
Dear Apple, let's talk about photos - robheaton
http://peternixey.com/post/49928526270/dear-apple-lets-talk-about-photos
======
JangoSteve
I haven't really tried iPhoto personally for photos taken with my phone, since
I have an Android. And my girlfriend has an iPhone, but with a Windows
computer, so she hasn't either. Because of that, the whole iPhoto ecosystem
(and photostream) have never been an option for either of us anyway.

I had gone on the search for a similar service to what he describes, but with
the added requirement that I want to own my cloud copy of my photos and not
give up my photos to some unknown 3rd party (I'd have no problem letting Apple
or Amazon keep a copy of my photos, but other than that, I'd be cautious).

I found the Open Photo Project (<http://theopenphotoproject.org/>), and it
seems pretty cool so far. It's an open source app to store your photos on your
own S3, Dropbox, Box.net, or DreamHost account, and give you cloud backup and
access, and they have an iOS app with an Android version coming soon. And they
just launched Trovebox (<https://trovebox.com>) which is their hosted option
if you don't want to install Open Photo on your own server. Trovebox already
has both an iOS and Android app, and also APIs. I'm just surprised I have seen
either one mentioned here.

~~~
jmathai
Founder of OpenPhoto / Trovebox here.

Correction, our iPhone app has been out for a year and our Android app for 6
months. Go get them [1][2]!

Somehow this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Even Google with as
many integrated services as they have (gmail, picasa, G+) don't look like
they're going to really solve it.

If there's one thing people are opinionated about, it's their photos. Some
refuse to rely on the cloud. Others refuse not to have iPhoto as part of their
workflow. There's about 50 of these...

Our approach has been quite different. We first focused on making sure your
photos are portable. Whoever you choose today to store and keep all your
photos is probably not who you're going to be using in 10 years. I'm surprised
that HN doesn't really zero in on this. Closed systems are just a temporary
solution for a problem that's getting exponentially worse.

Using Trovebox you can decide to change your storage provider at any time. We
move your photos for you. Your web links, iPhone and Android apps continue to
work as if nothing ever changed.

We haven't even scratched at the surface of the problem though. There's
organization, sharing, etc. needs which we need to continuously improve on.

The parent didn't link to our source code so I'll include that here,
<https://github.com/photo>

P.S. We're funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation (big huge shoutout to them)

[1] <http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-android> or source @
<https://github.com/photo/mobile-android>

[2] <http://bit.ly/trovebox-for-iphone> or source @
<https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios>

~~~
microcolonel
I just push my photos up to an SFTP on a home server, which also pushes it to
an encrypted offsite backup.

This has the advantage of working equally well for code(git repositories and
everything being just directories with files), photos, videos, audio
samples/tracks... anything which we're used to representing as files on UNIX-y
systems.

I really don't understand why we need to jettison the boatloads of wonderful
work which has been done to support files on UNIX, in search of a frontend
interface difference for people(yes, many people) who don't understand files.

~~~
jmathai
Not sure I understand completely. But I'm taking a stab...

For something like photos the interface is a very big problem. The UNIX file
system, for example, doesn't help to visually organize tens of thousands of
files (photos). There has to be a layer on top of that.

FYI, OpenPhoto supports a variety of "file systems" including the local file
system or anything which can be mounted.

------
shurcooL
It's ridiculous how un-Apple-like Photo Streams are.

They solve one problem of sharing your photos across all your devices for
VIEWING, but not for organizing/editing/deleting. It just creates copies of
your photos everywhere. It's not a centralized place where you can keep your
"good, sorted, organized, edited" photos with all the bad photos deleted.

Photo Streams actually adds problems. If you want to completely delete a photo
you just took (it turned out bad), you have to delete it in TWO places instead
of one.

Dropbox does a much better job at the latter (assuming you have enough space
for your photos on it; I do).

To solve this problem, you need to create a good "home" for people's photos.
Right now, the Camera Roll remains the only viable home, but it has many
downsides (unable to be accessed or edited from other devices, can't manually
add older photos).

Basically, with Photo Streams, Apple violate the DRY principle [1] and it
creates more problems than it solves.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_repeat_yourself>

~~~
astral303
One of the original reasons I switched to a Mac back in 2008 was iPhoto. The
automatic event splitting by date struck me as brilliant--it was exactly what
I wanted most of the time. Multi-day events were easy to merge.

At the time, Apple also had a great online gallery that made it simple to
share photos. Flickr was (and still is) overly complicated in comparison.
That's been gone for years and is kinda sorta back as shared photo streams.

So your comment about how "un-Apple-like" Photo Streams is so damn true. C'mon
Apple, figure this shit out.

~~~
smackfu
Kind of amazing that they don't do automatic events on the phone. It seems
like an obvious natural thing to group together photos that share a common
location and time.

------
jack_trades
So you want: \- unlimited storage for a large collection of images \-
additional unlimited storage for an acceleratingly large archive of video \-
minimal local caching and, likely, very responsive UI \- to do me the favor of
profit at $5/mo

I can't get past the entitlement attitude that one should be able to archive
unlimited amounts of 1080p 30fps video for $5/mo. 178MB/min. Average youtube
video is 4+minutes. That's >700MB per video.

Even at scale, Amazon s3 is .055/GB, so it'd be over $5 just to store 100GB,
let alone run the SaaS platform and related overhead. Sure, that's an Amazon
retail price for storage, but I don't see how $5/mo. is profitable once
everyone is auto-syncing cat videos and their gangam harlem thrift shop
videos.

~~~
adrr
S3 is overkill for this. If its just storing images you don't need all those
9's for durability/availability that Amazon offers. Could easily do unlimited
for $60 a year. There's cheaper services that do unlimited for less than half
that price like imgur.

~~~
jack_trades
I need to underline that he throws video in like it's nothing.

Sure, just for images without responsibility of 6-8 9's for peoples' treasured
decade of photos, you can approach the price. I believe Imgur also has, even
pro accounts, a 5MB limit on file size and that brings a set of efficiencies
on resources. Fine for pictures, trouble for video.

When 1-10 million people are uploading/downloading 200MB/min for video @ maybe
1MB/sec?, storage stops being the most painful problem.

This would be something of a netflix scale problem, but without some set of
minimal control about formats, dynamic content throttling, etc.

~~~
petenixey
I really don't throw in video like it's nothing. What I intended to highlight
was that for 99% of users, the perception of what they get should be unlimited
even if there are fair-use policies.

I don't expect that a $5/user/month model is going to support Chase Jarvis'
needs. However I do imagine that at $5/user/month 90% of users will actually
be very profitable for Apple as they'll use way less than the available
amount.

The fair-use limits can therefore be relatively high as they're subsidised by
the majority of people who don't use that much.

My point about wanting "unlimited video" was not that I expected to store my
entire film collection on there - only that as a 90-95 percentile user I want
to be able to do the stuff I do every day without worrying about low limits. I
don't mind if there's fair-use limit I just want to be sure that I can do a
"fair" amount before hitting it.

All of this is also putting to one side the fact that this is a 20 year
investment for Apple. Data costs don't seem to fall inline with Moore's law
but they still fall crazy fast. It was only 10 years ago we didn't have S3.
Even now if the RAW files were stored on an Amazon Glacier equivalent
($0.01/Gb/month) while screen-quality versions were stored in a hot cache you
could provide high dataplans with much lower costs than putting things in tier
1 S3.

------
grandalf
This is the single biggest technology related point of pain in my life, as
well as the lives of many people I know.

Snapjoy looked like it was on track to fix the problem, then Dropbox acquired
it and appears to be doing something...

But it really shocks me to see Apple fail to address these core problems in
update after update.

The worst part is that if you have a photo in the photo stream and try to
import photos from the phone into iPhoto, it warns that the photo has already
been copied. Then if you delete it from the phone it's still not in iPhoto,
and photos in the photo stream get deleted after a month or two. I estimate
that I've lost a few hundred photos due to this boneheaded design.

Picasa comes close but is useless when it comes to intelligently syncing a
canonical "cloud" copy of each photo to a variety of devices linked to the
account.

~~~
GrantS
It sounds like you (and possibly the author of the article) turned off the
iPhoto option to automatically import photo stream images to your library.
See: <http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2712>

Other than videos not being included (yes, that's annoying), it does exactly
what I need. Am I missing some other aspect?

~~~
ricardobeat
Doesn't it require that you plug in the iPhone/iPad via USB cable?

~~~
GrantS
Nope. All photos (and screenshots) are added to iPhoto automatically as long
as iPhoto is actually running, even if the iPhone is on wifi in a different
country, meaning its not just a local sync. Only videos require physical
cable.

------
orofino
Add a family to this and it only compounds. My wife takes pictures with her
phone, I take pictures with mine, we've got a Sony NEX that I took 4,500
pictures with last year (we traveled a lot), not to mention the years of
photos from before...

And unlike a "normal" person, I want to review and edit this stuff in
lightroom. Perhaps dropbox is the solution, but I've probably got something
like 120GB of photos... and only 132GB of space there. Now what... I have to
pay still more to dropbox to get their 200GB plan.

I'll be buying a NAS in a couple weeks. This should be awesome, but wait, I
want the wide integration that dropbox provides. Is the solution to save
everything to dropbox and move it out on a regular basis onto the NAS?

In short, I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for
flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby. (And worse, based
on this thread, no one seems to have solved it)

~~~
PavlovsCat
Learn to delete. Not right away, but go through old stuff at least, and be a
snob. Your mileage may vary, but the delete button is my number one
photography tool. I now actually have less photos than I had after, say, 3
years; simply because my standards of what I consider a keepers rise. I still
totally suck at photography, but I have become very good at deleting, even if
I say so myself, so people sometimes think I'm quite decent ^^ Maybe try it
out with moving them at first, to get a feel for it.

~~~
Torrents
Oh man...that's hard to do though. Deleting photos isn't for the faint of
heart.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I know.. I never take it lightly. But I also never regretted it either,
probably because I really do spend some time on making that decision, and know
I would do it again. Excuse the bragging, but by now I can even delete songs!
Super crappy "songs", mind you; but it was near impossible for me at first.
It's liberating however, and with photos just plain necessary IMHO.

You are not actually killing that person, or destroying that object; you are
just deciding which one(s) of the photos of that moment or mood capture it
best, and delete the ones which are just slightly worse variations of those.

It takes time though, that is a real cost. Though I think that time is made up
for down the road, when you don't have to wade past the photos you deleted, or
wait for them to upload/download/backup, etc... even a little bit of self-
discipline adds up to quite a bit over a lifetime of digital photography. I
think of it as removing weed so the flowers are more enjoyable, and have a
greater probability of actually being seen (photographs are kinda useless when
they are not seen other than by the bulge they create in the pagination;
flickr is like a graveyard where good photos go to get overlooked in that
way).

~~~
demallien
I've noticed that I never go back to looking at old photos. If I've been off
at a special event - holidays, a conference a wedding etc, I take any photos /
video that I took, and edit it into a short film using iMovie. Because the
film has been curated and worked, it is generally of higher quality than the
raw shots, and as a result I have noticed that I tend watch the resulting
films far (two orders of magnitude?) more often than the raw photos.

I've been doing this for a about 5-6 years now, so about 3 years ago I started
deleting the raw shots a few months after having finished the film. To date I
have not once regretted deleting a photo.

------
steven2012
I love the iPhone camera. I have largely stopped using my other cameras
because the iPhone camera is just so convenient.

However, the iPhone Photo App is extremely terrible. Everything exists in the
Camera Roll, and you can't physically move them from there, so you have to
search through the entire Camera Roll every time. I have 4000 photos and
videos, and trying to find anything is impossible, to the point where I have
given up. They have Albums, but those are merely pointers, so it doesn't
really help organize the Camera Roll itself. Plus, you can't do simple things
like see when the photo was taken, or search only for videos. You should be
able to pull up a calendar, and see the number of photos on a per day, per
month, or per year basis. It seems to be another example of an app that the
developers themselves don't use extensively, otherwise they would fix these
simple issues.

~~~
cmsj
I don't think that's true, you can create more albums on the device and move
photos to those albums?

~~~
lysol
You can, but they stay in the central photo roll.

~~~
nicwolff
They stay in the "Photo Library", not the "Camera Roll", which is meant to
hold just the photos you've taken since your last sync to iPhoto.

------
fumar
Post like these, about Apple's ecosystem, are like a jab in the gut. I know, I
know, that I should have not invested time and resources into a closed loop,
but it stinks that what I thought was the correct thing to do, is wrong. I
have slowly transitioned to using other services. I use Android, and have a
Surface RT. I figured that if I own devices from separate ecosystems, it will
make me find a better solution for my needs.

For example, using Google + to store all my photos. It keeps them organized
and in the cloud. If I so happen to need them, I can download them all or
individually. I started using Skydrive for documents, and its been great so
far.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Because things are better elsewhere? Photos are in my top three reasons for
owning a smartphone, so if you have a solution, my aperture is open wide!

~~~
chokolad
Well, Windows Phone uploads photos to skydrive and you can sync skydrive onto
your desktop/tablet,etc.

~~~
TheAnimus
It syncs nicely out of the box, in fact using a WiFi sync'ing SD card,
SkyDrive now even supports my Pentax Proprietary RAW format images. Pretty
damned cool, take a photo and when camera is next in WiFi, it appears on my
phone, tablet, laptop, desktop.....

------
simonbarker87
I could not agree more, the whole iPhone, iPhoto (mac), photo stream situation
actually confuses the hell out of me. We're generally smart people on HN and
if we don't get, try explaining it to parents and it's a whole world of
confusion - normally ending with "You suggested we buy Apple because it was
simple to use". My only reply at the moment is "Yeah, I know ... it's
complicated".

To anyone making closed ecosystem comments, it's even harder to explain how to
do any of this photo management to a parent (the dominant market with
disposable income at the moment) with Android and Dropbox.

There really is no way back from "So wait, your telling me Google is IN my
phone and so people can search my photos?"

------
subpixel
Amen. I'm right in the middle of figuring out how to set my mother up with an
iPad - as her only computer. No mac, no iTunes sync.

The only problem? She's got an iPhoto library almost as large as the iPad
drive, and there's currently no way to store her iPhoto library remotely.

I'm looking at Space Monkey - but it's not clear yet just how it works or if
it will be a truly seamless experience. (People like my parents can't be
bothered to manually move photos around - it just needs to work.)

NB: In my research, I've noticed that 99% of iPad users think iCloud backs up
all their photos on all devices, which of course it does not.

~~~
subpixel
Everpix is mentioned in another comment. I tried Everpix last year, and it
looks like since then they've made it possible to basically store photos in
the cloud (without keeping a local copy). Could be an option...

~~~
tombot
Don't want to keep banging on about it, but yeah Everpix is the solution.
Install it on the desktop and Sync the iPhoto library. Install the Everpix app
on the iPad, £3 a month, job done.

~~~
brown9-2
From their website, I see no mention of how much quota or space you get to
store photos with them. Am I correct to assume that you have infinite space?

~~~
tombot
Yes

------
buro9
This isn't even an Apple specific use-case.

There's real opportunity for Dropbox (if they stopped syncing everything
everywhere), or Flickr (if they suddenly made really great native clients) to
sew this up.

Google probably hasn't a chance in hell given the neglect that they're showing
to Picasa.

~~~
mtgx
Isn't Google+ pretty good for photos? You can even auto-sync photos to it. In
fact it was one of the very first to do it, long before Dropbox and iCloud.

~~~
bjhoops1
Google+'s photo sharing/storing system is great. Unfortunately, right now you
have to use a third-party app if you want your G+ Instant Upload album to
automatically sync to a Google Drive folder. I'm surprised Google hasn't added
this feature yet. Perhaps they are intentionally refraining in order to try to
induce people to share on G+?

------
kalleboo
I'm really praying for them to do something about this. I don't know anyone
who's happy with the current situation. We're all lost and in heavy "photo
debt".

~~~
0x0
Absolutely. I gave both iPhoto and Aperture a spin, but they're really really
horrible when it comes to managing copies and eating drive space.

In the end I settled for using the OS X "Image Capture" to transfer .jpegs and
.mp4s into my own directory structure, so I can rsync it to my linux backup
server or copy them to an USB drive and _see the images are there_, instead of
some magic "photo.library single-file-folder-hidden-contents".

And then I settled for Picasa to browse them. I freed up around 20% of my hard
drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews.

Unfortunately Picasa still wants to cache thumbnails and it takes up quite
some space, but I'm still coming out ahead.

Photo streams are a brilliant idea, but horribly executed. The article hits
the nail straight on the head.

~~~
Terretta
> _I freed up around 20% of my hard drive just from losing the iPhoto/Aperture
> thumbnails and 1024x1024 previews._

Presumably you know you can turn both of those off and not use any space for
them at all, just gen on the fly from the JPEGs own built in preview.

~~~
0x0
I looked around really hard for this option but failed to find it. Where is
it?

~~~
Terretta
I'm on the road, can't verify where it is, but off top of my head, right click
the project, disable generate previews. May also be in File menu when a
project is selected. Be sure to turn off auto generate previews on import.
There are tons of blogs about this, Google for screenshots.

------
tombot
I also tried using the Dropbox backup approach but it's a massive waste of
time syncing endless photos to multiple devices. I don't actually want the
files on all my devices, I just want them stored somewhere I can access them
later.

So I've started using <https://www.everpix.com/> backup from multiple sources
Facebook, Flickr, iPhoto, Insagram etc, finds de-duplicates and I don't have
to ever worry about running out of storage.

~~~
brown9-2
It's a bit annoying since you have to opt each device out, but you can use the
Selective Sync feature in Dropbox to _not_ sync your photos folder to each
device that you have Dropbox installed on.

~~~
tombot
Yup, but I'm right in thinking that also prevents you from adding new photos
on that device?

Current setup is to use the Dropbox Camera Sync with Everpix, then just cull
the start of the folder when it gets over 5GBs / every few months.

------
wklauss
If you find Photostream confusing you don't need to use it. Simple as that.
It's not even activated by default, you have to turn it on the first time you
try to access it.

If you don't activate it, you phone keeps working the way it used to: you sync
to your computer and thats that. There are third party apps that will let you
upload to Dropbox and google+ if you prefer those as repository.

Now, the thing is that you want the convenience to have PhotoStream without
worrying about space constraints. Ever.

iPhoto automatically creates a folder with all last month's Photostream
pictures and I think thats default behavior, unless you purposely turn it off.
To me, thats the most "smart" sync can get, unless you want Apple to store
every photo you ever took, forever, in their servers. Having around 400
million iOS users worldwide this seems to me a little unrealistic at the
moment. Maybe someday.

But for me the key here is just being able to delete your own content. You
don't expect the memory card in your camera to last forever, you periodically
format it. You don't expect your download folder to hold everything you
download forever. Every now and then you go in and clean around. Your phone
(ioS, Android or whatever) is no different. Go into that Camera Roll and start
cleaning around.

Unless you turn it off the option all the photos are already in iPhoto,
ordered by month (something like "Sept XXX Photostream"). If you turned it
off, just impoert all the photos before deleting to make sure you don't end up
loosing any pics.

I agree on the video, though. Photostream needs to start syncing videos as
well.

~~~
jmreid
I agree with you. I'm a little confused about the "outrage" about Photostream.

It's basically just a wireless USB cable that automatically imports into
iPhoto based on the month. It's actually been 100% perfect for me. When I plug
my phone in using USB to transfer the videos over, it tells me that it already
has all the pictures, then it imports the videos, then offers to remove the
already synced photos and videos from my phone.

Once everything is in iPhoto, I have been curating an album from a vacation
then sharing it with myself using Shared Photostreams. That way I have the
trimmed down and edited album available on my phone and iPad.

Maybe people are asking it to do something it was never designed to do?

------
riotingpscifis
1) Pick a closed ecosystem

2) Have a non-standard use case

3) Beg Ecosystem owners to change to meet your needs

~~~
petenixey
Or, for another perspective:

1\. Pick the best (free) iOS management tool for the job at the time

2\. Invest eight years of curation and 70Gb of photos in it

3\. Use the setup with more than one device and the same way that 20M+ other
users use it

4\. Expect that I shouldn't have to be a contortionist to continue to do so

~~~
josteink
> 1\. Pick ... iOS ... for the job at the time

And voila, you have found yourself a closed system which wont let you treat
your data as yours, just as pointed out in the comment you replied to.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out that Apple has a closed solution
here, and that the solution is seriously lacking.

~~~
brown9-2
What are the complaints in the original article about not being able to treat
your data as your own?

The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing
the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how
whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than
improve the situation.

~~~
pessimizer
All of them, I think. If any vendor were allowed to drop photo management
software (as a first class citizen) on Apple machines, software that would
even be allowed to manipulate their current cloud library through an open API
- would anybody be asking Apple for anything?

------
jdechko
For me, photo storage had become so incredibly complex that I ditched the
entire effort and piece-mealed my own.

Here's my workflow:

1) Take photo from my iPhone

2) CameraSync.app automatically uploads the pictures & videos to Dropbox when
I get home (Geofencing & wait for wifi)

3) Computer Automation automatically sorts photos into Dropbox/Photos/YYYY/MM
folders (Hazel, DropIt, etc). Videos go into external folder (Outside of
dropbox)

4) Manual verification of photo upload & delete from camera roll
(unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow automatic deletion of photos)

No huge photostream (only a few small shared photostreams). Not tied to a
single platform (Mac/PC/iOS/Android/WinPhone/etc). No slow apps (iPhoto). No
databases to corrupt, just folders of pictures. Easy access through the
Dropbox app. Easy backup & restoration (Dropbox + CrashPlan).

This system can easily expand to accommodate other cameras too.

------
cdjk
I've noticed this about iPhoto too. I was a mac user, but recently switched to
linux on my laptop when I realized iPhoto/Aperture were the only things
keeping me on OS X, and I didn't really like how they worked.

Does anyone have suggestions for a linux photo manager? I'd like an easy way
to view/rate/tag/delete pictures, a sane file system storage structure (i.e.
not like iPhoto), and a way to make "albums" out of a bunch of pictures that
aren't in the same directory. I'm not too concerned about sharing/etc, as
there are plenty of other web-based tools for that.

Open source would be nice (and maybe I should write this...), but I'm happy to
pay for something if it will do what I want.

~~~
npsimons
I'll throw in a recommendation for gPhoto; while old and pretty bare bones, it
does sane storage structure (customizable, actually), not some silly database.
The album export will create static albums you can then upload by hand (or
just have them written out to an SSH mount on your web server).

------
scosman
For anyone having this problem, check out MyShoebox. It's exactly what Peter
is suggesting, plus it works on Android and Windows as well.

1) Full collection in the cloud with access or upload from any device 2)
Unlimited backup... for free! Okay, slight caveat, the free plan is downsized,
but for $5 a month it keeps original resolution. 3) A merged camera roll
across all devices (including old devices) 4) API coming soon 5) Lots of
clever auto-sorting. We search and sort on about 25 filters, and use that data
to automatically find interesting sets to surface on the explore page

<http://shoeboxapp.com>

~~~
sib
Unfortunately MyShoebox - even the paid, "Pro" tier - limits photos to 20MB
per image. It also only supports JPEG and PNG formats, not RAW. Both of these
constraints prevent usage by photographers with modern DSLRs.

~~~
iuliab
I don't think they're going after the photographer market. It's more for
regular people who take photos with their iPhone, etc. A ton of people don't
shoot RAW.

------
spiek
iPhoto is the worst, just a straight up terrible photo management program.
Adobe Lightroom is not that expensive and is far and away better - mainly for
the fact that it actually allows you to manage your photo files, instead of
hiding them god knows where. Also, it doesn't cache your entire collection of
photos so I can actually open and use Lightroom with 14k+ photos. iPhoto would
shit the bed and crash my computer if I tried to do that.

~~~
furyg3
But you still can't do what he wants to do, which is pretty straightforward:

1\. Photos he takes are added to a library automatically (for internet
connected devices).

2\. That library exists in the cloud.

3\. He can access that library from all of his devices.

I also have this problem, and I'd add a 4th point: Please let me back up the
cloud based library.

You can't do this with lightroom, either.

~~~
luser001
You can get close. Check out Photosmith (<http://www.photosmithapp.com/>).

Btw, Lightroom has a scripting interface using which I'm pretty sure you can
roll what this guy wants.

------
threeseed
Not really sure what he means.

Apple isn't using smaller and smaller drives for the MacBook Air. The current
release goes up to 512GB which is the max so far. And 10 years worth of high
res photos and movies is always going to take up space. Why doesn't he just
buy an external hard drive like a normal person or use Dropbox/S3 etc ?

~~~
0x0
Last time I tried aperture/iphoto, it created ~30gb of worthless thumbnails
and previews out of a ~20gb photo library. That hurts on a 256GB macbook air
(largest size available about a year ago). Plus, the Apple photo apps seem to
go to great lengths to hide where photos are physically stored, as if you're
not supposed to think about .jpeg files or volumes.

~~~
threeseed
Thumbnails get generated because most cameras are outputting multi-GB JPEG/RAW
which take too long generate in real time on low end Macs whilst scrolling the
thumbnail view.

And Apple apps don't go to great lengths to hide photos. They are stored in
your Pictures folder in a package e.g. Aperture Library. Just right click and
your photos are there. Packages are great for inexperienced users since it is
easier to backup and less opportunities to mess up the metadata.

~~~
0x0
I thought most camera JPEGs contained a thumbnail in the EXIF. And there's
absolutely no reason to store 1024x1024 "preview" versions either, or whatever
it is it is doing to to take up so many gigabytes. Last time I looked at
iPhoto, there were no obvious ways to move images around volumes (in fact,
there were no obvious ways to even have folders within folders) (actually - i
don't think it even supports folders; the "albums" it generated seemed to be
only stored in some opaque hidden meta-database? Talk about lock-in!)

~~~
threeseed
It is up to individual cameras to support thumbnails and the resolution either
way is postage stamped. The large 1024x1024 previews are for the large
thumbnail view of your photos/albums (try it in iPhoto and you will see).

And the metadata is stored inside the iPhoto/Aperture library package. For
Aperture at least it is an open standard XML file so there is no 'lock in'
what so ever.

~~~
0x0
Ah yes, I'll just tell my mom to write an XML-parsing script to move the files
around in case she ever changes her setup. ;)

And even Finder quicklook seem to render the full .jpegs just fine and fast
enough, so wasting so much disk space on a useless preview/thumbnail feature
(to me) is a dealbreaker. I'd even be willing to accept missing or postage
stamped thumbnails, rather than having to uninstall applications and remove
music to make room for my photos.

~~~
Terretta
Thankfully, your deal beaker is accounted for, just turn off thumbnail and
preview generation, done.

------
caiusdurling
Hear Hear. Currently I just don't bother with curating pictures I've shot,
aside from tweeting or facebooking them at the point I take them.

------
Marazan
In this thread we learn that Apple is really bad at sync. Again.

The problem is that Apple seemingly cannot escape from the users-
owns-1-computer-which-is-the-master-to-1-iPod setup from eons past.

~~~
Terretta
Apple is not bad at sync. I have run nearly 100k photos through photostreams
without a single glitch. I have thousands of photos in shared photostreams
(dynamic albums) shared to a dozen family members without a single glitch. Set
and forget, just works.

What I learned for this thread is a few people have obviously gathered that
all this works great, most have not. So Apple needs a good best practices
guide to cover the use cases between casual and pro.

------
euroclydon
And iTunes... My wife spent hours last night trying to clear PodCasts off her
iPhone. There are setting for how many episodes to keep in: iTunes, iPhone
Settings, the individual PodCast in iTunes, and on the individual PodCast in
the iPhone. How these settings play together, well, who the heck knows!

------
eddieroger
> MacBook Air so that after 10 years of taking high-res photos and videos I
> couldn’t actually fit them on your my desktop hard drive

The MacBook Air isn't a desktop, and the iPad isn't a remote control for
iPhoto. Besides, wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I
doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an
external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site
backup. Also, Photo Streams aren't the only way to get things in to iPhoto, if
that's not your flavor. Image Capture will pull the full files off the camera
and iPhoto can import anything it understands from anywhere (like,
~/Pictures/ImageCaptureDump). A small change in workflow would solve this
guy's problems.

~~~
smackfu
>The MacBook Air isn't a desktop

True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on
it.

~~~
acheron
The HN bubble cracks me up sometimes.

Yes, most people still have a desktop.

~~~
smackfu
Really? I think the HN bubble would lead to thinking _more_ people have
desktops than laptops. Many casual computer users don't even have desks to put
that desktop on, they just use a laptop on the couch, when they run into
something they can't do on their phone or tablet.

~~~
pessimizer
Agreed. Since the days of the $400 laptop started, most non-techies I meet
don't have working desktops anymore. Almost all techies I know have one or
more.

------
nos4A2
Doesn't the dropbox instant upload already do this (one album\store that all
devices have master access to)? I am not sure if it works on iDevices

~~~
lucian1900
It doesn't really work because of iOS's stupid ban on background processes.
You have to start Dropbox and keep it open for it to sync photos ...

~~~
threeseed
Dropbox WILL upload in the background for IIRC 10 mins as well as when you
move around.

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/500/en>

~~~
VexXtreme
It's sad that companies have to come up with these kinds of hacks just to get
around stupid limitations imposed by Apple.

I really regret buying an iPhone last year. I had been avoiding them for the
longest time but at some point I needed a new phone and gave in because
everyone keep touting how awesome and convenient it is. Well, maybe for an
average layman but not for a power user.

My friend bought an Android for half the price of an iPhone and his phone
feels like a spaceship compared to this fancy looking but ultimately extremely
limited device. Apple my ass.

------
atishay811
Adobe Revel does all this for $5.99 per month. They have a free version for 50
photos a month. it syncs low-res version on iPhone for those out of sync
cases.. see <http://www.adoberevel.com/>

------
dkhenry
Funny, Google+ and my android phone do everything he just mentioned. Why not
just switch ?

~~~
threeseed
Google+ and your Android phone can manage 70GB of photos and ensure that they
properly synced to multiple devices including a Mac ?

~~~
dkhenry
Yes, I don't have 70GB yet, but my Google Drive account currently has 100GB of
allocated space in it. I can get up to 1TB If I want. I can access all of them
from the gallery app on my phone ,and a web page on my desktop. I can print
them via any number of services. Also if I use ChromeOS I have essentially
filesystem native access to them.

~~~
gallamine
With this setup, however, do you end up with local backups of the files?
Whatever picture solution I choose, it's important that I have all the files
local (because I still consider it a distinct possibility that Google will
cancel my account someday ... accident or not).

~~~
dkhenry
No you don't which I count as a feature, but I understand the opposite side. I
can export my photos locally, but already my photo collection is larger then
the storage space on my phone, tablet or Chromebook so a syncing solution
wouldn't help on those platforms.

------
mikeocool
I switched over to picturelife.com for photo storage a few months ago, and
it's the first photo management service I've been happy with in years.

It'll store your photos in your own S3 bucket if you want, and it'll
automatically pull in photos from iPhoto and any other photos on your
computer, as well as most popular services you might have photos on, like
Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Also has nice iPhone and iPhoto apps, that
will auto-upload photos from the device, and allow your browse and manage your
library without requiring you to sync your entire library to your device [I
believe].

------
nchuhoai
I just wanted to join the choir. I think its pretty clear that photo
management has not been solved yet, which is quite surprising given the
cultural importance of memories via photos/videos.

I actually think the same discussion arised 265 days ago:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4388242>

My story: I used to keep everything in iPhoto since it is quite intuitive and
allowed me to manage my photos (60 Gig, videos take a ton of space). However,
since there are more and more devices, I have been looking for a more future-
proof solution. It didn't help that the export opportunities (metadata-wise)
diminish with every version of iPhoto.

So right now, I have returned to folder-hirachy where the metadata is saved in
the open iptc standard. Lightroom makes it really easy to keep your assets as
future-proof as possible. Which is one of my biggest pet-peeves with most of
the mentioned providers/solutions. They just don't have sufficient export
options, and we ought to realize that any of them could die any day. Or video
support is lacking which I cannot understand in the 21st century.

What I'm now looking for is a solution that allows me to backup my folder
structure (I'm heavily leaning towards AWS Glacier), as well as allowing me to
access them from a variety of devices. Like even a simple web-inferface would
suffice. If someone could help me with my single biggest technical problem,
I'd be forever in your debt.

------
Matsta
I guess this a little bit of a hacky, complicated way to do it, but I think it
might solve part of the problem.

Setup a cheap VPS/Dedicated server to host all your images. A good example is
BuyVM Storage VPS ($7/month for 250gb) or Kimsufi (10€ /Atom dedicated with
500gb HD).

From what I see, people don't want to sync their stuff so much as it's keeping
a copy on their computer, but they want a on the fly solution to edit, modify
pictures etc.

1\. Setup OwnCloud. Unless someone can think of a better solution, it's
probably the easiest and there's already a iOS/Android app, so you sync all
your pictures and what not.

2\. Setup Samba/AFP. This is pretty easy, it's a bit harder to setup Bonjour
for Mac people, but it's not really necessary.

3\. (Optional) Setup a VPN, OpenVPN AS comes to mind as its simple as typing
apt-get openvpnas (Debian guy here).

Now you would have your own private cloud for under $15/month. Of course if
your outside Europe/USA like me the upload speeds are gonna be pretty crap and
probably not good enough for Lightroom editing and whatnot, but if you are I
reckon the speeds would be fine. I have both a BuyVM VPS and Kimsufi
dedicated, and I can easily hit over 10mb/s download/upload on both instances.

~~~
dpcx
Very complicated. That's why the OP went with an Apple solution, that he
expected to "Just Work". Sadly, in this case, it doesn't.

------
robomartin
I am going to go a little further and suggest that Apple's entire iCloud +
iTunes + backup + synchronization strategy/system/product/code is a disaster.

Why? Simple: You cannot trust it. You need to be able to trust such software.
I'm sorry, but you just can't in this case.

I won't go into all of the details, links and examples here. Do a little
searching and it should not be too hard to find hordes of people who have lost
calendars, contacts, notes, photos and other valuable data thanks to Apple's
wonderful software.

I have personally experienced loosing all of my contacts, appointments,
calendar items and notes. Of course, being that this ain't my first rodeo I
had backups of the backups. I always go into data storage situations with zero
trust for what is being offered. It took some work to get the data back but I
recovered.

That is not the point. The first three rules of any piece of software that
users entrust with their data are:

    
    
      1- Thou shalt not loose user data
      2- Thou shalt not loose user data
      3- Thou shalt not loose user data
    

Notice that cool hippie user interfaces are never mentioned there. My data
(and your data) is far more valuable than their cool icons and "beautiful"
design. Far, far more valuable.

Go ahead, Google it. The stories are horrific. From people loosing contacts to
students loosing semesters worth of notes. Auto-magically.

I even went to my local Apple store to consult with a "Genius" about this. The
guy was clueless. And, in fact, right in front of my eyes, he proceeded to
accidentally delete all of my calendar entries --something that should be
darn-near impossible to do. Again, I had my backup at home so I didn't blow a
fuse. But, please.

I explained that it was not reasonable to blow away someone's data if their
email service provider changed. If you go from Google to Yahoo all the shit
that was being synchronized with Google goes poof. Really? Why? I would love
to hear from someone at Apple on this. Why it is even remotely reasonable to
blow away all of my contacts, notes and calendar information?

If you close your email account and you are no-longer able to log-on it seems
iOS will attempt to synchronize, fail and then blow away your data. My wife
has had cases of constantly disappearing notes and appointments due to failed
synchronization sessions.

The greater point is that you should not have to be a programmer or IT worker
to have your personal data be safe on iOS. She is not a technical person and
without my help she would have descended into data loss hell. Grandpa and
Grandma have no hope.

Anyhow, now iCloud and all forms of automated synchronization are turned off
on all of our devices. Manual backup is still the only way you can be sure
your data will not be lost.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Syncing all devices is fundamentally _wrong_ and broken. Apple won't get it
right until they drop the concept.

Try controlling what music from your vast library is currently on your tiny
iphone. It's a god damned nightmare. Apple wants to "sync" which is just the
wrong paradigm.

My phone is not synced with my itunes library. It's just contains a very small
subset of it. If I were to draw a Venn diagram of "all the things" it would
contain my iphone5, iphone4, ipad3, macbook, other icloud data, plus data on
Apple's servers about what apps and TV shows I own but currently do not exist
on any device in my possession. Each circle in the diagram has varying degrees
of overlap with all the other circles. Not a single one is fully contained in
any other. To proclaim that all of these devices are "fully synced" is just
plain wrong.

~~~
Inufu
This is where Google's Play Music works much better - your music is in the
cloud by default, but you can "pin" specific albums to have them stored on the
device.

If you play some song that's not on the device, it will be streamed and then
cached for some time till space runs out.

~~~
th3james
This is how iCloud works already, if all your music was bought from iTunes or
if you're using iTunes match

------
hippee-lee
I recently went through this as well. My wife and I shared iPhoto libraries
for ~10 years and then they got to big.

So I started splitting them into multiple libraries. Then the libraries (with
dslr video) filled up the hard drive and my wife had trouble finding pictures
she knew were there (but not in the current library ) After this a a couple of
other things I settle on out current strategy:

All old and new iPhoto libraries on an external HD connected to the home
network. Aperture - I'm still learning how to use this so I can show my wife
but it lets multiple people access multiple iPhoto libraries on multiple
computers. The hard drive is wet her by the Crashplan daemon and everything
gets backed up.

As for phones and tablets, I'm pessimistic when it comes to photo stream: I
see it as nice but ephemeral and regularly import the device images into the
libraries. We will see how it goes as I learn more about Aperture.

~~~
gallamine
I found network access to an iPhoto library to be rather slow. Can you
describe your setup? Is everything wired or wireless?

------
rgbrgb
I think this is a much bigger problem than photos -- there's massive
fragmentation in personal data storage. The thing is we all have online
storage to put the photos in and there are companies that will give us more
for a fee on the scale you're talking about (GDrive, Box, Dropbox). It's just
tricky and a lot of overhead for developers to connect that storage to their
apps.

We're working on this problem right now at <http://stashkit.co/>. We're trying
to solve it by building a drop in cloud file browser where saving and loading
file is just 2 lines of code and users can see all of their data in one place.

------
ratsbane
I have over 20k photos in my iPhoto library. The problems he describes here
are real. For me, it's more of a problem of retrieval. I want to search on
more attributes than just date, location, face, and a flat tag structure.

Examples: show me... \- all of the photos of people from my uncle Harold's
side of the family (cousins, etc.) \- all of the photos containing the blue
car I used to own. \- all of the photos containing both person1 and person 2.

This would require a significant expansion both in the complexity of metadata
as well as automated tagging. I wish Apple would make it happen.

------
smallegan
And don't even think about going down the path of multiple users sharing an
iPhoto Library across multiple devices, because you know...I want/need a
separate photo library than my wife.

------
ctingom
The solution I found for my photo workflow is that I've installed AeroFS on my
computers and I store my latest photos from the last several months in that
folder. It syncs across all of my computers, that way my wife and I can use
Picasa or Lightroom and the photos load fast since they are on our local
drives.

Since we store folders in a /year/month/ file structure we can easily move
those to an external hard drive.

The whole thing backs up to CrashPlan. My entire collection is over 1.5 TB of
photos.

------
avenueb
I took one look at how iPhoto stores the pictures years ago and said "no way"
(same with storing my music in iTunes). My SMB network share has been working
quite well for me, connect all my Windows and Mac computers and my Android
phone and tablets to my share.. backed up to another USB drive. Has been
working well for over a decade for me. iTunes and iPhoto are primary reasons I
don't do Apple products.

~~~
zerohm
Yeah, I had the same heartburn with iphoto years ago. I was still in the
mindset of wanting to do file management myself. Now I'm buying in to the
principle of letting the app manage the files in a DB. Or just generally
taking file management away from user, but no one has really cracked the nut
of how to that across multiple services and multiple devices.

~~~
slantyyz
You really do have to get over that psychological block about managing files
to enjoy using iPhoto and Aperture.

Personally, I don't mind it, because it's one less thing to think about. I
would prefer to buy a bigger drive than to worry about the placement of my
photo files beyond the iPhoto/Aperture library package.

On the other hand, I know people with that file management mentality that
hate, hate, hate iPhoto and Aperture's way of doing things.

------
meagflops
Iam a huge fan of apple, i got ipads, iphones, apple tvs, apple express, but i
was only one time, disapointed for this lovely fruit.

In winter 2012 i go back from thailand with my ipad full of one month of
photos and videos taken in those beautifull beaches. I lost all of it. My 16gb
ipad took an update and erased everything. Only recovered the last backup
before my one month trip, and some loaded in facebook. Sight!

------
natex
Smugmug.com is what you are looking for.

For $5 per month,($60 per year for a Power account), you get unlimited storage
for photos and video. With third party apps -- SmugFolio on Android. I'm sure
there is a similar if not better app for iOS -- you can manage your web-based
portfolio using your phone, automatically upload photos to your account, and
rate them. You also get access to great printing and other services.

Problem solved.

------
jrkelly
Snapjoy seemed to be taking the right approach to dealing with this issue.
Dropbox bought them, so maybe this will end up a solved problem - though the
last thing I want is to be able to 'sync' photos out of existence which is why
Dropbox itself is a bad solution to photo storage. Agree that right now it's
surprisingly hard to keep all your photos in one place.

------
Aardwolf
Anything called "synching" makes me cringe.

Synching to me means that there's a 50% chance it'll add the data, or delete
it. And I've seen "synching" things delete things.

The only way your data can survive decades, is in a file system, with a backup
disk, moving from machine to machine as you upgrade. Imho at least.

------
fjpoblam
Thank you! Hear, hear! And well put. Exactly. We've struggled with the same
issues, not to mention the confusion added by iTunes sync. (My bad: should've
kept iTunes' little sneaky fingers out of it.) Lots of duplicates, and over
the years, quite a few MIAs.

------
tigroferoce
And I would also add... please give us the possibility to write plugins for
iPhoto officially and give us some API for iCloud.

We love Apple products and we love the "just work" philosophy, but you should
allow people to get out from the walled garden when they feel to.

------
slacka
I have a high DPI monitor and need to zoom the text to 150% to make it
readable. But on that website the text gets zoomed into the right margin in
Chrome and off the screen in FF. Works fine on my iPhone. Something wrong with
the CSS?

------
frogpelt
I've stopped messing with iPhoto for the most part.

I now use the Image Capture utility that still comes on every Mac to transfer
my pictures to the computer. That way I know where they are and I can import
them to iPhoto myself if I feel the need.

~~~
asynchronous13
Look into a referenced library for iPhoto. You can organize your photos on
your hard drive as you see fit. And iPhoto will reference those files in place
without duplicating the files when you import.

------
Shorel
UbuntuOne already solves those problems.

You can sync only the folders you want.

This is the list of clients:

    
    
      Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7
      Mac OSX 10.6 and higher
      Ubuntu
      Android 2.1 and higher
      iPhone & iPad iOS 3.1 and higher

------
jpswade
Apple mobile devices were never intended to be about being creative, it was
always designed to be a consumer device.

The creative devices are the MacBook and iMac.

It's this reason you can't organise your songs on your iPod without using
iTunes.

~~~
officer_gotcha
How is organizing your music "creative" and not a part of its "consumption"?

~~~
jpswade
It's as simple as "doing" (creative) vs "using" (consuming).

It's the difference between, say writing notes (creative) and watching TV
(consuming).

It's my understanding that this is the view that Steve Jobs took when creating
these devices.

~~~
draugadrotten
Your logic is wrong, because iPhones and iPads are creative devices where
photos are created. Therefore, your understand of Steve Jobs intentions are
wrong.

~~~
jpswade
Yeah sure they are trying to play catch up now, as they underestimated how
they would be used, but bare in mind first gen iPads did not have a camera.

------
Mazer23
This sounds a lot like the problem we're trying to crack with our photo app
suite 'unbound':

Http://www.unboundformac.com/dropbox.html

All your photos on Dropbox and synced to all you iOS devices and macs.

------
BtM909
Charge? Isn't everything free on teh interwebs? _haha_

On a serious note: you're completely right! iPhoto should be the next product
that works exactly like you describe.

------
babesh
Don't people have the same problem with other types of content, content
produced by other tools, by other people, or in different social networks?

------
FatalBaboon
Ah, when the firmly closed ecosystem turns against its master. That or Apple
sucks at programming, I never quite know.

------
cbhl
I feel like the dmedia library made by the Novacut team solves exactly this
use case.

Alas, it's tightly integrated with Ubuntu.

------
martin_
Very well written - great read!

Maybe a nice side project to reverse engineer the process of uploading photos
to the cloud!

------
alanh
It’s like a classic John Siracusa criticism, but without the eloquence. Can’t
disagree.

------
DigitalSea
That's it, keep walking, come to the Android side Peter.

------
wgoodwin
A-fscking-men.

------
workbench
Apples price gorging on disk space is a complete joke when PhotoStream is
needlessly duplicating all my photos.

------
yoster
Do what everyone else does when they run out of space, buy an external HDD.

~~~
samolang
There are two problems with this. One, it's another physical device to manage
which is a pain in the ass. Two, what happens if the external HDD breaks?

~~~
scholia
It reduces the triplicate pains in the ass caused by trying to manage three
physical devices bought from Apple....

However, note that if you just move all your photos to an external hard drive,
you don't have a backup.

~~~
samolang
No it doesn't. You still have those devices. They don't go away. Now you have
expend time manually copying your photos to the device.

~~~
scholia
You can use backup/sync software to copy stuff across automatically.
Otherwise, I didn't say your pain-in-the-ass idevices went away, I just said
you could reduce their pain-in-the-assness.

------
moha297
True that!

------
moron4hire
Hate to say it (not really, I love it), but "see, we told you so". This is
what you get with closed platforms.

~~~
geon
I'm not defending closed platforms, but... What open platform does it better?

~~~
wnight
People in this thread have had workarounds and solutions that would work but
would not work on an iPhone. Such as leaving drop box syncing in the
background. If you could change the background app policy...

Its not as much that another ecosystem is better, but that if yours is closed
you will hit limits.

