Apple seem to ration their major announcements to their keynote speeches and the last one majored on the iWatch. Despite having a house full of apple hardware I am an abstainer from the iPhone, I spend so little of my time not in front of a keyboard that having a portable version of the internet seems expensive and pointless. Accordingly a Dick Tracy style iWatch holds little appeal.
Less prominent was the roll out of Photos, the new photo management software for Apple devices, that was touted in an earlier keynote speech.
This offers a simpler quicker interface for interacting with your photos, and unifies the software available on OS devices, laptops and desktops and IOS devices such as iPads and iPhones. It also signals the end of iPhoto, if you install Photos, it replaces iPhoto. Aperture the higher end photo management software has now vanished from the AppStore, but will presumably remain useable for a while. Both iPhoto and Aperture would routinely use the same database, and it is this database that Photos now take ownership of.
Where things really get interesting is the ability to store photos seamlessly in the cloud. There are plenty of cloud solutions out there, I already seem to subscribe to a chunk of them. Some are very content specific, such as iTunes Match which will store your music in the cloud, or Evernote which is restricted to various document formats. Others are less restrictive, Dropbox, or Wuala will duplicate a folder full of stuff in the cloud. Some of these will allow you to save stuff to the cloud and delete safely from your hard drive, such as iTunes Match. Dropbox will let you use it for uploading some stuff to the cloud and deleting from your own hard drive, but not photos. If you want to save your photos to the cloud with Dropbox then you still have to retain a copy on your computer.
My laptop is getting a bit old and with only 250 gig of hard drive space it is starting to run out of space. I have built up a fair few photos, and recently bought a DSLR which allows me to take a mountain of photos, and a lot of gigabytes of data, very quickly. Accordingly I have long been interested in some means to save my photos to the cloud.
Flickr will allow you to upload any volume of stuff, but it is not really a backup means, and although you can treat photos as private, it is a fair amount of work and there is always the risk that you have inadvertently uploaded something to the public site that you did not want to.
Accordingly something integrated straight into my usual photo management application that provides cloud storage is definitely something that I am interested in.
When Photos came out, I did check for reviews, apart from Walt Mossberg, who had a problem with uploading because of a corrupted database, there was little objective opinion out there. However the monthly cost for what I was needing was less than a pound so rather than wait for the next issue of MacFormat or whatever I just jumped in. The support pages reported a lot of problems, as they invariably do, with minimal comment from Apple, also fairly standard. There were also some ingenious ‘solutions’ involving Terminal scripts.
From long experience I generally avoid hacking about with my computer, and for anything involving an irreplaceable database or the cloud, I find it best to just leave it running, overnight if needs be, and let it sort itself out. It did take a few days of uploading, but eventually the upload completed. My iPad is too aged to access the photos on the cloud, but I presume that they are there.
There are various issues with backing up photos,
1 you are probably backing up a database rather than a collection of individual photos, and a corrupted database means you lose everything. Backing up to the cloud is all very well, but you need to be confident that any corruption is contained at source, and a corrupted database on your laptop does not upload to corrupt the cloud back up too
2 it s not going to be quick, you could be uploading gigabytes of data, upload speeds are a lot less than download speeds, expect to run things overnight
3 increasingly, if it is on your computer, it is a kick in the pants away from being in the cloud, and it is not inconceivable that it could be made public at some point
4 you will end up renting access to your photos,
Despite some investigating I really could not find a practical means of backing up my photos to the cloud, so I thoroughly welcome the option within Photos. It does seem reasonably straightforward but it is certainly not instant, and it would be easy to mess about and corrupt your database of photos. In a few years everyone could be using it. Just how reliable is it? Only time will tell, other back up options remain advisable but Photos cloud storage does seem like a useful and timely solution for most folk.
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