, but I think it might solve part of the problem. Setup a cheap VPS/Dedicated server to host all your images. A good example is BuyVM Storage VPS ($7/month for 250gb) or Kimsufi (10€ /Atom dedicated with 500gb HD). From what I see, people don't want to sync their stuff so much as it's keeping a copy on their computer, but they want a on the fly solution to edit, modify pictures etc. 1. Setup OwnCloud. Unless someone can think of a better solution, it's probably the easiest and there's already a iOS/Android app, so you sync all your pictures and what not. 2. Setup Samba/AFP. This is pretty easy, it's a bit harder to setup Bonjour for Mac people, but it's not really necessary. 3. (Optional) Setup a VPN, OpenVPN AS comes to mind as its simple as typing apt-get openvpnas (Debian guy here). Now you would have your own private cloud for under $15/month. Of course if your outside Europe/USA like me the upload speeds are gonna be pretty crap and probably not good enough for Lightroom editing and whatnot, but if you are I reckon the speeds would be fine. I have both a BuyVM VPS and Kimsufi dedicated, and I can easily hit over 10mb/s download/upload on both instances.
- dpcx 13y ago
  Very complicated. That's why the OP went with an Apple solution, that he expected to "Just Work". Sadly, in this case, it doesn't.
tigroferoce 13y ago
And I would also add... please give us the possibility to write plugins for iPhoto officially and give us some API for iCloud. We love Apple products and we love the "just work" philosophy, but you should allow people to get out from the walled garden when they feel to.
JangoSteve 13y ago
I haven't really tried iPhoto personally for photos taken with my phone, since I have an Android. And my girlfriend has an iPhone, but with a Windows computer, so she hasn't either. Because of that, the whole iPhoto ecosystem (and photostream) have never been an option for either of us anyway. I had gone on the search for a similar service to what he describes, but with the added requirement that I want to own my cloud copy of my photos and not give up my photos to some unknown 3rd party (I'd have no problem letting Apple or Amazon keep a copy of my photos, but other than that, I'd be cautious). I found the Open Photo Project (http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/), and it seems pretty cool so far. It's an open source app to store your photos on your own S3, Dropbox, Box.net, or DreamHost account, and give you cloud backup and access, and they have an iOS app with an Android version coming soon. And they just launched Trovebox (https://trovebox.com https://trovebox.com) which is their hosted option if you don't want to install Open Photo on your own server. Trovebox already has both an iOS and Android app, and also APIs. I'm just surprised I have seen either one mentioned here.
- jmathai 13y ago
  Founder of OpenPhoto / Trovebox here. Correction, our iPhone app has been out for a year and our Android app for 6 months. Go get them [1][2]! Somehow this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Even Google with as many integrated services as they have (gmail, picasa, G+) don't look like they're going to really solve it. If there's one thing people are opinionated about, it's their photos. Some refuse to rely on the cloud. Others refuse not to have iPhoto as part of their workflow. There's about 50 of these... Our approach has been quite different. We first focused on making sure your photos are portable. Whoever you choose today to store and keep all your photos is probably not who you're going to be using in 10 years. I'm surprised that HN doesn't really zero in on this. Closed systems are just a temporary solution for a problem that's getting exponentially worse. Using Trovebox you can decide to change your storage provider at any time. We move your photos for you. Your web links, iPhone and Android apps continue to work as if nothing ever changed. We haven't even scratched at the surface of the problem though. There's organization, sharing, etc. needs which we need to continuously improve on. The parent didn't link to our source code so I'll include that here, https://github.com/photo https://github.com/photo P.S. We're funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation (big huge shoutout to them) [1] http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android or source @ https://github.com/photo/mobile-android https://github.com/photo/mobile-android [2] http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone or source @ https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios
Shorel 13y ago
UbuntuOne already solves those problems. You can sync only the folders you want. This is the list of clients: Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 Mac OSX 10.6 and higher Ubuntu Android 2.1 and higher iPhone & iPad iOS 3.1 and higher
mikeocool 13y ago
I switched over to picturelife.com for photo storage a few months ago, and it's the first photo management service I've been happy with in years. It'll store your photos in your own S3 bucket if you want, and it'll automatically pull in photos from iPhoto and any other photos on your computer, as well as most popular services you might have photos on, like Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Also has nice iPhone and iPhoto apps, that will auto-upload photos from the device, and allow your browse and manage your library without requiring you to sync your entire library to your device [I believe].
natex 13y ago
Smugmug.com is what you are looking for. For $5 per month,($60 per year for a Power account), you get unlimited storage for photos and video. With third party apps -- SmugFolio on Android. I'm sure there is a similar if not better app for iOS -- you can manage your web-based portfolio using your phone, automatically upload photos to your account, and rate them. You also get access to great printing and other services. Problem solved.
nchuhoai 13y ago
I just wanted to join the choir. I think its pretty clear that photo management has not been solved yet, which is quite surprising given the cultural importance of memories via photos/videos. I actually think the same discussion arised 265 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242 My story: I used to keep everything in iPhoto since it is quite intuitive and allowed me to manage my photos (60 Gig, videos take a ton of space). However, since there are more and more devices, I have been looking for a more future-proof solution. It didn't help that the export opportunities (metadata-wise) diminish with every version of iPhoto. So right now, I have returned to folder-hirachy where the metadata is saved in the open iptc standard. Lightroom makes it really easy to keep your assets as future-proof as possible. Which is one of my biggest pet-peeves with most of the mentioned providers/solutions. They just don't have sufficient export options, and we ought to realize that any of them could die any day. Or video support is lacking which I cannot understand in the 21st century. What I'm now looking for is a solution that allows me to backup my folder structure (I'm heavily leaning towards AWS Glacier), as well as allowing me to access them from a variety of devices. Like even a simple web-inferface would suffice. If someone could help me with my single biggest technical problem, I'd be forever in your debt.
cbhl 13y ago
I feel like the dmedia library made by the Novacut team solves exactly this use case. Alas, it's tightly integrated with Ubuntu.
Aardwolf 13y ago
Anything called "synching" makes me cringe. Synching to me means that there's a 50% chance it'll add the data, or delete it. And I've seen "synching" things delete things. The only way your data can survive decades, is in a file system, with a backup disk, moving from machine to machine as you upgrade. Imho at least.
rgbrgb 13y ago
I think this is a much bigger problem than photos -- there's massive fragmentation in personal data storage. The thing is we all have online storage to put the photos in and there are companies that will give us more for a fee on the scale you're talking about (GDrive, Box, Dropbox). It's just tricky and a lot of overhead for developers to connect that storage to their apps. We're working on this problem right now at http://stashkit.co/ http://stashkit.co/. We're trying to solve it by building a drop in cloud file browser where saving and loading file is just 2 lines of code and users can see all of their data in one place.
cdjk 13y ago
I've noticed this about iPhoto too. I was a mac user, but recently switched to linux on my laptop when I realized iPhoto/Aperture were the only things keeping me on OS X, and I didn't really like how they worked. Does anyone have suggestions for a linux photo manager? I'd like an easy way to view/rate/tag/delete pictures, a sane file system storage structure (i.e. not like iPhoto), and a way to make "albums" out of a bunch of pictures that aren't in the same directory. I'm not too concerned about sharing/etc, as there are plenty of other web-based tools for that. Open source would be nice (and maybe I should write this...), but I'm happy to pay for something if it will do what I want.
- jmathai 13y ago
  I think Shotwell is pretty good if you're looking for a desktop app.
- jmarxer 13y ago
  I like DigiKam. It works well with the KDE desktop and it's software libre licensed GPL Version 2.
- npsimons 13y ago
  I'll throw in a recommendation for gPhoto; while old and pretty bare bones, it does sane storage structure (customizable, actually), not some silly database. The album export will create static albums you can then upload by hand (or just have them written out to an SSH mount on your web server).
shurcooL 13y ago
It's ridiculous how un-Apple-like Photo Streams are. They solve one problem of sharing your photos across all your devices for VIEWING, but not for organizing/editing/deleting. It just creates copies of your photos everywhere. It's not a centralized place where you can keep your "good, sorted, organized, edited" photos with all the bad photos deleted. Photo Streams actually adds problems. If you want to completely delete a photo you just took (it turned out bad), you have to delete it in TWO places instead of one. Dropbox does a much better job at the latter (assuming you have enough space for your photos on it; I do). To solve this problem, you need to create a good "home" for people's photos. Right now, the Camera Roll remains the only viable home, but it has many downsides (unable to be accessed or edited from other devices, can't manually add older photos). Basically, with Photo Streams, Apple violate the DRY principle [1] and it creates more problems than it solves. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself
- shurcooL 13y ago
  After many years of taking photos, I find the best way to organize them for me is to only take few photos and keep them sorted by time. The way Camera Roll does already. It's perfect. Now if my Camera Roll were synced across devices rather than having duplicate photos in Photo Stream, that would be much much better. And if I could add photos to that time-sorted stream from multiple devices (bonus points for SLRs)... That would be how it should've been from day 1.
- astral303 13y ago
  One of the original reasons I switched to a Mac back in 2008 was iPhoto. The automatic event splitting by date struck me as brilliant--it was exactly what I wanted most of the time. Multi-day events were easy to merge. At the time, Apple also had a great online gallery that made it simple to share photos. Flickr was (and still is) overly complicated in comparison. That's been gone for years and is kinda sorta back as shared photo streams. So your comment about how "un-Apple-like" Photo Streams is so damn true. C'mon Apple, figure this shit out.
  - smackfu 13y ago
BtM909 13y ago
Charge? Isn't everything free on teh interwebs? haha On a serious note: you're completely right! iPhoto should be the next product that works exactly like you describe.
wgoodwin 13y ago
A-fscking-men.
martin_ 13y ago
Very well written - great read! Maybe a nice side project to reverse engineer the process of uploading photos to the cloud!
Mazer23 13y ago
This sounds a lot like the problem we're trying to crack with our photo app suite 'unbound': Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.
jdechko 13y ago
For me, photo storage had become so incredibly complex that I ditched the entire effort and piece-mealed my own. Here's my workflow: 1) Take photo from my iPhone 2) CameraSync.app automatically uploads the pictures & videos to Dropbox when I get home (Geofencing & wait for wifi) 3) Computer Automation automatically sorts photos into Dropbox/Photos/YYYY/MM folders (Hazel, DropIt, etc). Videos go into external folder (Outside of dropbox) 4) Manual verification of photo upload & delete from camera roll (unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow automatic deletion of photos) No huge photostream (only a few small shared photostreams). Not tied to a single platform (Mac/PC/iOS/Android/WinPhone/etc). No slow apps (iPhoto). No databases to corrupt, just folders of pictures. Easy access through the Dropbox app. Easy backup & restoration (Dropbox + CrashPlan). This system can easily expand to accommodate other cameras too.
meagflops 13y ago
Iam a huge fan of apple, i got ipads, iphones, apple tvs, apple express, but i was only one time, disapointed for this lovely fruit. In winter 2012 i go back from thailand with my ipad full of one month of photos and videos taken in those beautifull beaches. I lost all of it. My 16gb ipad took an update and erased everything. Only recovered the last backup before my one month trip, and some loaded in facebook. Sight!
wklauss 13y ago
If you find Photostream confusing you don't need to use it. Simple as that. It's not even activated by default, you have to turn it on the first time you try to access it. If you don't activate it, you phone keeps working the way it used to: you sync to your computer and thats that. There are third party apps that will let you upload to Dropbox and google+ if you prefer those as repository. Now, the thing is that you want the convenience to have PhotoStream without worrying about space constraints. Ever. iPhoto automatically creates a folder with all last month's Photostream pictures and I think thats default behavior, unless you purposely turn it off. To me, thats the most "smart" sync can get, unless you want Apple to store every photo you ever took, forever, in their servers. Having around 400 million iOS users worldwide this seems to me a little unrealistic at the moment. Maybe someday. But for me the key here is just being able to delete your own content. You don't expect the memory card in your camera to last forever, you periodically format it. You don't expect your download folder to hold everything you download forever. Every now and then you go in and clean around. Your phone (ioS, Android or whatever) is no different. Go into that Camera Roll and start cleaning around. Unless you turn it off the option all the photos are already in iPhoto, ordered by month (something like "Sept XXX Photostream"). If you turned it off, just impoert all the photos before deleting to make sure you don't end up loosing any pics. I agree on the video, though. Photostream needs to start syncing videos as well.
- jmreid 13y ago
  I agree with you. I'm a little confused about the "outrage" about Photostream. It's basically just a wireless USB cable that automatically imports into iPhoto based on the month. It's actually been 100% perfect for me. When I plug my phone in using USB to transfer the videos over, it tells me that it already has all the pictures, then it imports the videos, then offers to remove the already synced photos and videos from my phone. Once everything is in iPhoto, I have been curating an album from a vacation then sharing it with myself using Shared Photostreams. That way I have the trimmed down and edited album available on my phone and iPad. Maybe people are asking it to do something it was never designed to do?
fjpoblam 13y ago
Thank you! Hear, hear! And well put. Exactly. We've struggled with the same issues, not to mention the confusion added by iTunes sync. (My bad: should've kept iTunes' little sneaky fingers out of it.) Lots of duplicates, and over the years, quite a few MIAs.
alanh 13y ago
It’s like a classic John Siracusa criticism, but without the eloquence. Can’t disagree.
robomartin 13y ago
I am going to go a little further and suggest that Apple's entire iCloud + iTunes + backup + synchronization strategy/system/product/code is a disaster. Why? Simple: You cannot trust it. You need to be able to trust such software. I'm sorry, but you just can't in this case. I won't go into all of the details, links and examples here. Do a little searching and it should not be too hard to find hordes of people who have lost calendars, contacts, notes, photos and other valuable data thanks to Apple's wonderful software. I have personally experienced loosing all of my contacts, appointments, calendar items and notes. Of course, being that this ain't my first rodeo I had backups of the backups. I always go into data storage situations with zero trust for what is being offered. It took some work to get the data back but I recovered. That is not the point. The first three rules of any piece of software that users entrust with their data are: 1- Thou shalt not loose user data 2- Thou shalt not loose user data 3- Thou shalt not loose user data Notice that cool hippie user interfaces are never mentioned there. My data (and your data) is far more valuable than their cool icons and "beautiful" design. Far, far more valuable. Go ahead, Google it. The stories are horrific. From people loosing contacts to students loosing semesters worth of notes. Auto-magically. I even went to my local Apple store to consult with a "Genius" about this. The guy was clueless. And, in fact, right in front of my eyes, he proceeded to accidentally delete all of my calendar entries --something that should be darn-near impossible to do. Again, I had my backup at home so I didn't blow a fuse. But, please. I explained that it was not reasonable to blow away someone's data if their email service provider changed. If you go from Google to Yahoo all the shit that was being synchronized with Google goes poof. Really? Why? I would love to hear from someone at Apple on this. Why it is even remotely reasonable to blow away all of my contacts, notes and calendar information? If you close your email account and you are no-longer able to log-on it seems iOS will attempt to synchronize, fail and then blow away your data. My wife has had cases of constantly disappearing notes and appointments due to failed synchronization sessions. The greater point is that you should not have to be a programmer or IT worker to have your personal data be safe on iOS. She is not a technical person and without my help she would have descended into data loss hell. Grandpa and Grandma have no hope. Anyhow, now iCloud and all forms of automated synchronization are turned off on all of our devices. Manual backup is still the only way you can be sure your data will not be lost.
- 13y ago
DigitalSea 13y ago
That's it, keep walking, come to the Android side Peter.
babesh 13y ago
Don't people have the same problem with other types of content, content produced by other tools, by other people, or in different social networks?
ctingom 13y ago
The solution I found for my photo workflow is that I've installed AeroFS on my computers and I store my latest photos from the last several months in that folder. It syncs across all of my computers, that way my wife and I can use Picasa or Lightroom and the photos load fast since they are on our local drives. Since we store folders in a /year/month/ file structure we can easily move those to an external hard drive. The whole thing backs up to CrashPlan. My entire collection is over 1.5 TB of photos.
slacka 13y ago
I have a high DPI monitor and need to zoom the text to 150% to make it readable. But on that website the text gets zoomed into the right margin in Chrome and off the screen in FF. Works fine on my iPhone. Something wrong with the CSS?

429 points by robheaton 13y ago

Hear Hear. Currently I just don't bother with curating pictures I've shot, aside from tweeting or facebooking them at the point I take them.

kalleboo 13y ago

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".

0x0 13y ago
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.
- Terretta 13y ago
  > I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews. 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.
  - 0x0 13y ago
    I looked around really hard for this option but failed to find it. Where is it?
    - Terretta 13y ago
      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.

nos4A2 13y ago

Doesn't the dropbox instant upload already do this (one album\store that all devices have master access to)? I am not sure if it works on iDevices

lucian1900 13y ago
It doesn't really work because of iOS's stupid ban on background processes. You have to start Dropbox and keep it open for it to sync photos ...
- samolang 13y ago
  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.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Dropbox WILL upload in the background for IIRC 10 mins as well as when you move around. https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en
  - VexXtreme 13y ago
    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.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    Ah. I guess I wouldn't have noticed that on an iPad (I don't have/use an iPhone).

workbench 13y ago

Apples price gorging on disk space is a complete joke when PhotoStream is needlessly duplicating all my photos.

riotingpscifis 13y ago

1) Pick a closed ecosystem 2) Have a non-standard use case 3) Beg Ecosystem owners to change to meet your needs

gr3yh47 13y ago
+1 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?
MasterScrat 13y ago
How non-standard is his use case? And what then would be the standard use case when using laptop, iPhone and iPad?
- pi18n 13y ago
  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.
  - josteink 13y ago
    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.
petenixey 13y ago
Or, for another perspective: 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
- 13y ago

tombot 13y ago

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/ 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.

brown9-2 13y ago
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.
- tombot 13y ago
  Yup, but I'm right in thinking that also prevents you from adding new photos on that device? 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.
tommoor 13y ago
You're not the only one, if the Dropbox desktop clients acted more like the mobile clients then it would work well...

smallegan 13y ago

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.

threeseed 13y ago

Not really sure what he means. 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 ?

yoster 13y ago
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!
- andybak 13y ago
  External drives rather conflict with the ideal of hyper-portable laptops. It's like attaching an anchor to a 13" Macbook or Air.
  - Hontano 13y ago
    It's not ideal, but there's a happy enough compromise in USB-powered 2TB 2.5" external drives.
  - yoster 13y ago
    If that's the case, why not use a 1TB USB 3.0 flash drive? Cant get more "hyper-portable" than that.
0x0 13y ago
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.
- 13y ago

subpixel 13y ago

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.

subpixel 13y ago
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...
- tombot 13y ago
  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.
  - konradb 13y ago
    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.
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    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?
    - tombot 13y ago

jrkelly 13y ago

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.

yoster 13y ago

Do what everyone else does when they run out of space, buy an external HDD.

samolang 13y ago
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?
- scholia 13y ago
  It reduces the triplicate pains in the ass caused by trying to manage three physical devices bought from Apple.... However, note that if you just move all your photos to an external hard drive, you don't have a backup.
  - samolang 13y ago
    No it doesn't. You still have those devices. They don't go away. Now you have expend time manually copying your photos to the device.
    - yoster 13y ago
      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.
    - scholia 13y ago
      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.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  Nothing bad, if you've done backup properly (i.e. three copies; two local, one remote.) Mirrored drives on your desktop plus an account with Blackblaze (~$5/mo. for unlimited storage), and you're covered. Done and done.

moha297 13y ago

True that!

eddieroger 13y ago

> 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.

zerovox 13y ago
> 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.
jrochkind1 13y ago
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.
smackfu 13y ago
>The MacBook Air isn't a desktop True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on it.
- acheron 13y ago

dkhenry 13y ago

Funny, Google+ and my android phone do everything he just mentioned. Why not just switch ?

threeseed 13y ago
Google+ and your Android phone can manage 70GB of photos and ensure that they properly synced to multiple devices including a Mac ?
- dkhenry 13y ago
  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.
  - gallamine 13y ago
    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).
    - dkhenry 13y ago
      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.
corresation 13y ago
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.

simonbarker87 13y ago

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?"

steven2012 13y ago

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.

whichdan 13y ago
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. Is Android any better?
- colomon 13y ago
  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.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  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.
cmsj 13y ago
I don't think that's true, you can create more albums on the device and move photos to those albums?

buro9 13y ago

This isn't even an Apple specific use-case. 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.

threeseed 13y ago
Dropbox definitely knows about it. https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos
kmfrk 13y ago
Flickr's new client is pretty bad all-around. I wouldn't bet on them to get it right, much as I would.
mathias 13y ago
> Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything everywhere) Dropbox has offered selective sync for a while now.
mtgx 13y ago
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.
- twistedpair 13y ago
  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.
- bjhoops1 13y ago
  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+?

euroclydon 13y ago

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!

Marazan 13y ago

In this thread we learn that Apple is really bad at sync. Again. 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.

Terretta 13y ago
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.

spiek 13y ago

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.

furyg3 13y ago
But you still can't do what he wants to do, which is pretty straightforward: 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.
- luser001 13y ago
  You can get close. Check out Photosmith (http://www.photosmithapp.com/ http://www.photosmithapp.com/). Btw, Lightroom has a scripting interface using which I'm pretty sure you can roll what this guy wants.

atishay811 13y ago

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/ http://www.adoberevel.com/

grandalf 13y ago

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.

DonnyV 13y ago
I use Picasa to sync to Google+ Photos(Picasa Web) and it works great. What doesn't work for you?
- grandalf 13y ago
  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.
cheald 13y ago
> 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.
GrantS 13y ago
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 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?

hippee-lee 13y ago

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.

gallamine 13y ago
I found network access to an iPhoto library to be rather slow. Can you describe your setup? Is everything wired or wireless?

moron4hire 13y ago

Hate to say it (not really, I love it), but "see, we told you so". This is what you get with closed platforms.

geon 13y ago
I'm not defending closed platforms, but... What open platform does it better?
- wnight 13y ago
  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.

ratsbane 13y ago

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.

FatalBaboon 13y ago

Ah, when the firmly closed ecosystem turns against its master. That or Apple sucks at programming, I never quite know.

jpswade 13y ago

Apple mobile devices were never intended to be about being creative, it was always designed to be a consumer device. The creative devices are the MacBook and iMac. It's this reason you can't organise your songs on your iPod without using iTunes.

officer_gotcha 13y ago
How is organizing your music "creative" and not a part of its "consumption"?
- jpswade 13y ago
  It's as simple as "doing" (creative) vs "using" (consuming). It's the difference between, say writing notes (creative) and watching TV (consuming). It's my understanding that this is the view that Steve Jobs took when creating these devices.
  - draugadrotten 13y ago
    Your logic is wrong, because iPhones and iPads are creative devices where photos are created. Therefore, your understand of Steve Jobs intentions are wrong.
    - jpswade 13y ago
      Yeah sure they are trying to play catch up now, as they underestimated how they would be used, but bare in mind first gen iPads did not have a camera.
  - officer_gotcha 13y ago
    I am probably too plain for this, but to me there is usually very little creativity involved in re-ordering a playlist. The rather massive replacement of radio DJs with automated systems is a testament to that.
    - 13y ago

jack_trades 13y ago

So you want: - unlimited storage for a large collection of images - additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video - minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI - to do me the favor of profit at $5/mo I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video. Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB, let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop videos.

Terretta 13y ago
Thank you for the dose of reality. People forget the technical realities of video vs photos.
tommoor 13y ago
This is true, but storage is dropping and don't forget Amazon makes a profit on those prices so the cost is cheaper. It would potentially be a loss leader - generally people still don't take much video compared to photos.
adrr 13y ago
S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those 9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half that price like imgur.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jack_trades 13y ago
  I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing. Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video. When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe 1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem. This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.

fumar 13y ago

Post like these, about Apple's ecosystem, are like a jab in the gut. I know, I know, that I should have not invested time and resources into a closed loop, but it stinks that what I thought was the correct thing to do, is wrong. I have slowly transitioned to using other services. I use Android, and have a Surface RT. I figured that if I own devices from separate ecosystems, it will make me find a better solution for my needs. For example, using Google + to store all my photos. It keeps them organized and in the cloud. If I so happen to need them, I can download them all or individually. I started using Skydrive for documents, and its been great so far.

Terretta 13y ago
Perhaps surprisingly, Apple's iOS "closed system" lets you run G+ and auto upload your camera roll. Also perhaps surprisingly, a copy of your photo stream lives in a local system folder so you can easily script your own auto workflow for every photo you shoot without an API. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your-photo-stream-without-iphoto-on-os-x/ http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your...
SoftwareMaven 13y ago
Because things are better elsewhere? Photos are in my top three reasons for owning a smartphone, so if you have a solution, my aperture is open wide!
- chokolad 13y ago
  Well, Windows Phone uploads photos to skydrive and you can sync skydrive onto your desktop/tablet,etc.
  - TheAnimus 13y ago
    It syncs nicely out of the box, in fact using a WiFi sync'ing SD card, SkyDrive now even supports my Pentax Proprietary RAW format images. Pretty damned cool, take a photo and when camera is next in WiFi, it appears on my phone, tablet, laptop, desktop.....

largesse 13y ago

Apple is a hardware company. Notably, it is not a software company and it does not understand the internet.

frogpelt 13y ago

I've stopped messing with iPhoto for the most part. I now use the Image Capture utility that still comes on every Mac to transfer my pictures to the computer. That way I know where they are and I can import them to iPhoto myself if I feel the need.

asynchronous13 13y ago
Look into a referenced library for iPhoto. You can organize your photos on your hard drive as you see fit. And iPhoto will reference those files in place without duplicating the files when you import.

orofino 13y ago

Add a family to this and it only compounds. My wife takes pictures with her phone, I take pictures with mine, we've got a Sony NEX that I took 4,500 pictures with last year (we traveled a lot), not to mention the years of photos from before... And unlike a "normal" person, I want to review and edit this stuff in lightroom. Perhaps dropbox is the solution, but I've probably got something like 120GB of photos... and only 132GB of space there. Now what... I have to pay still more to dropbox to get their 200GB plan. I'll be buying a NAS in a couple weeks. This should be awesome, but wait, I want the wide integration that dropbox provides. Is the solution to save everything to dropbox and move it out on a regular basis onto the NAS? In short, I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby. (And worse, based on this thread, no one seems to have solved it)

mikepurvis 13y ago
I feel like home NAS + btsync could be the killer setup for this.
Terretta 13y ago
I'm traveling this week, but email me a reminder next Monday and I'll share a workflow using solely Apple free tools to get your photos into Lightroom. I'm a little surprised how much misinformation is in this thread. (Btw, I feel Dropbox is an outrageously expensive solution to this.)
- orofino 13y ago
  Thanks, will do. I agree about Dropbox, I have no intention of adding additional space for this, however, I like the integration it offers on phones etc.
verytrivial 13y ago
Take fewer, better photos.
- rythie 13y ago

avenueb 13y ago

I took one look at how iPhoto stores the pictures years ago and said "no way" (same with storing my music in iTunes). My SMB network share has been working quite well for me, connect all my Windows and Mac computers and my Android phone and tablets to my share.. backed up to another USB drive. Has been working well for over a decade for me. iTunes and iPhoto are primary reasons I don't do Apple products.

Terretta 13y ago
How iPhoto stored photos years ago and now are very different. Today iPhoto uses the scalable Aperture library SQLite DB for fast indexing and searching (open same library in both programs), but stores photos in simple directory structure (folders dated by import date) as original untouched files.
zerohm 13y ago
Yeah, I had the same heartburn with iphoto years ago. I was still in the mindset of wanting to do file management myself. Now I'm buying in to the principle of letting the app manage the files in a DB. Or just generally taking file management away from user, but no one has really cracked the nut of how to that across multiple services and multiple devices.
- slantyyz 13y ago
  You really do have to get over that psychological block about managing files to enjoy using iPhoto and Aperture. Personally, I don't mind it, because it's one less thing to think about. I would prefer to buy a bigger drive than to worry about the placement of my photo files beyond the iPhoto/Aperture library package. On the other hand, I know people with that file management mentality that hate, hate, hate iPhoto and Aperture's way of doing things.

scosman 13y ago

For anyone having this problem, check out MyShoebox. It's exactly what Peter is suggesting, plus it works on Android and Windows as well. 1) Full collection in the cloud with access or upload from any device 2) Unlimited backup... for free! Okay, slight caveat, the free plan is downsized, but for $5 a month it keeps original resolution. 3) A merged camera roll across all devices (including old devices) 4) API coming soon 5) Lots of clever auto-sorting. We search and sort on about 25 filters, and use that data to automatically find interesting sets to surface on the explore page http://shoeboxapp.com http://shoeboxapp.com

sib 13y ago
Unfortunately MyShoebox - even the paid, "Pro" tier - limits photos to 20MB per image. It also only supports JPEG and PNG formats, not RAW. Both of these constraints prevent usage by photographers with modern DSLRs.
- iuliab 13y ago
  I don't think they're going after the photographer market. It's more for regular people who take photos with their iPhone, etc. A ton of people don't shoot RAW.

Matsta 13y ago

I guess this a little bit of a hacky, complicated way to do it, but I think it might solve part of the problem. Setup a cheap VPS/Dedicated server to host all your images. A good example is BuyVM Storage VPS ($7/month for 250gb) or Kimsufi (10€ /Atom dedicated with 500gb HD). From what I see, people don't want to sync their stuff so much as it's keeping a copy on their computer, but they want a on the fly solution to edit, modify pictures etc. 1. Setup OwnCloud. Unless someone can think of a better solution, it's probably the easiest and there's already a iOS/Android app, so you sync all your pictures and what not. 2. Setup Samba/AFP. This is pretty easy, it's a bit harder to setup Bonjour for Mac people, but it's not really necessary. 3. (Optional) Setup a VPN, OpenVPN AS comes to mind as its simple as typing apt-get openvpnas (Debian guy here). Now you would have your own private cloud for under $15/month. Of course if your outside Europe/USA like me the upload speeds are gonna be pretty crap and probably not good enough for Lightroom editing and whatnot, but if you are I reckon the speeds would be fine. I have both a BuyVM VPS and Kimsufi dedicated, and I can easily hit over 10mb/s download/upload on both instances.

dpcx 13y ago
Very complicated. That's why the OP went with an Apple solution, that he expected to "Just Work". Sadly, in this case, it doesn't.

tigroferoce 13y ago

And I would also add... please give us the possibility to write plugins for iPhoto officially and give us some API for iCloud. We love Apple products and we love the "just work" philosophy, but you should allow people to get out from the walled garden when they feel to.

JangoSteve 13y ago

I haven't really tried iPhoto personally for photos taken with my phone, since I have an Android. And my girlfriend has an iPhone, but with a Windows computer, so she hasn't either. Because of that, the whole iPhoto ecosystem (and photostream) have never been an option for either of us anyway. I had gone on the search for a similar service to what he describes, but with the added requirement that I want to own my cloud copy of my photos and not give up my photos to some unknown 3rd party (I'd have no problem letting Apple or Amazon keep a copy of my photos, but other than that, I'd be cautious). I found the Open Photo Project (http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/), and it seems pretty cool so far. It's an open source app to store your photos on your own S3, Dropbox, Box.net, or DreamHost account, and give you cloud backup and access, and they have an iOS app with an Android version coming soon. And they just launched Trovebox (https://trovebox.com https://trovebox.com) which is their hosted option if you don't want to install Open Photo on your own server. Trovebox already has both an iOS and Android app, and also APIs. I'm just surprised I have seen either one mentioned here.

jmathai 13y ago
Founder of OpenPhoto / Trovebox here. Correction, our iPhone app has been out for a year and our Android app for 6 months. Go get them [1][2]! Somehow this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Even Google with as many integrated services as they have (gmail, picasa, G+) don't look like they're going to really solve it. If there's one thing people are opinionated about, it's their photos. Some refuse to rely on the cloud. Others refuse not to have iPhoto as part of their workflow. There's about 50 of these... Our approach has been quite different. We first focused on making sure your photos are portable. Whoever you choose today to store and keep all your photos is probably not who you're going to be using in 10 years. I'm surprised that HN doesn't really zero in on this. Closed systems are just a temporary solution for a problem that's getting exponentially worse. Using Trovebox you can decide to change your storage provider at any time. We move your photos for you. Your web links, iPhone and Android apps continue to work as if nothing ever changed. We haven't even scratched at the surface of the problem though. There's organization, sharing, etc. needs which we need to continuously improve on. The parent didn't link to our source code so I'll include that here, https://github.com/photo https://github.com/photo P.S. We're funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation (big huge shoutout to them) [1] http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android or source @ https://github.com/photo/mobile-android https://github.com/photo/mobile-android [2] http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone or source @ https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios

Shorel 13y ago

UbuntuOne already solves those problems. You can sync only the folders you want. This is the list of clients: Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 Mac OSX 10.6 and higher Ubuntu Android 2.1 and higher iPhone & iPad iOS 3.1 and higher

mikeocool 13y ago

I switched over to picturelife.com for photo storage a few months ago, and it's the first photo management service I've been happy with in years. It'll store your photos in your own S3 bucket if you want, and it'll automatically pull in photos from iPhoto and any other photos on your computer, as well as most popular services you might have photos on, like Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Also has nice iPhone and iPhoto apps, that will auto-upload photos from the device, and allow your browse and manage your library without requiring you to sync your entire library to your device [I believe].

natex 13y ago

Smugmug.com is what you are looking for. For $5 per month,($60 per year for a Power account), you get unlimited storage for photos and video. With third party apps -- SmugFolio on Android. I'm sure there is a similar if not better app for iOS -- you can manage your web-based portfolio using your phone, automatically upload photos to your account, and rate them. You also get access to great printing and other services. Problem solved.

nchuhoai 13y ago

I just wanted to join the choir. I think its pretty clear that photo management has not been solved yet, which is quite surprising given the cultural importance of memories via photos/videos. I actually think the same discussion arised 265 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242 My story: I used to keep everything in iPhoto since it is quite intuitive and allowed me to manage my photos (60 Gig, videos take a ton of space). However, since there are more and more devices, I have been looking for a more future-proof solution. It didn't help that the export opportunities (metadata-wise) diminish with every version of iPhoto. So right now, I have returned to folder-hirachy where the metadata is saved in the open iptc standard. Lightroom makes it really easy to keep your assets as future-proof as possible. Which is one of my biggest pet-peeves with most of the mentioned providers/solutions. They just don't have sufficient export options, and we ought to realize that any of them could die any day. Or video support is lacking which I cannot understand in the 21st century. What I'm now looking for is a solution that allows me to backup my folder structure (I'm heavily leaning towards AWS Glacier), as well as allowing me to access them from a variety of devices. Like even a simple web-inferface would suffice. If someone could help me with my single biggest technical problem, I'd be forever in your debt.

cbhl 13y ago

I feel like the dmedia library made by the Novacut team solves exactly this use case. Alas, it's tightly integrated with Ubuntu.

Aardwolf 13y ago

Anything called "synching" makes me cringe. Synching to me means that there's a 50% chance it'll add the data, or delete it. And I've seen "synching" things delete things. The only way your data can survive decades, is in a file system, with a backup disk, moving from machine to machine as you upgrade. Imho at least.

rgbrgb 13y ago

I think this is a much bigger problem than photos -- there's massive fragmentation in personal data storage. The thing is we all have online storage to put the photos in and there are companies that will give us more for a fee on the scale you're talking about (GDrive, Box, Dropbox). It's just tricky and a lot of overhead for developers to connect that storage to their apps. We're working on this problem right now at http://stashkit.co/ http://stashkit.co/. We're trying to solve it by building a drop in cloud file browser where saving and loading file is just 2 lines of code and users can see all of their data in one place.

cdjk 13y ago

I've noticed this about iPhoto too. I was a mac user, but recently switched to linux on my laptop when I realized iPhoto/Aperture were the only things keeping me on OS X, and I didn't really like how they worked. Does anyone have suggestions for a linux photo manager? I'd like an easy way to view/rate/tag/delete pictures, a sane file system storage structure (i.e. not like iPhoto), and a way to make "albums" out of a bunch of pictures that aren't in the same directory. I'm not too concerned about sharing/etc, as there are plenty of other web-based tools for that. Open source would be nice (and maybe I should write this...), but I'm happy to pay for something if it will do what I want.

jmathai 13y ago
I think Shotwell is pretty good if you're looking for a desktop app.
jmarxer 13y ago
I like DigiKam. It works well with the KDE desktop and it's software libre licensed GPL Version 2.
npsimons 13y ago
I'll throw in a recommendation for gPhoto; while old and pretty bare bones, it does sane storage structure (customizable, actually), not some silly database. The album export will create static albums you can then upload by hand (or just have them written out to an SSH mount on your web server).

shurcooL 13y ago

It's ridiculous how un-Apple-like Photo Streams are. They solve one problem of sharing your photos across all your devices for VIEWING, but not for organizing/editing/deleting. It just creates copies of your photos everywhere. It's not a centralized place where you can keep your "good, sorted, organized, edited" photos with all the bad photos deleted. Photo Streams actually adds problems. If you want to completely delete a photo you just took (it turned out bad), you have to delete it in TWO places instead of one. Dropbox does a much better job at the latter (assuming you have enough space for your photos on it; I do). To solve this problem, you need to create a good "home" for people's photos. Right now, the Camera Roll remains the only viable home, but it has many downsides (unable to be accessed or edited from other devices, can't manually add older photos). Basically, with Photo Streams, Apple violate the DRY principle [1] and it creates more problems than it solves. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself

shurcooL 13y ago
After many years of taking photos, I find the best way to organize them for me is to only take few photos and keep them sorted by time. The way Camera Roll does already. It's perfect. Now if my Camera Roll were synced across devices rather than having duplicate photos in Photo Stream, that would be much much better. And if I could add photos to that time-sorted stream from multiple devices (bonus points for SLRs)... That would be how it should've been from day 1.
astral303 13y ago
One of the original reasons I switched to a Mac back in 2008 was iPhoto. The automatic event splitting by date struck me as brilliant--it was exactly what I wanted most of the time. Multi-day events were easy to merge. At the time, Apple also had a great online gallery that made it simple to share photos. Flickr was (and still is) overly complicated in comparison. That's been gone for years and is kinda sorta back as shared photo streams. So your comment about how "un-Apple-like" Photo Streams is so damn true. C'mon Apple, figure this shit out.
- smackfu 13y ago

BtM909 13y ago

Charge? Isn't everything free on teh interwebs? haha On a serious note: you're completely right! iPhoto should be the next product that works exactly like you describe.

wgoodwin 13y ago

A-fscking-men.

martin_ 13y ago

Very well written - great read! Maybe a nice side project to reverse engineer the process of uploading photos to the cloud!

Mazer23 13y ago

This sounds a lot like the problem we're trying to crack with our photo app suite 'unbound': Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.

jdechko 13y ago

For me, photo storage had become so incredibly complex that I ditched the entire effort and piece-mealed my own. Here's my workflow: 1) Take photo from my iPhone 2) CameraSync.app automatically uploads the pictures & videos to Dropbox when I get home (Geofencing & wait for wifi) 3) Computer Automation automatically sorts photos into Dropbox/Photos/YYYY/MM folders (Hazel, DropIt, etc). Videos go into external folder (Outside of dropbox) 4) Manual verification of photo upload & delete from camera roll (unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow automatic deletion of photos) No huge photostream (only a few small shared photostreams). Not tied to a single platform (Mac/PC/iOS/Android/WinPhone/etc). No slow apps (iPhoto). No databases to corrupt, just folders of pictures. Easy access through the Dropbox app. Easy backup & restoration (Dropbox + CrashPlan). This system can easily expand to accommodate other cameras too.

meagflops 13y ago

Iam a huge fan of apple, i got ipads, iphones, apple tvs, apple express, but i was only one time, disapointed for this lovely fruit. In winter 2012 i go back from thailand with my ipad full of one month of photos and videos taken in those beautifull beaches. I lost all of it. My 16gb ipad took an update and erased everything. Only recovered the last backup before my one month trip, and some loaded in facebook. Sight!

wklauss 13y ago

If you find Photostream confusing you don't need to use it. Simple as that. It's not even activated by default, you have to turn it on the first time you try to access it. If you don't activate it, you phone keeps working the way it used to: you sync to your computer and thats that. There are third party apps that will let you upload to Dropbox and google+ if you prefer those as repository. Now, the thing is that you want the convenience to have PhotoStream without worrying about space constraints. Ever. iPhoto automatically creates a folder with all last month's Photostream pictures and I think thats default behavior, unless you purposely turn it off. To me, thats the most "smart" sync can get, unless you want Apple to store every photo you ever took, forever, in their servers. Having around 400 million iOS users worldwide this seems to me a little unrealistic at the moment. Maybe someday. But for me the key here is just being able to delete your own content. You don't expect the memory card in your camera to last forever, you periodically format it. You don't expect your download folder to hold everything you download forever. Every now and then you go in and clean around. Your phone (ioS, Android or whatever) is no different. Go into that Camera Roll and start cleaning around. Unless you turn it off the option all the photos are already in iPhoto, ordered by month (something like "Sept XXX Photostream"). If you turned it off, just impoert all the photos before deleting to make sure you don't end up loosing any pics. I agree on the video, though. Photostream needs to start syncing videos as well.

jmreid 13y ago
I agree with you. I'm a little confused about the "outrage" about Photostream. It's basically just a wireless USB cable that automatically imports into iPhoto based on the month. It's actually been 100% perfect for me. When I plug my phone in using USB to transfer the videos over, it tells me that it already has all the pictures, then it imports the videos, then offers to remove the already synced photos and videos from my phone. Once everything is in iPhoto, I have been curating an album from a vacation then sharing it with myself using Shared Photostreams. That way I have the trimmed down and edited album available on my phone and iPad. Maybe people are asking it to do something it was never designed to do?

fjpoblam 13y ago

Thank you! Hear, hear! And well put. Exactly. We've struggled with the same issues, not to mention the confusion added by iTunes sync. (My bad: should've kept iTunes' little sneaky fingers out of it.) Lots of duplicates, and over the years, quite a few MIAs.

alanh 13y ago

It’s like a classic John Siracusa criticism, but without the eloquence. Can’t disagree.

robomartin 13y ago

I am going to go a little further and suggest that Apple's entire iCloud + iTunes + backup + synchronization strategy/system/product/code is a disaster. Why? Simple: You cannot trust it. You need to be able to trust such software. I'm sorry, but you just can't in this case. I won't go into all of the details, links and examples here. Do a little searching and it should not be too hard to find hordes of people who have lost calendars, contacts, notes, photos and other valuable data thanks to Apple's wonderful software. I have personally experienced loosing all of my contacts, appointments, calendar items and notes. Of course, being that this ain't my first rodeo I had backups of the backups. I always go into data storage situations with zero trust for what is being offered. It took some work to get the data back but I recovered. That is not the point. The first three rules of any piece of software that users entrust with their data are: 1- Thou shalt not loose user data 2- Thou shalt not loose user data 3- Thou shalt not loose user data Notice that cool hippie user interfaces are never mentioned there. My data (and your data) is far more valuable than their cool icons and "beautiful" design. Far, far more valuable. Go ahead, Google it. The stories are horrific. From people loosing contacts to students loosing semesters worth of notes. Auto-magically. I even went to my local Apple store to consult with a "Genius" about this. The guy was clueless. And, in fact, right in front of my eyes, he proceeded to accidentally delete all of my calendar entries --something that should be darn-near impossible to do. Again, I had my backup at home so I didn't blow a fuse. But, please. I explained that it was not reasonable to blow away someone's data if their email service provider changed. If you go from Google to Yahoo all the shit that was being synchronized with Google goes poof. Really? Why? I would love to hear from someone at Apple on this. Why it is even remotely reasonable to blow away all of my contacts, notes and calendar information? If you close your email account and you are no-longer able to log-on it seems iOS will attempt to synchronize, fail and then blow away your data. My wife has had cases of constantly disappearing notes and appointments due to failed synchronization sessions. The greater point is that you should not have to be a programmer or IT worker to have your personal data be safe on iOS. She is not a technical person and without my help she would have descended into data loss hell. Grandpa and Grandma have no hope. Anyhow, now iCloud and all forms of automated synchronization are turned off on all of our devices. Manual backup is still the only way you can be sure your data will not be lost.

13y ago

DigitalSea 13y ago

That's it, keep walking, come to the Android side Peter.

babesh 13y ago

Don't people have the same problem with other types of content, content produced by other tools, by other people, or in different social networks?

ctingom 13y ago

The solution I found for my photo workflow is that I've installed AeroFS on my computers and I store my latest photos from the last several months in that folder. It syncs across all of my computers, that way my wife and I can use Picasa or Lightroom and the photos load fast since they are on our local drives. Since we store folders in a /year/month/ file structure we can easily move those to an external hard drive. The whole thing backs up to CrashPlan. My entire collection is over 1.5 TB of photos.

slacka 13y ago

I have a high DPI monitor and need to zoom the text to 150% to make it readable. But on that website the text gets zoomed into the right margin in Chrome and off the screen in FF. Works fine on my iPhone. Something wrong with the CSS?