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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with experience using iCloud for family photo management pitch me on it? My devices are two iPhones, one MacBook, a Windows 10 laptop, and two occasionally-used digital cameras. So I feel like this might be a good fit, but it's also a problem a lot of companies have tried to crack and failed at. I'm a little nervous about vendor lock-in, for example not having a good story for a future Android phone, but potentially willing to pay that price if the cost and features are otherwise right.

If you use and like iCloud for photo management between multiple people, how is it?

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I'd tried to make iCloud work in a shared setup and gave up after several libraries decided to corrupt themselves.

PhotoStructure is designed exactly with this sort of heterogenous family setup in mind.

My wife uses a Chromebook and MBP, I'm on Ubuntu, Windows and macOS, we have a NAS, and we can mount the library directly with CIFS/samba/AFS/NFS, or use the PhotoStructure web interface that's hosted by any of the computers that are running.

Photos and videos get to the NAS via SyncThing or Resilio Sync. Duplicate and downsampled files (like via Google photos) are handled gracefully by PhotoStructure's sync process.

Most importantly, I retain control of my own files.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of PhotoStructure, and I'm eager to get user feedback during the closed beta. More info on my HN profile.

Just signed up and so excited. I need a solution so badly.

I can’t answer that question and while I’m not concerned with vendor lock in, I still don’t completely trust Apple when it comes to services. I have photos syncing to Google Photos, iCloud and OneDrive. Sooner or later I’m going to setup desktop syncing with iCloud for Windows and backup with Backblaze.

I have my parents and siblings on my iCloud family with 1tb and we have yet to use 60% of the total space. This is with backups turned on and photos as well. I think it is worth the money.

I'm not super price sensitive though; I'm specifically interested in features that make managing multiple photo streams not be ridiculous.

The ios 13 features and even ios 12 show that Apple has continually made sharing and photo streams better. I think it is worth it and you can even share photo streams via urls to people that don't have ios. _I know multiple platforms have this already, just pointing out that Apple is really interested in making this experience a good one_

Google Photos?

Definitely another option under consideration. It just creates one more giant thing to have to export if I ever divorce from Google.

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