When I scroll to some arbitrary point on my timeline, this is what I see for some random (long) amount of time…[/caption]\n\nRecently, Google raised the \"free\" tier of photos.google.com to unlimited storage of photos where RAW files are JPEGs are processed into high-but-not-full-quality JPEGs on-the-fly. I've tried it and it's pretty damn good. The uploader is smart enough to skip files that are clearly not important photos (e.g. too small, wrong format) and ignore obvious duplicates. The problems are (i) that the uploader application periodically just hangs and needs to be manually killed and restarted (ii) the web app seems to be weirdly slow and unreliable (I can log on with two machines side-by-side and they'll see different subsets of my photos), (iii) no Apple TV support, and (iv) online photo editor seems to need one or two extra clicks to accomplish anything (but it's a lot better than nothing). I'm pretty confident that my stuff is there, just not in my ability to see a given photo from a given machine on a given day. It's certainly the most complete, easy-to-navigate, and shareable archive I've ever managed to create of my photographs. And if I can find a photo there, I can locate the original RAW image pretty easily.\n\nNow, the absolute best system for dealing with my photographs thus far is iCloud. If I could simply rent 10TB from iCloud for a reasonable price (let's say, $25/month) and get my Mac to automatically sync multiple volumes to iCloud, my problem would be solved. Obviously, I'm a happy Apple customer. If I were a more-than-casual Windows or Linux user then this would not be a useful option to me, and I'm not sure what I'd do, because I'm pretty sure there's no equivalently seamless option for people who don't want to pay the \"Apple Tax\". Google Drive isn't even a tolerable substitute for DropBox (although I think it has Sharepoint beaten).\n\nHere's where iCloud beats all other options:\n
\n \t- I don't need to think about it or do anything. (Well, on a desktop device, I need to NOT avoid storing my data in iCloud) If I take a photo, then it ends up in the cloud pretty quickly (basically, when the device gets recharged while on a LAN, if not sooner).
\n \t- By default, full-resolution images are not propagated to all my devices (as would be the case for DropBox, or Hubic if it actually worked). Instead, as with everything in iCloud it's available on-demand. (Indeed, it's a bit reminiscent of the way iTunes deals with movies… superficially less convenient than pure streaming, but a lot more flexible and useful in practice).
\n \t- If I ingest a RAW photo from a camera onto a device, then it's in the cloud and available from any device on-demand (but it's not wasting space on all my devices).
\n \t- If I want to work on a photo, I can use the best native tools that are available on the device I'm using — seamlessly (although I'm inclined to actively avoid Adobe applications because Adobe's workflow involves use of Adobe's barely functional Cloud ecosystem).
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\nThe big problem — of course there has to be one — is that Apple's highest storage tier is 2TB. I'm currently on 200GB which is plenty for the stuff I need that isn't photos and videos, but hopelessly inadequate for photos and videos. 2TB (the next tier up, and it's competitively priced) would be sufficient for my photos and videos if I were to curate them, but I don't want to curate shit. I want to dump it in the cloud and not think about it.\nMissing in Action
\nAll of this adds up to a bunch of pretty disappointing non-solutions. Even though Apple provides a file sync system that works pretty well for personal photographs, it wouldn't work for say a small photography business. (I guess you could use some kind of \"family plan\" but I'm pretty sure that would run you into weirdness pretty fast.) And it's not like we're talking advanced workflow support here — I just want my photos backed up and available.\n\nWhere is a tool that automatically detects blurred, underexposed, or overexposed photos and flags them as less worthy of backup? (Google's photos app does a pretty good job of automatically correcting exposure, I wonder if it's smart enough to task the uploader with going back to the RAW and reprocessing and re-uploading the photo?)\n\nWhere is the tool that remembers which photos have been opened or zoomed in and flags them as more interesting or worthy of backup?\n\nWhere is the tool that correlates the GPS location data of your iPhone photos and tentatively applies them to your corresponding camera photos?\n\nAperture used to collect photos from bursts into a single set and represent them with what it guessed was the best one. Where did this idea disappear to?\n\nThere's a ton of low-hanging fruit here. Someone, please do something. I'm busy.","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T09:10:29.704+00:00",path:"photo-backup-hubic-and-other-stories",_created:"2024-07-09T20:28:56.139Z",id:"6280",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:28:56.139Z","$id":"6280",_path:"post/path=photo-backup-hubic-and-other-stories"}}