Two Weeks On … only one and a half left in the cloud archive race

         

My photo archiving experiment is really just reduced to microsoft’s OneDrive, which is functioning without any hiccups although I haven’t yet managed to fully automate it, because I don’t want a to create “google style vacuum cleaner suck-in everything” What I am considering building is a synchronization script that takes only the final jpeg version of stared photos and also incorporates the identification (If not removal) of duplicates, copying them into an appropriate OneDrive Directory/Folder on my main Desktop Computer, I expect y=to have to initiate this script/process.  From there OneDrive features take over and do the synch into the cloud completely automatically and in the background (ie no fuss or further actions required)

A niffty feature(aka magic) in the new version on OneDrive (under windows 10) is the free up space option on OneDive directories. At very regular intervals the OneDrive checked and any new files synched to the OneDrive cloud. Any items in a folder or subfolder marked as free up space gets removed and represented by a set of place holders. Just clicking on that icon or filename (givens the message available on line) and can instigate its immediate down load. Its very seamless but does free up the need for a lot of local diskspace. Perhaps it would have be nice to have just thumbnails of photo in the place holder files but hat sort of review/search  can be oust as easily done in the cloud version on OneDrive Photo Archive.

I suggested in last week’s post I was considering Flickr and I have been, and I’m including here because it is free up to 1TB of storage. Which is a lot if you are only storing snapshot sized (4” by 6” or 2400 pixel on the longest side) jpeg images, Which I think would be ideal for a family photo archive. The biggest concern here is privacy.

We don't mine our customers' photos for information to sell to the highest bidder, or to turn into targeted advertising campaigns.

…Don McAskill (Owner Smug Mug)

Smug Mug recently bought Flickr from Oath who bought it from Yahoo.While their photo sharing and storage is not free, but they have been suggesting things at flickr might be much the same in the near future (which seems to include free accounts and the 1TB limit). So I’m encouraged to try out a small scale and very private Family Archive Photo Cloud based on around flickr. I wont be sharing anything here (ie public) other than it has been very easy to step up and use. Also I’m sure that even if I had to move in future to the basic level of Smug Mug subscription USD$3.99 per month (that's the discount if you pay annually, ~$50/year) I might have built a good resource for the wider family that will justify the outlay.

One week on … How are the Cloud Archives going?

In simple terms my testing of the free generic cloud services as a places to save a copy of an archive photo collection are going well. I have dropped drop box. There is nothing wrong with drop box as a backup system, in fact it is so simple to set up, its drag & drop feature on a PC really nce and sharing photos (privately) across the web it could be a winner for most folk. The limitation I see is it relies on the photos being nicely sorted (say into albums before you upload). If your photo collection is a big mass of stuff all over the place (aka a Mess) the backup will be a mess also.

So Sorry Drop Box your the first elimination.

                             

OneDrive was the real surprise. I must admit I have one drive on a couple of machines (not all) and used it occasionally. Setting up the windows 10 OneDive app and phone apps and rebuilding the local OneDrive folder I saw all the right ingredients to build a rigorous and truly “set and forget” way to synch the photos I wish to upload (not everything vacuum cleaner style). The secret is in using the new format OneDrive folder (in Windows 10) on any of your machines (their doesn’t need to be a master catalogue or piece of software, another nail in your coffin lightroom) You just need to export your finished photos (I’m sticking with jpeg for this test) into the appropriate folder.

The One Drive folders are just like of folders in Explorer, with the exception that when you right click the mouse to get a options menu you’ll also see the options that control the display of the status icon beside any file or folder, (these are highlighted with the pink dotted box). The best option for my archive is  free up space which change the icon to an open cloud and  often leaves the files in place for a little while but seems to always upload them (during this process the status icon become an animated pair of arrow spinning and clears the space, then what you see is a thumbnail of the photos or icons of file types. If you want to bring the image back you just click on it and providing you have a web connection it downloads seamlessly. If you always what the local folder synched with a given folder (or file) you can select always keep on this device, and the status icon becomes an infilled green circle with a white tick. Files/photos loaded from other computers sharing the same One Drive will automatically appear this type of folder.

Google Drive (aka Backup and Sync from Google) is a Meehhhh! It worked the first time automatically, just like a vacuum cleaner and hasn’t work automatically since (I can restart it manually, it works once and stops). Not sure if this is yet another Windows 10 upgrade problem but I’ll preservere for the rest of the month and see if I can find the issue. Once uploaded you need to access google photos to see the on-line collection and there are plenty of tools, However it is so mobile phone centric I’m not a fan, even the great snapseed style tools they used to have are missing. I’m not sure what going on in there. Anyway I’ll keep testing.

I’m showing a flickr logo now and while I haven’t actually started using to build an cloud based photo collection archive (I’ll defer that until I understand better what Smug Mug is likely to do with the free !TB storage limits. What flickr offeres is some great and well proven ways to organize and share your on-line photo collection over and above the cloud storage, it could be the real winner of the free social media systems

Archive Obsession Three :: Building a Cloud Archive

There are a multiplicity of clouds services offered at the moment. It’s a bit scary because it would take ages to properly access them now. So this is a relatively incomplete list, but it is enough to get me started.

• Free “generic” Cloud Service
• Drop Box
• Google Drive
• One Drive
• Photo Focused Services
• Google Photo (its free and uses Google Drive)
• Flickr (it can be free)
• Smug Mug (starts at $3/month)
• Adobe/Creative Cloud (starts at $/10)
• DYI Cloud Backup/Archiving
• Back Blaze
• Carbonite
• Amazon S3, Glacier

It’s a no brainer to start with a test of the concept on the free services, especial as I already have experience work with all three. Not as a backup oriented services but I have used Drop Box as a way to automatically off load photos from my phone and also exchange big data sets with co-workers, when email struggles to handle the large files. Google Drive I use for blogger photos and as a cloud place to store training material and key documents while I was travelling. One Drive has a bit of a checked history (mainly because Microsoft was changing things a lot for a while there), the service looks nice and stable now.

The last two tiers I will probably leave to evaluate till much later down the track. I need to get comfy with the services I know how to use.

                                   

So beginning today I’m building cloud archive on all three Dropbox. Google Drive & OneDrive. I’ll let you know in a month or so which, if any suits by archiving requirements

Where are we going?

For many years the emphasis in digital photography revolve around the work flow. It began as a way to simplify the learning of complex software like photoshop and lightroom on a computer, but softened into a more generic shoot, edit and share. At roughly the same time social media became big and what drew a lot of views was those digital photos being shared. These two themes dominated developments in the photocentric internet world for most of the past decade. Then cloud computing raised its head and after a few train wrecks, and then the voracious gobbling up of promising startups by the social media and bigger computing and/or internet groups. The theme for this years is definitely one place to store all your photos. I suspect all the contenders are aiming for that sweat spot at the intersection of all these themes. Yet from my perspective all of these offerings have at least one shortcoming which disappoints, since most are essentially free perhaps complaining is not being reasonable. However my photos are mine and I want to look after them. I want to do a range of tasks and I want to be confident that the images are only shared when and where I want. I think it is time to leave the work flow, cloud and social media constraints and refocus on tasks that need to be done. These are methods and skills, some equipment/ hardware, some software. Using these processes and tools that can be learned and mastered in the manner of any true artisan. Then again I might be in the minority, I cringe to think most folk are happy to push the shutter button, click on autofix or the make zany filter and flood the world with wasted bandwidth.

Flickr’s Uploadr (Beta) …another photo vacuum cleaner?

Earlier last week I might have been a bit hasty expressing disappointment at the new standalone uploadr (because I could not log in) the next day I couldn’t wait and tried again with success this time. I wasn’t aware of the 1 terabyte free storage (that’s a lot by the way) being offered. However it didn’t take me long to figure out the new desktop app was much the same as google’s autoback, its just a photo vacuum cleaner, sucking up any images on your computer is a number of default directories (including dropbox) and with no opportunity to tag or cull the collection as it disappears into the cloud, The one consolation is the pictures are loaded as private so they won’t flood your photostream but they will flood your camera roll. Perhaps worst it will create new albums to match each folder it finds. It you upload your photos into directories by date (as most software does, you will have a new camera roll item for that day and a new album to duplicate it!

Unlike google’s autobackup the new uploads are more intelligently filtered (the message I saw suggested it was doing a de-duplicating search, which is good but more importantly tags where automatically added to most photos to identify the type of subject. More surprisingly these seemed to be largely correct (I quickly avoid having my whole collection swept up so I have only uploaded a few photos but I was impressed with the tagging). I can only assume that flickr is using some form of AI image recognition. You can then use this tags to filter your collection (and possibly created new specific albums. It is somewhat reminiscent of everypix. At least it didn’t also try to autoawesome my stuff.

I was intrigued by the picture tagging so I decided to give the uploadr a diverse test Ah it did say Beta.

PS I’ve turned the new beta uploadr off,  and will stick with the previous version which allows manual tagging, choosing sharing options, album and group posting and adding comments at the time of upload.

The Biggest Workspace of Them All

In my post about workspace not workflow, I omitted the biggest workspace, the all pervasive, everywhere at once internet, now often just referred to as the cloud. This oversight may be because I am still uncertain what it has to offer, even what it is? Rather than being on uniform and extensive place, it is a mismatch of different services, formats and connections.

So Why even put stuff there? Well the ease of exchange and sharing is wonderful and services like drop box make it very easy, not to forget email which is over 20 years old now.The other reason often suggested is that social media can be a great way to expose your work to others. In fact all I see is a pervasive pressure to go viral and become an overnight celebrity, that drives a lot of appallingly bad content. So much of what is on offer is boringly the same copy-cat, look at me stuff (eg rise of selfies and LOLcats, need I say more). I am starting to firmly believe it is ok to share what you are working on (as in provenance) your thought and methods and some of your works, but it is more important to be honest in following your creativity (ie don’t worry about the crowd).

I have had negative and unresolved issue with scrapping of my content and unauthorised (aka stealing) of my images. So I only want to share publically via services that offer creative commons licences. I am also not sure that social media is as secure as they pretend. I worry about small things like less desirable people I don’t want to share with, just what is actually being stolen and reused as some one else work or worse sold. I’m very conscious of the filter bubble effect that social media sites like google+ and facebook can create.

So I am very unlike to do much more than token photographic works and art publically in the cloud. I am certainly unlikely to put my entire collection of photos in the cloud even for a backup. Lets see if I am forced to eat my words in the next 10 years!

Even More Mistresses

Not content with have a number of photo managers (aka Mistresses) that don’t really get along, I just noticed that I have a growing line of “cloud storage” courtesans vying for my attention, my files, many of which are photos and a bit more bandwidth demand for syncing (slowing start up). Whilst I used to use BOX and Google Drive extensively, I must admit I have moved to dropbox for things photographic, and specifically for syncing photos from my phone. Its really easy and automatic (I have set my android up to upload any photos whenever the phone finds a WiFi link).

Whilst in theory Google Drive is integrated with Google+ photos (& Picasa Web Albums) in practice I’m still a bit lost and haven’t use it for photos in quiet a while. The update of Skydrive to One Drive, seems to be in name mainly and a little bit of cleaning up the interface. Like Skydrive it does have photo friendly features.

I’m no closer to choosing one over the others and will probably keep using which ever is appropriate for my current needs on an ad hoc basis.

CNet’s Sarah Mitroff, has a good summary of the offerings of these four cloud storage services.

Skydrive to OneDrive is it only a name change?

I have been using, and liking the photo storage and sharing of SkyDrive for a long while now. However it has been an On/Off style relationship, DropBox has kind of taken over a lot of the uses I had been using Skydrive for. I was interested to see a little alert email to say SkyDrive will be changing its name To OneDive, so I went to investigate any likely changes. It looks just like a marketing issue to promote the Microsoft’s offerings as “One place for everything in your life” more than anything really new.

Reading between the lines and a few other blog posts I think OneDrive could easily be initially promoted as yet another on-line backup place. They will be offering ways to “earn” extra storage, either through referring friends (like drop box) or using one of their “camera roll backup” apps, which will take all the images from your phone into the OneSky cloud.   These offerings are unlikely to excite early SkyDrive adopters (like me) who already have a massive 25GB of storage, which I understand will not expire. SkyDrive already has some photo organizing features, so I’m interested to see if they can avoid rather than create the on-line mess phenomena.

A Month on and Google+ AutoBackup is a Vacuum

Its a month since I set up AutoBackup (as a trial) on one of my computers (a laptop onto which I load most of my photos, they will get stored permanently somewhere else). Well it is a real vacuum, as in cleaner, not void space. It sucks up everything as soon as it’s loaded, and often before I even seen the photos. Well before I get a chance to cull the duds and keyword or rank the better images. What it is building is an uncurated pile (aka a mess) rather than an organized backup!

So here are my observations after the first month of use.

• It isn’t the bandwidth pirate I expected. It does seem to takes its time and not interfere too much with others on my network when it has a lot of images to load
• It highlights some strange photos, and more importantly skips over some gems
• I’m well over being auto awesomed
• Many HDR sets and multi-image overlapping panorama sets are turned into Motion Gifs. This puzzles me?
• I can not see tools to help me find specific images in the vast collection I am amassing on-line (scrolling through just one month’s uploads is already tedious)
• I’m still uncertain if there are dangers involved with having most of your photos on-line somewhere in the clouds. So far I’m happy that the defaults are private and you have to specifically share an image to let others see it
• Already there are many unintended duplicates
• Sharing outside the Google+ world is difficult (even into blogger, see steps I had to use in image caption below)
• Whilst you can easily download individual images there are no “recovery” tools that I can find
• I’ll probably leave it installed for new uploads, at least for a month or so
• BUT I have no plans to backup my full digital photo collection onto google+

An AutoBackedup photo, edited  including frame and then copied to another album in google+ photo before I could share it here

Not Much Time left to get Your EverPix Photos

For those that where using everpix, the date of it shutdown (15/12/2013) is almost upon us. You should have received at least a couple of emails telling you how to archive and retrieve you photos. However because mine where all indexed to other location (ie my only images on Everpix were thumbnails) I didn’t bother. The process takes a couple of days so if you haven’t done it yet and intend to, TODAY is the DAY!

An Alternative

There was a comment one of my everpix posts, about being able to transfer your photos to Photofeed. So I have taken the opportunity to do that and test out the free version of photofeed at the same time. Photofeed has some useful everpix like features, it has built in duplicate detection, and read multiple resources. It’s sync seems quiet fast (well compared with picturelife) and I got the message that I has more than 1000 photos and needed to upgrade within minutes. I can’t see a lot of organization and ranking tools but it does have albums, and can use embedded metadata. It can store full resolution images (there is a 20MB limit not sure about RAW, there is no help section that I can find at the moment and the FAQs are about signing up) and can, using an app, can automatically backup photo from your phone. So I see it as more a cloud based place to consolidate and store your photos. I’m just using the free 30 day trial, rather the $100/year pro subscription, which gives a three month free bonus.

There is a nice looking android app for your phone, but as it required android version 2.3 or up I couldn’t test it either,

Picture Life in the slow lane

Following the demise of everpix, I decided to take a look at alternatives. There are of course some well established on-line photo sharing sites, including but not limited to instagram, flickr, google+ and photobucket, however the emphasis here is on sharing your photo with others and some may have very unfortunate terms of service. What I was looking for was something to mange “my” photos on-line, sometimes privately sometimes publically and whilst these services mentioned can allow privacy, they are really more focused on the sharing aspects. One service that I have seen frequently mentioned as an everypix alternative is Picturelife. This is a cloud based service to store all your photos and video on-line. It promotes that itself by the slogan “You take the pictures. We’ll keep them safe.”

At the features level it is very similar to everypix, just a little more appleverse oriented, there are auto-uploading apps for mobile devices, syncing from Macs &PCs, duplicate detection (“Keep the best, hide the rest”), intelligent photo organization (one claim I’m not able to substantiate), backing up photos from the major social networks and private emails and photostreams for family and friends. It also have Iphoto and Aperture support and the IOS apps support airplay so you could get your photos displayed on Apple TV. There is also a new IOS app called memories, which works a lot like everpix flashbacks. If you want to store everything in one place (and in the cloud) this will probably appeal to you but the pricing could become expensive with a large collection (eg a 500 GB subscription cost $250 per year, whereas a 500GB USB external backpack will probably cost less that $75). The Web App (actually just a browser view) is nice and simple with album, places and a time line view. but it doesn’t load very fast and you get to see a colour swatch as the photos load. I certainly hope the premium accounts are more responsive. It you have your own Amazon S3 bucket you can use that to backup your photos via picturelife.

At the operational level it is even more remarkably similar to everpix, except when it come to performance. You download a small program (app) that then trawls your computer for nominated folders (eg C:/username/pictures) and Syncs them in background up to your account. I’m not sure if it the fact that I’m trialling a free account but after 2 days I only have 34 photos and one video uploaded (most are the raw version) out of 80 days and approx. 15,000 photos, just a tiny part of the photo collection I now have, but the status window is suggesting its going to take 50 days to sync those! However my free trial account only give me a 5GB limit and those ~15,000 files are closer to 180GB. Now at this trickle slow speed, which will also consume your band width as well, if I had to up load a terra byte of images It could takes years.. I surmise that everpix was much faster because it was only creating a thumbnail/preview on the web. Then I realised picturelife was uploading RAW files (presumable not the matching JPEG). This RAW file support is great if you want you whole photo collection on-line, but RAW files are large and they must be rendered as .jpg for web display anyway. So I’d be just as happy having the jpeg file or a preview on line and the original’s (and RAW files) locally.

So I will keep trying it out picturelife for a little while at least but I’m convinced I would not want to pay a premium to slowly store my photos on-line and I’m perfectly happy using drop box to automatically sync from my cameraphone now while I still maintain my collection myself locally with a external hard drive backup.