7 ms·

I'm wondering how alone (or not) I am in being uncomfortable with cloud storage for my (mostly family) photos. It would be the most convenient solution in terms

by kohanz 12y ago

I'm wondering how alone (or not) I am in being uncomfortable with cloud storage for my (mostly family) photos. It would be the most convenient solution in terms of storage and redundancy, but the idea of them possibly being compromised and also somewhat out of my control doesn't sit well with me. It feels slightly hypocritical, since I do share the odd photo on Facebook, but the idea of having every photo and video "out there" is a bit daunting. Currently I have a RAID 1 NAS at home (also backed up to external drive occasionally), which I use to offload photos from our various devices. I can access these pictures when at home from any device, but of course not outside of the WIFI. So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup. Am I living in the stone age?

cwbrandsma 12y ago
House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway. Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.
- kohanz 12y ago
  Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.
  - apetresc 12y ago
    I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
    - kohanz 12y ago
      Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?
    - pauldino 12y ago
      I've read differently... > Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced. http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently/answer/Scott-Bonds http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...
    - skuhn 12y ago
      Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.
- skrause 12y ago
  Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.
  - dserodio 12y ago
    I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade. I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.
junto 12y ago
No, you are not alone. I too would live to find a solution so that I can share photos and updates with my family and friends and still own the data. My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and a simple Google+ style photos masonry and albums app (Wordpress style install) that are locked down. Files can be shared on Facebook and other social networks but only as iframed embeds a bit like Wickr https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/01/30/facebook-to-fill-with-more-kittens-in-wickrs-message-hiding-scheme/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/01/30/facebook-to-fill... All my data. I control it. I can share it. Code open source. Openphoto that became TroveBox that then failed and open sourced it's code is probably the closest to what I want, except it is missing the Wickr style sharing and the encrypted at rest parts.
- madeofpalk 12y ago
  > My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 Aren't your photos still in the 'cloud'? What's the difference between Amazon S3 and Apple's servers?
  - comex 12y ago
    I expect the "code open source" bit implies that it is client side encryption, unlike current consumer products where such data is not encrypted or can be decrypted without the user's consent.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    ...Particularly given how much of Amazon's servers Apple seems to use, if Little Snitch is at all accurate.
  - junto 12y ago
    They would be encrypted. The point is privacy. Icloud gives you none. In 10 years time the NSA are going to be sucking up every single photo and email and Facebook post they can, storing it for posterity in Utah, analysing every single one, facial recognition and categorisation automatically. They can have mine encrypted.
mercer 12y ago
You could use tarsnap, which is very safe and quite cheap. I'm doing that with my photos.
Someone 12y ago
My hope is on the can in "And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud", but it wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be a must.
- glhaynes 12y ago
  Usage of iCloud Photo Library is 100% opt-in.
  - frik 12y ago
    Does it support alternative cloud solutions or common protocols like WebDAV, SCP/SFTP? Otherwise, it's all or nothing like with iOS8.
    - glhaynes 12y ago
      It's like iOS 8 - you can either have your photos just locally or all in iCloud Photo Library. Of course, being a Mac you could probably put that "local" photo library in a cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive. Or use a separate app to sync photos to a cloud service.
skeeterbug 12y ago
No you are not living in the stone age. I keep photos backed up on an external drive. I also use CrashPlan to keep a copy of my files (encrypted) offsite so I won't lose my photos if my house burns down or is broken into.
VOYD 12y ago
Not everyone has a RAID 1 NAS at home, nor even knows what one it. Totally aimed at the apple noob demographic.
falcolas 12y ago
No, particularly when you don't even have to look back a full year to see what happens when this goes awry (Jennifer Lawrence, etc). It's simply hard to trust everyone involved with a cloud storage scheme like this.
happyscrappy 12y ago
Dear Grandma, It is very simple to setup a RAID 1 NAS and an offsite backup. Now that you are retired you have time to read the manuals and setup a cron job from terminal. You will be glad you expended the time and can relax in knowing the pictures of your cat are safe. You will also need to use encryption if you wish to communicate with me further. Love Jimmy
- kohanz 12y ago
  I wasn't suggesting that what I've chosen to do is the way to go or that it is accessible to most people. I want to know how the tech-savvy audience of HN feels about this issue.
  - prawn 12y ago
    I suspect that the majority of us know what we should do, but never get around to it. I have photos spread across a dozen storage options, only one of them with any backup in place. My wife deals with hers separately and has no off-site or cloud back up. Between us, we have a lot of photos. I think a lot of people will simply go with the convenient option offered by the big player and risk it (nothing sordid stored in my collections anyway, so security is less of a drama).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
wbond 12y ago
Also note that dealing with family photos on iCloud might be a pain/impossible. I spent time trying to figure out a good way to pool our photos from multiple devices, but ended up settling on using Dropbox and Carousel. There were some hacky work-arounds to have multiple Apple IDs logged in per phone (one for apps, one for iCloud), but I couldn't find any information on something like selective sync for our laptops and iCloud drive. Between Carousel for automatic uploads from phones, being able to view all of our photos easily via the web from our laptops, and being able to exclude full-res files from our machines via selective sync, I think it is the most robust option right now. If anyone has details about being able to share full iCloud photo libraries, I'd be interested to hear.
ruswick 12y ago
It's not a totally unreasonable complaint given that Apple has a history when it comes to security breaches. My biggest complain is that they are keeping the old 5GB iCloud limit. It's 2015. 5GB is absolutely nothing in terms of both capacity and cost. People pay $700-$800 for their phones and upwards of $1000 for their MacBooks and are still made to shell out for anything more than an negligible amount of free storage? I mean, it's not like iCloud is unreasonably-priced. It's actually fairly cheap. But, it just seems weird that Apple is printing billions of dollars a quarter with these very expensive devices and still feels the need to squeak out a few dollars a month extra from iCloud subs. One would think that, with iWork and OSX going free, iCloud would also move from a paid product to a utility that is just included with the devices.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Or that they would offer 32GB as the starting option for their phones, especially considering that their OTA updates don't really work on 16GB phones. There's a lot that Apple does that makes people go "hmm". But they're a case study in getting some things right enough that nothing else matters.
- gress 12y ago
  False - Apple has no significant history when it comes to security breaches.
  - skuhn 12y ago
    No large scale breaches are known externally, but they have certainly have had their share of security incidents and poor practices. http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-icloud-hack-obvious-security-flaw-patched-after-new-years-day-disclosure-1773648 http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-icloud-hack-obvious-security-fl... http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/22/apple-warns-icloud-security/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/22/apple-warns-icloud-se... http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-note-apple-two-step-protection-wont-protect-your-data/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-no...
  - WildUtah 12y ago
Domenic_S 12y ago
> So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup. I have a solution. My workflow is: -Import photos into Lightroom from camera to local SSD. Select the option to generate 1:1 previews. -Edit/trash photos. Publish some to FB, Flickr, Snapfish, whatever I want to do with them. -Move originals to external storage. The 1:1 previews stay on the local catalog (they're like.. big JPGs or something). Good enough to show off, even print, but obviously you'd want to edit the originals. If you're disconnected from that external storage, you can still see the 1:1 previews. If you're connected to storage, Lightroom recognizes it and loads up the originals instead. It's brilliant. You can even set up a collection that syncs with your phone/tablet. If you're even halfway serious about your photos, lightroom is the way to go.
- marban 12y ago
  All nice unless you select previews to purge automatically after x days; which I think was a default setting at some point in time.
- frik 12y ago
  Unless a recent Photoshop Lightroom version allows you to manage the photos outside of its library-database, it isn't. At least version 1 & 2 copied all files to an SQL database/hidden directory in the users folder. Windows (Live) Photogallery is much better in this regard, as it indexes the files but keep the files were the are stored. Also all metadata changes are stored back to the file itself. The same goes for Windows Explorer and OSX Finder+Spotlight.
  - mje__ 12y ago
    That's not true at all. Lightroom can add photos at their current location, or import them to a location of your choice. There's no "hidden directory". Lightroom supports sidecar (xml) changes, or syncing metadata to the files. Your choice.
  - FireBeyond 12y ago
    LR doesn't have true multi-user, but numerous solutions exist that are pretty seamless for handling multiple systems using the same database. I have my LR catalog on Dropbox, and all of my photos on an AFS share on FreeNAS, which isn't always available (I have a VPN to home, but it depends on the speed of my connectivity). I generate 1:1 previews and don't expire them, so I can use LR with the same settings and edits on both my iMac and MBP. The only issue is having LR running on both, at once. See: http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dropbox/ http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dr... (and many others).
plg 12y ago
At least Apple's business model doesn't depend on mining your photos for information. Other companies can't say the same thing.
imaginenore 12y ago
You're one house fire, flood or a lighting stike away from losing all your photos. If you want a backup, it has to be remote. It can be a hard drive in 5 ziploc bags at your friends place, or encrypted in a cloud. Just don't store your photos all in one place, if you value them.
GoofballJones 12y ago
It's what works for you. Honestly, I love cloud storage. I decided to go with Microsoft's OneDrive because it has unlimited storage, and if there's any data that I need encrypted, I can just encrypt a folder on the sync-drive. Just remember to have a back-up of your photos and other digital things that you can't lose at an off-site location also. There are several solutions that can do this that doesn't involve the "cloud". I love the cloud though. Could it be compromised? Maybe. Could a fire happen in my house where I lose everything? Maybe. But as it stands now, I could walk away from everything I own, walk into a store and pick up a cheap laptop and access all my data again. But that's just me. Some people are paranoid about their privacy and data (and a justifiable paranoia, don't get me wrong), but use a solution that works for _me_ personally. Everyone is different and will need a different solution. There's really no one-size-fits-all.
- Veratyr 12y ago
  I'm just curious, how have you been able to avail yourself of their unlimited storage? I signed up too but their API rate limiting is draconian enough that I can't realistically use that for uploading large amounts of data. Their native clients might fare a little better but they require a ton of disk space if you're doing a large upload it seems.
  - GoofballJones 12y ago
    no, not yet, but from what I understand they'll be implementing it slowly. I mainly got it though because getting 1TB cloud storage for the price is still cheaper than Box or Google Drive or Dropbox, the "unlimited" is just icing.
bwindels 12y ago
I have the same concerns, even though today I use OneDrive. My ideal solution would be a NAS that replicates my (encrypted) data across a peer to peer network of similar NAS'es, and so you would only be able to store personal data on a certain portion of the hard disk, and the other part would be used to replicate data from other NAS'es on the network. My data would be pretty safe: if the drive crashes I can just insert a new hard drive and the NAS starts reconstructing my data from the network again given the encryption key. Also, this NAS would be accessible from outside of my home network, so it's like my own cloud backed up on a peer to peer network. I would actually like to build this at one point. The hardware is pretty easy, take a Banana Pro board + a SATA drive and you have a wifi connected NAS. Building the software for the peer to peer network would be a bit trickier to make it work well. Anyone knows if a peer to peer network like this already exists?
- ojilles 12y ago
  Not affiliated but Synology does exactly that, replicate to friends' synologies.
- drhayes9 12y ago
  Transporter does that as well: http://www.filetransporter.com/ http://www.filetransporter.com/
mark_l_watson 12y ago
This might make you more comfortable with cloud storage of high value personal photos: I have my android phone automatically back up each picture I take on Google+ pictures and Microsoft OneDrive. Also, every once in a while, I burn a DVD-R. Eggs in multiple baskets.
amirmc 12y ago
Not alone and I suspect there are more and more people becoming uneasy with 'the cloud' for myriad different reasons. Obvious reasons include privacy and security but there's also the ephemeral nature of such services (they can get bought/shutdown on a whim -- Apple is no stranger to cutting things that don't work for them). Also, it's not hypocritical at all to raise a concern even if you're a big user of such services. Right now, it's not like you have many alternatives. In my view, we need to move towards a system where everyone can control their own piece of the 'cloud', without the burden of being a sysadmin. There are varying approaches to this (cf Sandstorm and OwnCloud), but I believe we need to work on the fundamental infrastructure if we want properly decentralised systems. I'm working on this, based on the idea of unikernels - http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
rtpg 12y ago
Do you keep your money in a bank? I get worries about storing things on Facebook, but I feel the implicit contract about iCloud is that it's a personal drive (unless you explicitly make something public). I understand some people might be really good at automated backup and whatnot, but for me this solution means not losing photos. (probability losing photos) * pain is much greater for me than (probability having photos public) * pain (at least my impression of it)
- kohanz 12y ago
  I don't think the bank analogy holds. My bank funds are insured up to $100K (by the Canadian government) and I don't keep more than that with any one bank. Money is replaceable. Family photos are not.
rayiner 12y ago
Set up a server and put it on the internet! I have a BRIX mini-PC,[1] on which I've got Linux then Windows Server 2008 running in a VM. My FiOS router has a setting to automatically keep a Dynamic-DNS entry up-to-date (I use dyn.org), and I bought a SSL certificate from Network Solutions so I can connect with HTTPS. It's a little over-engineered for a home server because I wanted to be able to keep my OneNote notebooks off the cloud, but IIS also makes it super-easy to set up a WebDAV share, which iOS plays very nicely with. [1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164007 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164.... Loaded it up with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD for surprisingly cheap. At idle, you can't hear it unless you put your ear right up to it in a quiet room. But it's a pain to install anything on it because it doesn't have any USB 2.0 ports, just USB 3.0 which a lot of installers don't support. Ubuntu 14.10 works (though holy shit did they fuck everything up since I last used it), but Fedora and CentOS don't.
reacweb 12y ago
I have also a raid1 NAS at home. It is mounted by NFS on my main computer that is available from internet using ssh. My ADSL modem is configure to enable WOL. This allows to access my photos from anywhere using filezilla. You just need to carry your key in .ppk format.

by kohanz 12y ago

cwbrandsma 12y ago

House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway. Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.

kohanz 12y ago
Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.
- apetresc 12y ago
  I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
  - kohanz 12y ago
    Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?
  - pauldino 12y ago
    I've read differently... > Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced. http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently/answer/Scott-Bonds http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...
  - skuhn 12y ago
    Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.
skrause 12y ago
Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.
- dserodio 12y ago
  I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade. I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.

junto 12y ago

No, you are not alone. I too would live to find a solution so that I can share photos and updates with my family and friends and still own the data. My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and a simple Google+ style photos masonry and albums app (Wordpress style install) that are locked down. Files can be shared on Facebook and other social networks but only as iframed embeds a bit like Wickr https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/01/30/facebook-to-fill-with-more-kittens-in-wickrs-message-hiding-scheme/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/01/30/facebook-to-fill... All my data. I control it. I can share it. Code open source. Openphoto that became TroveBox that then failed and open sourced it's code is probably the closest to what I want, except it is missing the Wickr style sharing and the encrypted at rest parts.

madeofpalk 12y ago
> My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 Aren't your photos still in the 'cloud'? What's the difference between Amazon S3 and Apple's servers?
- comex 12y ago
  I expect the "code open source" bit implies that it is client side encryption, unlike current consumer products where such data is not encrypted or can be decrypted without the user's consent.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  ...Particularly given how much of Amazon's servers Apple seems to use, if Little Snitch is at all accurate.
- junto 12y ago
  They would be encrypted. The point is privacy. Icloud gives you none. In 10 years time the NSA are going to be sucking up every single photo and email and Facebook post they can, storing it for posterity in Utah, analysing every single one, facial recognition and categorisation automatically. They can have mine encrypted.

mercer 12y ago

You could use tarsnap, which is very safe and quite cheap. I'm doing that with my photos.

Someone 12y ago

My hope is on the can in "And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud", but it wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be a must.

glhaynes 12y ago
Usage of iCloud Photo Library is 100% opt-in.
- frik 12y ago
  Does it support alternative cloud solutions or common protocols like WebDAV, SCP/SFTP? Otherwise, it's all or nothing like with iOS8.
  - glhaynes 12y ago
    It's like iOS 8 - you can either have your photos just locally or all in iCloud Photo Library. Of course, being a Mac you could probably put that "local" photo library in a cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive. Or use a separate app to sync photos to a cloud service.

skeeterbug 12y ago

No you are not living in the stone age. I keep photos backed up on an external drive. I also use CrashPlan to keep a copy of my files (encrypted) offsite so I won't lose my photos if my house burns down or is broken into.

VOYD 12y ago

Not everyone has a RAID 1 NAS at home, nor even knows what one it. Totally aimed at the apple noob demographic.

falcolas 12y ago

No, particularly when you don't even have to look back a full year to see what happens when this goes awry (Jennifer Lawrence, etc). It's simply hard to trust everyone involved with a cloud storage scheme like this.

happyscrappy 12y ago

Dear Grandma, It is very simple to setup a RAID 1 NAS and an offsite backup. Now that you are retired you have time to read the manuals and setup a cron job from terminal. You will be glad you expended the time and can relax in knowing the pictures of your cat are safe. You will also need to use encryption if you wish to communicate with me further. Love Jimmy

kohanz 12y ago
I wasn't suggesting that what I've chosen to do is the way to go or that it is accessible to most people. I want to know how the tech-savvy audience of HN feels about this issue.
- prawn 12y ago
  I suspect that the majority of us know what we should do, but never get around to it. I have photos spread across a dozen storage options, only one of them with any backup in place. My wife deals with hers separately and has no off-site or cloud back up. Between us, we have a lot of photos. I think a lot of people will simply go with the convenient option offered by the big player and risk it (nothing sordid stored in my collections anyway, so security is less of a drama).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

wbond 12y ago

Also note that dealing with family photos on iCloud might be a pain/impossible. I spent time trying to figure out a good way to pool our photos from multiple devices, but ended up settling on using Dropbox and Carousel. There were some hacky work-arounds to have multiple Apple IDs logged in per phone (one for apps, one for iCloud), but I couldn't find any information on something like selective sync for our laptops and iCloud drive. Between Carousel for automatic uploads from phones, being able to view all of our photos easily via the web from our laptops, and being able to exclude full-res files from our machines via selective sync, I think it is the most robust option right now. If anyone has details about being able to share full iCloud photo libraries, I'd be interested to hear.

ruswick 12y ago

It's not a totally unreasonable complaint given that Apple has a history when it comes to security breaches. My biggest complain is that they are keeping the old 5GB iCloud limit. It's 2015. 5GB is absolutely nothing in terms of both capacity and cost. People pay $700-$800 for their phones and upwards of $1000 for their MacBooks and are still made to shell out for anything more than an negligible amount of free storage? I mean, it's not like iCloud is unreasonably-priced. It's actually fairly cheap. But, it just seems weird that Apple is printing billions of dollars a quarter with these very expensive devices and still feels the need to squeak out a few dollars a month extra from iCloud subs. One would think that, with iWork and OSX going free, iCloud would also move from a paid product to a utility that is just included with the devices.

freehunter 12y ago
Or that they would offer 32GB as the starting option for their phones, especially considering that their OTA updates don't really work on 16GB phones. There's a lot that Apple does that makes people go "hmm". But they're a case study in getting some things right enough that nothing else matters.
gress 12y ago
False - Apple has no significant history when it comes to security breaches.
- skuhn 12y ago
  No large scale breaches are known externally, but they have certainly have had their share of security incidents and poor practices. http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-icloud-hack-obvious-security-flaw-patched-after-new-years-day-disclosure-1773648 http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-icloud-hack-obvious-security-fl... http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/22/apple-warns-icloud-security/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/22/apple-warns-icloud-se... http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-note-apple-two-step-protection-wont-protect-your-data/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-no...
- WildUtah 12y ago

Domenic_S 12y ago

> So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup. I have a solution. My workflow is: -Import photos into Lightroom from camera to local SSD. Select the option to generate 1:1 previews. -Edit/trash photos. Publish some to FB, Flickr, Snapfish, whatever I want to do with them. -Move originals to external storage. The 1:1 previews stay on the local catalog (they're like.. big JPGs or something). Good enough to show off, even print, but obviously you'd want to edit the originals. If you're disconnected from that external storage, you can still see the 1:1 previews. If you're connected to storage, Lightroom recognizes it and loads up the originals instead. It's brilliant. You can even set up a collection that syncs with your phone/tablet. If you're even halfway serious about your photos, lightroom is the way to go.

marban 12y ago
All nice unless you select previews to purge automatically after x days; which I think was a default setting at some point in time.
frik 12y ago
Unless a recent Photoshop Lightroom version allows you to manage the photos outside of its library-database, it isn't. At least version 1 & 2 copied all files to an SQL database/hidden directory in the users folder. Windows (Live) Photogallery is much better in this regard, as it indexes the files but keep the files were the are stored. Also all metadata changes are stored back to the file itself. The same goes for Windows Explorer and OSX Finder+Spotlight.
- mje__ 12y ago
  That's not true at all. Lightroom can add photos at their current location, or import them to a location of your choice. There's no "hidden directory". Lightroom supports sidecar (xml) changes, or syncing metadata to the files. Your choice.
- FireBeyond 12y ago
  LR doesn't have true multi-user, but numerous solutions exist that are pretty seamless for handling multiple systems using the same database. I have my LR catalog on Dropbox, and all of my photos on an AFS share on FreeNAS, which isn't always available (I have a VPN to home, but it depends on the speed of my connectivity). I generate 1:1 previews and don't expire them, so I can use LR with the same settings and edits on both my iMac and MBP. The only issue is having LR running on both, at once. See: http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dropbox/ http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dr... (and many others).

plg 12y ago

At least Apple's business model doesn't depend on mining your photos for information. Other companies can't say the same thing.

imaginenore 12y ago

You're one house fire, flood or a lighting stike away from losing all your photos. If you want a backup, it has to be remote. It can be a hard drive in 5 ziploc bags at your friends place, or encrypted in a cloud. Just don't store your photos all in one place, if you value them.

GoofballJones 12y ago

It's what works for you. Honestly, I love cloud storage. I decided to go with Microsoft's OneDrive because it has unlimited storage, and if there's any data that I need encrypted, I can just encrypt a folder on the sync-drive. Just remember to have a back-up of your photos and other digital things that you can't lose at an off-site location also. There are several solutions that can do this that doesn't involve the "cloud". I love the cloud though. Could it be compromised? Maybe. Could a fire happen in my house where I lose everything? Maybe. But as it stands now, I could walk away from everything I own, walk into a store and pick up a cheap laptop and access all my data again. But that's just me. Some people are paranoid about their privacy and data (and a justifiable paranoia, don't get me wrong), but use a solution that works for _me_ personally. Everyone is different and will need a different solution. There's really no one-size-fits-all.

Veratyr 12y ago
I'm just curious, how have you been able to avail yourself of their unlimited storage? I signed up too but their API rate limiting is draconian enough that I can't realistically use that for uploading large amounts of data. Their native clients might fare a little better but they require a ton of disk space if you're doing a large upload it seems.
- GoofballJones 12y ago
  no, not yet, but from what I understand they'll be implementing it slowly. I mainly got it though because getting 1TB cloud storage for the price is still cheaper than Box or Google Drive or Dropbox, the "unlimited" is just icing.

bwindels 12y ago

I have the same concerns, even though today I use OneDrive. My ideal solution would be a NAS that replicates my (encrypted) data across a peer to peer network of similar NAS'es, and so you would only be able to store personal data on a certain portion of the hard disk, and the other part would be used to replicate data from other NAS'es on the network. My data would be pretty safe: if the drive crashes I can just insert a new hard drive and the NAS starts reconstructing my data from the network again given the encryption key. Also, this NAS would be accessible from outside of my home network, so it's like my own cloud backed up on a peer to peer network. I would actually like to build this at one point. The hardware is pretty easy, take a Banana Pro board + a SATA drive and you have a wifi connected NAS. Building the software for the peer to peer network would be a bit trickier to make it work well. Anyone knows if a peer to peer network like this already exists?

ojilles 12y ago
Not affiliated but Synology does exactly that, replicate to friends' synologies.
drhayes9 12y ago
Transporter does that as well: http://www.filetransporter.com/ http://www.filetransporter.com/

mark_l_watson 12y ago

This might make you more comfortable with cloud storage of high value personal photos: I have my android phone automatically back up each picture I take on Google+ pictures and Microsoft OneDrive. Also, every once in a while, I burn a DVD-R. Eggs in multiple baskets.

amirmc 12y ago

Not alone and I suspect there are more and more people becoming uneasy with 'the cloud' for myriad different reasons. Obvious reasons include privacy and security but there's also the ephemeral nature of such services (they can get bought/shutdown on a whim -- Apple is no stranger to cutting things that don't work for them). Also, it's not hypocritical at all to raise a concern even if you're a big user of such services. Right now, it's not like you have many alternatives. In my view, we need to move towards a system where everyone can control their own piece of the 'cloud', without the burden of being a sysadmin. There are varying approaches to this (cf Sandstorm and OwnCloud), but I believe we need to work on the fundamental infrastructure if we want properly decentralised systems. I'm working on this, based on the idea of unikernels - http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

rtpg 12y ago

Do you keep your money in a bank? I get worries about storing things on Facebook, but I feel the implicit contract about iCloud is that it's a personal drive (unless you explicitly make something public). I understand some people might be really good at automated backup and whatnot, but for me this solution means not losing photos. (probability losing photos) * pain is much greater for me than (probability having photos public) * pain (at least my impression of it)

kohanz 12y ago
I don't think the bank analogy holds. My bank funds are insured up to $100K (by the Canadian government) and I don't keep more than that with any one bank. Money is replaceable. Family photos are not.

rayiner 12y ago

Set up a server and put it on the internet! I have a BRIX mini-PC,[1] on which I've got Linux then Windows Server 2008 running in a VM. My FiOS router has a setting to automatically keep a Dynamic-DNS entry up-to-date (I use dyn.org), and I bought a SSL certificate from Network Solutions so I can connect with HTTPS. It's a little over-engineered for a home server because I wanted to be able to keep my OneNote notebooks off the cloud, but IIS also makes it super-easy to set up a WebDAV share, which iOS plays very nicely with. [1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164007 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164.... Loaded it up with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD for surprisingly cheap. At idle, you can't hear it unless you put your ear right up to it in a quiet room. But it's a pain to install anything on it because it doesn't have any USB 2.0 ports, just USB 3.0 which a lot of installers don't support. Ubuntu 14.10 works (though holy shit did they fuck everything up since I last used it), but Fedora and CentOS don't.

reacweb 12y ago

I have also a raid1 NAS at home. It is mounted by NFS on my main computer that is available from internet using ssh. My ADSL modem is configure to enable WOL. This allows to access my photos from anywhere using filezilla. You just need to carry your key in .ppk format.