Years ago it was like this: I had a desktop PC with Lightroom; I'd plug in the card from a camera and import the photos (always raw) onto disk via Lightroom, and then that disk would be backed up onto an external one.
These days I don't have a PC. I've got an 11" Macbook Air (which is a bit underpowered for photo editing and the screen isn't good enough anyway), an iPad and an iPhone. And even though I don't take half as many "proper" photos as I used to, I'm finding that I tend to accumulate SD cards full of photos because getting them onto a disk just isn't part of any workflow: I stick the SD card in the bottom of the iPad/iPhone and fire up Photoshop Express on that, and save the results. I've still got a Lightroom (3) licence but, like I say, the Air isn't really up to the task.
Editing on the iPad is fine but as a workflow it just doesn't scale without cloud storage.
So I'm wondering what's out there which will work well enough with raw files edited on an iPad, plus absorbing all my old (maybe 400GB or so?) photos and maybe even the Lightroom catalog that holds them.
The two obvious candidates are iCloud (£6.99/mo for 2TB, and I'm already paying for the 79p 50GB service anyway) and Adobe, most likely the Lightroom plan at £9.98/mo for 1TB. Obviously others exist, but I'm not sure how well they'll fit what I want to do.
It'd be good to have some way of organising the photos, or at the very least tagging ones which I'd file under "photography" rather than just being pictures of stuff.
This is, by the way, just a hobby, nothing professional—so I'm not looking to pay top dollar for all the bells and whistles. I largely just want to end up with a manageable and backed-up bucket of files, instead of an actual bucket of SD cards.
I guess I'm probably looking at whether there's a workflow that works well with iCloud, given that that's cheaper and more flexible. I might be prepared to move to an alternative editor such as Affinity if that makes life easier.
Anyone got any experience/tips?
I’ve a similar issue, tho not quite the same.
Anyway, the answer to this might be changing. IPadOS (iOS 13 for iPads) changes how you can use external storage, including network shares. So working on an iPad, with larger external/network storage, rather than cloud, becomes possible (depending on app support). And e.g. the 2 bay desktop synology devices have SD slots and can import directly, easy to auto backup offsite to cloud providers etc.
So I don’t have an answer, but the options are changing. I’ll watch this thread with interest and maybe post back later.
Oh and my revisiting the topic of my photo storage is driven by the fact I use lightroom 6 and looks like Catalina will break it. So stay on an old OS or change my photo management...
One issue I find with the £9.98 Lightroom plan is it that only contains the less feature rich ‘modern’ Lightroom. I keep trying to love it but it’s still not there yet compared to Lightroom Classic. The Photography plan is £15 for 1TB with Lightroom, Lightroom classic and Photoshop (probably of less interest if your not laptoping). If you find the modern version fine then it’s a good price for the app and storage, if your upload bandwidth can handle the constant syncing.
If you have Amazon Prime you can upload RAW for free to Prime Photos (as a hand archive second location backup) and it doesn’t count against your storage allocation. I’ve got just under 1TB up there and it shows I’m using 1.3GB which is just some docs and video files