With the new photos app on my mac I’m wondering if it’s time to actually consider paying the £3 a month for 200GB of iCloud storage and actually back my photo’s up to the cloud.

My current situation is . . .

About 40 GB of photo’s on my Mac (backed up to an external drive every few months and then stored at my parents house)
A few GB (no more than 10 I would imagine) of photo’s on random other devices/drives etc
Probably about a further 10GB of home videos (your wife, like photography does she, SAY NO MORE!!!)

Both the wife and I have iPhones, and have a mac in the house for our use and also a desktop PC, and use a compact camera on occasion (hopefully a lot more in the next month when I treat myself to a new one).

What other options are out there which will be as hassle free as possible?

I quite like the look of Mylio – but no offline storage (and crap internet at my parents) means there’d be no easy offsite storage option for me) makes it a bit of non starter.

I’m not particularly fussed about what online storage provider has my photo’s (I don’t hate MS/Google/Apple) but just want something that would be easy to use for me and the wife and also easy to share albums with other members of the family.

I’m sure the STWCollective have got the combined brianpower to provide an easy answer . . . .

Flickr give you 1TB for free. And easy enough to share photos etc.
Though not sure about bulk uploading. I think you can set the phone app to upload everything automatically.

I use Flickr for hosting pics, not sure id want it to be a main backup tho, it never seemed easy to batch control/manage the pics (including downloading them)?

I use Amazon Cloud which was the cheapest at the time a few years ago, just checked and you can get unlimited photo storage for Amazon prime subscribers/customers, otherwise £16pa for 32GB, £32 for 100GB

Picasa is unlimited for 2MP images.

Amazon do unlimited storage for any image types cheaply (or free with Prime). Don’t think you can share from it though.

What does a cloud based back up system give you that a hard drive doesn’t (apart from a much slower process)?

Like others here, I use Flickr and Dropbox, the former to share publically among various groups and communities and the latter to share privately, with family and as a means of all areas access.

But all my backups of catalogues (I tend to create a new catalogue each year) are done within the editing software I use and then stored on separately on two 2TB hard drives.

Amazon do unlimited storage for any image types cheaply (or free with Prime). Don’t think you can share from it though.

There’s an android Amazon Photo Cloud app, not sure if that counts though?

What does a cloud based back up system give you that a hard drive doesn’t (apart from a much slower process)?

I went to do some consultancy at the head office of a well known catalogue company in Liverpool years ago. We couldn’t get anything done because a local scally had broken in to their server room and nicked their mini computer*

That and fire, spillages, kids, pets… Backing up locally is a crap idea.

*mini computers are not mini at all

What does a cloud based back up system give you that a hard drive doesn’t (apart from a much slower process)?

Multiple back ups at data centres around the world. Way more reliable than a HD in the loft etc.

I use Flickr for all my photo backups. Unlimited storage for $60/annum (old original Pro account).

I use smugmug. Has unlimited storage for a couple of quid a month. Stores 20 min videos and high resolution photos. Good iOS and android apps.

I think the new implementation of iCloud Photo Library looks really promising, but I can’t try it without signing up for extra storage (and extra cost). I don’t mind paying for storage but it’d be good to hear some real world feedback on how well iCloud Photos works. The USP for me is being able to make local edits on one device that propagate to all devices. I don’t believe anyone else does this unless you edit them online, but I’d be happy to be told otherwise.

I am the founder of Mylio. ‘Mylio actually solves many of these problems. It is a complete system for working with, editing, organizing and protecting photos. Best of all it is cloud agnostic: that is it can work with or without the cloud.
It certainly supports local backup. It also makes it possible to have a copy of your originals at another location — office, studio, second home, even friend’s house — and it will keep the pictures in sync across the two locations. So, it is possible to be fully protected without storing pictures in the cloud . . . if you choose.
Starting soon, Mylio will also offer cloud storage, so if you want your offsite copy in the cloud you can choose that too.
Most likely you will want a local second copy — perhaps on a USB drive — and an offsite copy. Mylio can automate that process too.
Besides protection, Mylio also makes your pictures available on all your devices — multiple computers, tablet’s, phones. Again when possible it replicates to those devices using WiFi — way faster — and only uses the cloud when it needs to.

Mylio sounds interesting and generating quite a few comments — kind of what I’d been looking at with CLoudberry or crashplan for 321 backup. But with the bonus of edit awareness (?)

Winner for me was ability to orchestrate and encrypt your cloudbound copies (trust no one 🙂 eh )

@davidement: any comments on encryption towards the cloud (i.e. avoiding cloud co’s slurping your stuff) and plans for Android?

Keen to hear more!

David from Mylio, again . . .

Android is in test now and will become broadly available this spring. Depending on the particular device you have, you could even consider using it before final release.

We currently encrypt all inter-machine communication.
If you choose the kind of “multi-location” protection configuration described in the previous post, then your images are not stored in the cloud except possibly for brief periods of time.

Later this spring two things happen. First we roll out broad encryption so that everything outside your own machine is encrypted, period. Second we introduce the ability for machines in a multi-location configuration to exchange pictures with each other without the pictures ever being stored in the cloud period; then for sure nobody can get at them even for brief periods of time.

Hope this helps.

just resurrecting this rather than start a new one…..

becoming frustrated now at trying to understand google+ photos and not being able to just take a pic on my phone and a few seconds later being able to post a pic on here (classifieds etc)
i have to fanny about shortening urls and copying and pasting stuff. was advised to try imgur which is a bit better but im still not getting to grips with it. could be me i spose!!

id like a system where as i mentioned above, i can take pics on my htc phone, upload from my gallery, and then just ‘copy photo url’ into online forums or whatever. and also be able to tidy it up from a chromebook, folders etc.

what do you all recommend for this?

thanks

imgur

just tried imgur again, and it only seems to allow 1 photo at a time to be uploaded. say i come back from hols with 200 photos on my phone, id like to be able to upload them straight to a folder i create called hols 2015 etc.

cant believe it seems this hard to find something suitable for me.

Flickr then and use the desktop version of the site when you want to get the url for sharing on here.

Use the Android auto upload to Google+ photos as usual. Install the PicsPro app and grab the URL from there.

I too got upset at the changes Google made and have switched to Flickr now, but for all the images I still have in Google storage I use Picspro to manage them – way better than the new native Google Photos stuff.

cant find picspro on either my phone or my chromebook store.

thought id bite the bullet and try flickr as its so popular. put in a false phone number to dodge the spam, but they say they send a verification code to it. i dont want flickr/yahoo having my phone number for obvious reasons. looks like its a no for flickr too then :-/

Sorry, what “obvious” reasons?

Sorry, what “obvious” reasons?

i try to keep my phone number as private as possible (had the same number now for 15 years or so) and not give it out online. this has resulted so far in having zero spam or calls from injurylawyers4you about the accident i had in the last few months.
my friends/family receive such calls regularly.

maybe being cynical and am happy to hear that yahoo/flickr are totally different if you know anything to the contrary?

thanks

EDIT: just read that back and it could be construed as being a sarky reply. not meant to be so ill drop in a 😀

I’ve been using Flickr for years and the only spam phone calls I ever get to my mobile are from Vodafone doing “customer satisfaction”.

ok,im in. got it up, cant see any easy to get my google+ or phone gallery pics into folders on there tho.

is my only option to forget about google+, connect phone to laptop, drag/drop photos from phone to laptop, then drag/drop from laptop drive to flickr?
or is there an easy ‘upload 100s of photos then sort em into folders through flickr’ type option? 🙂

thanks

sadexpunk – Member
cant find picspro on either my phone or my chromebook store.

Does this link work?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.imprologic.micasa

I use Flickr and have had no issues with Spam. The other good thing about Flickr is it is pure back-up, not syncing. So you have to make a special effort to delete files.

Delete something in Google+, Dropbox etc, then it gets deleted from all devices. And is surprising easy to do.

or is there an easy ‘upload 100s of photos then sort em into folders through flickr’ type option?

If you do use Flickr then download the Flickr uploader app. I uploaded over 4500 images the other week (well it took a week!).

Download the Flickr app to you phone as well – it uploads images in the background, and nothing is made public until you make it public.

I know Nikon give you 2gb of stoage for free, or 20gb if you own a camera by them. Handy as it allows uploads of RAW files, which not many other photo storage sites support.

Flickr offering 1TB sounds pretty hard to beat IMO.

Does this link work?

it does indeed mate ta. havent downloaded it yet as im trying to get flickr working but rest assured if i cant then ill try it….

aaaand ……im struggling. downloaded flickr to phone and selected all my gallery photos (763 of them), clicked ‘share to flickr’ and not much has happened. theres about 20 recent photos on there now and a few old ones from the phone. no idea how or why they were selected, but, as feared, its not working for me :-/
go to the website and same pics are there. tried a few times to upload them all but theres just nothing happening. any idea what im doing wrong?

thanks

One thing to bear in mind with any online storage options,

If you’ve got a regular ADSL connection, uploading is going the “wrong way” across it. So a large collection will take a considerable about of time to upload.

So a large collection will take a considerable about of time to upload.

Flickr has a upload client you can use, and just leave running over night if it’s 10s of Gb.

how do you use it, cos mines not uploading any more pics now. done about 30 of 700ish and thats it.
im not very good at this am i :-/

how do you use it, cos mines not uploading any more pics now.

I normally use the web interface uploader as I don’t upload that much in one go (maybe 250 Mb at a go). I do recall the uploader app used to crash occasionally, but that was years ago….

aaaand ……im struggling. downloaded flickr to phone and selected all my gallery photos (763 of them), clicked ‘share to flickr’ and not much has happened. theres about 20 recent photos on there now and a few old ones from the phone. no idea how or why they were selected, but, as feared, its not working for me :-/

Flickr does take a while to back-up on a phone (sometimes a long while!). As I said above 4500 photos took about a week to upload for me on my laptop, on a moderate broadband. (we get 6mb download, so upload is slow). They were full size files though, not compressed to a web friendly format.

As footflaps said – leave it running and don’t keep looking at it! It does sort itself out eventually. Quiting and restarting the App from time to time helps too.

I found the quickest way to upload is to transfer images to laptop then use the Flick Uploadr app. On your phone Flickr is competing with many other things for data usage.

i really think i need to get back to basics and try and make this work for me. as it stands i dont understand google+, google+ photos, google drive, im struggling with the lot.

ive got 1Tb space on google drive, and hardly using any cos i dont know how. i googled it and found “Google Drive is built-in to Chromebooks, so your files and photos are automatically backed up. You’ll get 100GB of free storage for two years with most new Chromebooks.”
automatically backed up?? ive got 700-odd photos, none of which are on google drive. its virtually empty, wheres the back-ups??
google drive is split into 3 sections, ‘shared with me’, ‘recent’ and ‘offline’. all with different things in there that i dont know how they got there.

maybe this should be for a different thread, but i think if i could understand this, i could get my head around something like flickr better.
ideally id have all my files on google drive and be able to upload/download everything to it. there you go again, i dont even know if i upload or download files to it!! and google+photos on my phone has more on it than the chromebook version, which i cant even access from google+ now!! WHY CANT THEY ALL JUST PLAY NICELY?? grrrrr……..

sorry for the ranty sidetrack, ill check flickr again in the morning, but im not hopeful any more pics will have appeared.

thanks for the help chaps.

So did any more files upload!?

happily yes 🙂

still not there yet tho. i think the 2 or 3 times i tried to ‘unsuccessfully’ upload last night has resulted in 3 lots of whatever photos have uploaded so far. i tried deleting them and it wont allow me to, says theres a problem or something.
dont really understand the difference between the photostream and the camera roll, if got different pictures in each.

ill leave it a day or so and see if more photos come in each day, and when theyve stopped, ill try deleting the copies again then.

thanks a lot for your help

dont really understand the difference between the photostream and the camera roll, if got different pictures in each.

This may help…

http://mashable.com/2014/06/16/my-photo-stream-camera-roll/#Vyf8nPORYEq1

thanks mate, now i realise that the photostream is the selction of photos i decide to share with the public. got no idea why some were and some werent but….. i went to ‘organise’ and made them all viewable only to me. hey presto, no pics in the photostream now.

so, now i understand the camera roll is every pic ive got on my phone, and i can make some of them into albums, so ive been doing that.

then i thought…..why not put all my photos ive got backed up on a portable drive onto here too. a backup of a backup.

i clicked the upload arrow, selected a few holiday pics for a test, created an album, stuck em in, then uploaded. or so i thought. nothing. the album i just created isnt in albums, i have no new photos on my camera roll.

any idea about this one? or is it just a case of get up in the morning and theyll be there by then? 🙂

thanks