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181 pointsantr166 comments

I'm wondering how alone (or not) I am in being uncomfortable with cloud storage for my (mostly family) photos. It would be the most convenient solution in terms of storage and redundancy, but the idea of them possibly being compromised and also somewhat out of my control doesn't sit well with me. It feels slightly hypocritical, since I do share the odd photo on Facebook, but the idea of having every photo and video "out there" is a bit daunting.

Currently I have a RAID 1 NAS at home (also backed up to external drive occasionally), which I use to offload photos from our various devices. I can access these pictures when at home from any device, but of course not outside of the WIFI. So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup.

Am I living in the stone age?

House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway.

Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.

Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience.

Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.

I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.

Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?

I've read differently...

> Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced.

http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...

Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.

Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.

I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade.

I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.

No, you are not alone. I too would live to find a solution so that I can share photos and updates with my family and friends and still own the data.

My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3 and a simple Google+ style photos masonry and albums app (Wordpress style install) that are locked down. Files can be shared on Facebook and other social networks but only as iframed embeds a bit like Wickr https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/01/30/facebook-to-fill...

All my data. I control it. I can share it. Code open source. Openphoto that became TroveBox that then failed and open sourced it's code is probably the closest to what I want, except it is missing the Wickr style sharing and the encrypted at rest parts.

> My ideal setup would be the photos encrypted at rest in Amazon S3

Aren't your photos still in the 'cloud'? What's the difference between Amazon S3 and Apple's servers?

I expect the "code open source" bit implies that it is client side encryption, unlike current consumer products where such data is not encrypted or can be decrypted without the user's consent.

...Particularly given how much of Amazon's servers Apple seems to use, if Little Snitch is at all accurate.

They would be encrypted. The point is privacy. Icloud gives you none.

In 10 years time the NSA are going to be sucking up every single photo and email and Facebook post they can, storing it for posterity in Utah, analysing every single one, facial recognition and categorisation automatically.

They can have mine encrypted.

In 10 years time, the NSA will be able to decrypt anything that is encrypted with 2015 encryption. And that's assuming they can't decrypt it now.

Privacy is important, but let's be honest, you basically can't hide from the NSA.

In 10 years time, the NSA will be able to decrypt anything that is encrypted with 2015 encryption.

Will they? The standard ten years ago was AES-128/256. Are they able to decrypt it now?

That is probably not true -- there are a lot of things that we encrypted in 2005 that they still probably cannot decrypt today.

More to the point, the NSA definitely can't decrypt everything that was encrypted a decade ago. They may be able to decrypt certain things that have somehow caught their interest.

Generally, it still makes sense for all of us to encrypt by default. But OTOH a central feature of these photo services is 'easily share pics with anybody you want', so obviously they need the plaintext data to do that.

I agree with junto that I would like encryption options, but I use these services anyhow because my photos just really aren't as interesting as when I was young -- mainly 100s of nearly-identical shots of babies drooling.

In one sense, the NSA can have the photos of my toddler; who gives a shit.

OTOH, though, it will suck when the shitty face recognition algorithms they are datamining with in 5 years generate a partial match between my son eating a rag and Jihadi John, and the feds come kick in the door to my house in the middle of the night and shoot my dog before anybody realizes what's happening... so yeah, I would just rather have it all encrypted by default.

The NSA already have been doing this for 15 years. Any picture that goes on the wire, to any cloud or other service, is in their system..

I just started using git-annex to backup my photos to Amazon Glacier. It's really powerful in that it allows you to specify the minimum number of backup copies, whether or not to "trust" a remote repo, and can automatically sync files that have fewer than the minimum number of copies. It also supports encryption using either your own GPG key or a generated one that stays in your local annex repos.

Take a look at Koken.

http://koken.me/

It's an awesome (and free) way to self-host your own photo album. Sounds like it'd solve at least part of your dream setup.

You could use tarsnap, which is very safe and quite cheap. I'm doing that with my photos.

My hope is on the can in "And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud", but it wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be a must.

Usage of iCloud Photo Library is 100% opt-in.

Does it support alternative cloud solutions or common protocols like WebDAV, SCP/SFTP? Otherwise, it's all or nothing like with iOS8.

It's like iOS 8 - you can either have your photos just locally or all in iCloud Photo Library.

Of course, being a Mac you could probably put that "local" photo library in a cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive. Or use a separate app to sync photos to a cloud service.

No you are not living in the stone age. I keep photos backed up on an external drive. I also use CrashPlan to keep a copy of my files (encrypted) offsite so I won't lose my photos if my house burns down or is broken into.

Not everyone has a RAID 1 NAS at home, nor even knows what one it. Totally aimed at the apple noob demographic.

No, particularly when you don't even have to look back a full year to see what happens when this goes awry (Jennifer Lawrence, etc).

It's simply hard to trust everyone involved with a cloud storage scheme like this.

Dear Grandma,

It is very simple to setup a RAID 1 NAS and an offsite backup. Now that you are retired you have time to read the manuals and setup a cron job from terminal. You will be glad you expended the time and can relax in knowing the pictures of your cat are safe. You will also need to use encryption if you wish to communicate with me further.

Love Jimmy

I wasn't suggesting that what I've chosen to do is the way to go or that it is accessible to most people. I want to know how the tech-savvy audience of HN feels about this issue.

I suspect that the majority of us know what we should do, but never get around to it. I have photos spread across a dozen storage options, only one of them with any backup in place. My wife deals with hers separately and has no off-site or cloud back up. Between us, we have a lot of photos.

I think a lot of people will simply go with the convenient option offered by the big player and risk it (nothing sordid stored in my collections anyway, so security is less of a drama).

Also note that dealing with family photos on iCloud might be a pain/impossible. I spent time trying to figure out a good way to pool our photos from multiple devices, but ended up settling on using Dropbox and Carousel.

There were some hacky work-arounds to have multiple Apple IDs logged in per phone (one for apps, one for iCloud), but I couldn't find any information on something like selective sync for our laptops and iCloud drive.

Between Carousel for automatic uploads from phones, being able to view all of our photos easily via the web from our laptops, and being able to exclude full-res files from our machines via selective sync, I think it is the most robust option right now.

If anyone has details about being able to share full iCloud photo libraries, I'd be interested to hear.

It's not a totally unreasonable complaint given that Apple has a history when it comes to security breaches.

My biggest complain is that they are keeping the old 5GB iCloud limit. It's 2015. 5GB is absolutely nothing in terms of both capacity and cost. People pay $700-$800 for their phones and upwards of $1000 for their MacBooks and are still made to shell out for anything more than an negligible amount of free storage?

I mean, it's not like iCloud is unreasonably-priced. It's actually fairly cheap. But, it just seems weird that Apple is printing billions of dollars a quarter with these very expensive devices and still feels the need to squeak out a few dollars a month extra from iCloud subs.

One would think that, with iWork and OSX going free, iCloud would also move from a paid product to a utility that is just included with the devices.

Or that they would offer 32GB as the starting option for their phones, especially considering that their OTA updates don't really work on 16GB phones.

There's a lot that Apple does that makes people go "hmm". But they're a case study in getting some things right enough that nothing else matters.

False - Apple has no significant history when it comes to security breaches.

No large scale breaches are known externally, but they have certainly have had their share of security incidents and poor practices.

http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-icloud-hack-obvious-security-fl...

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/10/22/apple-warns-icloud-se...

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/icloud-users-take-no...

"Apple has no significant history when it comes to security breaches."

Seriously?!

http://thefappening.rocks/

You clearly haven't understood that event. There was no security breach of Apple's systems. Specific celebrities were targeted and their personal information was stolen and used to unlock their iCloud accounts.

You have mistaken the level of media coverage (due to the celebrities involved) with the severity of the security issue.

You clearly are redefining security breach not to include severe and consequential types of security breaches. Social engineering attacks that allow accounts to be stolen are a big problem. Just because they can't be patched with a new FreeBSD kernel update doesn't make them unimportant.

Apple needs a system that blocks obvious social engineering attacks anyone could easily use against you based on public records if it doesn't want a reputation for security disasters. Apple has already failed many high profile people and probably lots more regular citizens; it deserves shame for its failure.

Apple has such a system. It's called 2FA. The fact you don't know that doesn't do much for the credibility of your position.

> So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup.

I have a solution. My workflow is:

-Import photos into Lightroom from camera to local SSD. Select the option to generate 1:1 previews.

-Edit/trash photos. Publish some to FB, Flickr, Snapfish, whatever I want to do with them.

-Move originals to external storage.

The 1:1 previews stay on the local catalog (they're like.. big JPGs or something). Good enough to show off, even print, but obviously you'd want to edit the originals.

If you're disconnected from that external storage, you can still see the 1:1 previews. If you're connected to storage, Lightroom recognizes it and loads up the originals instead. It's brilliant.

You can even set up a collection that syncs with your phone/tablet. If you're even halfway serious about your photos, lightroom is the way to go.

All nice unless you select previews to purge automatically after x days; which I think was a default setting at some point in time.

Unless a recent Photoshop Lightroom version allows you to manage the photos outside of its library-database, it isn't. At least version 1 & 2 copied all files to an SQL database/hidden directory in the users folder.

Windows (Live) Photogallery is much better in this regard, as it indexes the files but keep the files were the are stored. Also all metadata changes are stored back to the file itself. The same goes for Windows Explorer and OSX Finder+Spotlight.

That's not true at all. Lightroom can add photos at their current location, or import them to a location of your choice. There's no "hidden directory".

Lightroom supports sidecar (xml) changes, or syncing metadata to the files. Your choice.

LR doesn't have true multi-user, but numerous solutions exist that are pretty seamless for handling multiple systems using the same database.

I have my LR catalog on Dropbox, and all of my photos on an AFS share on FreeNAS, which isn't always available (I have a VPN to home, but it depends on the speed of my connectivity). I generate 1:1 previews and don't expire them, so I can use LR with the same settings and edits on both my iMac and MBP. The only issue is having LR running on both, at once.

See: http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dr... (and many others).

At least Apple's business model doesn't depend on mining your photos for information. Other companies can't say the same thing.

You're one house fire, flood or a lighting stike away from losing all your photos.

If you want a backup, it has to be remote. It can be a hard drive in 5 ziploc bags at your friends place, or encrypted in a cloud. Just don't store your photos all in one place, if you value them.

It's what works for you. Honestly, I love cloud storage. I decided to go with Microsoft's OneDrive because it has unlimited storage, and if there's any data that I need encrypted, I can just encrypt a folder on the sync-drive.

Just remember to have a back-up of your photos and other digital things that you can't lose at an off-site location also. There are several solutions that can do this that doesn't involve the "cloud".

I love the cloud though. Could it be compromised? Maybe. Could a fire happen in my house where I lose everything? Maybe. But as it stands now, I could walk away from everything I own, walk into a store and pick up a cheap laptop and access all my data again. But that's just me.

Some people are paranoid about their privacy and data (and a justifiable paranoia, don't get me wrong), but use a solution that works for _me_ personally. Everyone is different and will need a different solution. There's really no one-size-fits-all.

I'm just curious, how have you been able to avail yourself of their unlimited storage?

I signed up too but their API rate limiting is draconian enough that I can't realistically use that for uploading large amounts of data.

Their native clients might fare a little better but they require a ton of disk space if you're doing a large upload it seems.

no, not yet, but from what I understand they'll be implementing it slowly.

I mainly got it though because getting 1TB cloud storage for the price is still cheaper than Box or Google Drive or Dropbox, the "unlimited" is just icing.

I have the same concerns, even though today I use OneDrive. My ideal solution would be a NAS that replicates my (encrypted) data across a peer to peer network of similar NAS'es, and so you would only be able to store personal data on a certain portion of the hard disk, and the other part would be used to replicate data from other NAS'es on the network.

My data would be pretty safe: if the drive crashes I can just insert a new hard drive and the NAS starts reconstructing my data from the network again given the encryption key. Also, this NAS would be accessible from outside of my home network, so it's like my own cloud backed up on a peer to peer network.

I would actually like to build this at one point. The hardware is pretty easy, take a Banana Pro board + a SATA drive and you have a wifi connected NAS. Building the software for the peer to peer network would be a bit trickier to make it work well. Anyone knows if a peer to peer network like this already exists?

Not affiliated but Synology does exactly that, replicate to friends' synologies.

Transporter does that as well: http://www.filetransporter.com/

This might make you more comfortable with cloud storage of high value personal photos: I have my android phone automatically back up each picture I take on Google+ pictures and Microsoft OneDrive. Also, every once in a while, I burn a DVD-R. Eggs in multiple baskets.

Not alone and I suspect there are more and more people becoming uneasy with 'the cloud' for myriad different reasons. Obvious reasons include privacy and security but there's also the ephemeral nature of such services (they can get bought/shutdown on a whim -- Apple is no stranger to cutting things that don't work for them).

Also, it's not hypocritical at all to raise a concern even if you're a big user of such services. Right now, it's not like you have many alternatives.

In my view, we need to move towards a system where everyone can control their own piece of the 'cloud', without the burden of being a sysadmin. There are varying approaches to this (cf Sandstorm and OwnCloud), but I believe we need to work on the fundamental infrastructure if we want properly decentralised systems. I'm working on this, based on the idea of unikernels - http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

Do you keep your money in a bank? I get worries about storing things on Facebook, but I feel the implicit contract about iCloud is that it's a personal drive (unless you explicitly make something public).

I understand some people might be really good at automated backup and whatnot, but for me this solution means not losing photos. (probability losing photos) * pain is much greater for me than (probability having photos public) * pain (at least my impression of it)

I don't think the bank analogy holds. My bank funds are insured up to $100K (by the Canadian government) and I don't keep more than that with any one bank. Money is replaceable. Family photos are not.

Set up a server and put it on the internet!

I have a BRIX mini-PC,[1] on which I've got Linux then Windows Server 2008 running in a VM. My FiOS router has a setting to automatically keep a Dynamic-DNS entry up-to-date (I use dyn.org), and I bought a SSL certificate from Network Solutions so I can connect with HTTPS.

It's a little over-engineered for a home server because I wanted to be able to keep my OneNote notebooks off the cloud, but IIS also makes it super-easy to set up a WebDAV share, which iOS plays very nicely with.

[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164.... Loaded it up with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD for surprisingly cheap. At idle, you can't hear it unless you put your ear right up to it in a quiet room. But it's a pain to install anything on it because it doesn't have any USB 2.0 ports, just USB 3.0 which a lot of installers don't support. Ubuntu 14.10 works (though holy shit did they fuck everything up since I last used it), but Fedora and CentOS don't.

I have also a raid1 NAS at home. It is mounted by NFS on my main computer that is available from internet using ssh. My ADSL modem is configure to enable WOL. This allows to access my photos from anywhere using filezilla. You just need to carry your key in .ppk format.

I'm really pleased to see Apple getting away from the "events" concept that iPhoto introduced. It was a good idea in theory - all your photos would be automatically grouped into albums based on the date they were taken - but in practice requiring that every photo in your library belong to exactly one event meant that you had a bunch of awkward single-photo events. Photostream ended up making this worse with special photostream-only events that completely broke the model of how photos should be organised.

I've actually been quite pleased with the events concept. I found albums annoying and manually tedious but that pics automatically get grouped has made it easy for me to go back through old photos and find the ones I'm looking for. You're right about the annoying single-photo events but then I just dump them all together into the 'photostream' event for that month.

Wouldn't this also have been super annoying for events that went past midnight and spilled over into the next day?

IIRC events were created based on some heuristic of the photos' geolocaiton data and time taken. So if you do a 3 day trip outside of your city that becomes one event on import. It was also super easy to merge two events into one. I thought it worked pretty well in general.

I think the big win for Photos.app / iCloud Photo Library is the fact that 3rd party app 'extensions' are able to provide exponential editing capabilities directly to the users main library.

I anticipate Photos.app on Mac gaining 'Extensions' a la iOS Extensions in the next WWDC revision/OS X release.

OS X already has support for Extensions. Check System Preferences. The relevant category here is "Actions". The system already provides a "Markup" action that provides Preview.app's markup capabilities to other apps that embed images. On my system right now, Pixelmator also exposes one action called "Repair Tool".

You can try this out by creating a new TextEdit document and dragging an image in there. In the upper-right corner of the image there's a dropdown button that shows you the available actions you can take.

I certainly hope Photos.app supports Extensions. It would be a pretty obvious oversight not to do this.

Ah right, I forgot about the 'actions'.

As of right now (10.0.3 beta), Photos.app does not have any available access points to "Actions", etc. Hopefully soon!

Please file a radar! I hope it's on their roadmap, but if not, better to ask for it now than wait until after the app is released.

http://bugreport.apple.com

I would like a "storage" extension that let me choose my own "iCloud' implementation. That way I could point Photos at Dropbox, Amazon S3, or my own SAN, and still use the capabilities of the product. My main concern with photos on my computer right now is how much space they take up and how to securely store them off-site somewhere.

I know that iCloud could do this but I would probably need the 1TB plan with is $20/month - that's very expensive. Maybe there is a way to only store new photos in iCloud and offload the old ones to Glacier or something. :/

This is a late reply, but by default, Photos stores images inside a "Photos.photolibrary" package, which is just a special folder. Inside this, all your masters are contained in a "Masters" folder which is arranges every photo in a sub-directory hierarchy of:

year > month > day > day-timestamp

You could potentially symlink this folder knowing it'd have to be a one-way 'cloud' implementation because I would have to imagine modifications to anything inside here would corrupt the Photos.app library org.

Alternatively, you do not have to import photos into Photos' library package and have them as referenced. These referenced files could be in Dropbox/S3-sync'd folder/SAN etc in whatever org you want... same deal though if you modify location/attributes outside of Photos.app, it may mess things up.

As a photographer, 5GB isn't enough for storing high-res photos. It's nice to keep them off your iDevice, but relying on iCloud to keep them is silly.

Amazon, on the other hand, allows for unlimited cloud photo storage solely by being a Prime customer. All my 24MP RAW photos get stored there safely, along with having my own local storage for backup.

iClouds lack of file structure makes it seem not ideal for storage.

I also shoot raw.. Wait, unlimited cloud photo storage at amazon prime. That seems like a good deal.

You can have whatever file structure you want on iCloud Drive.

https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/icloud-drive/

So youll pay amazon for the storage but not Apple? Being a prime customer doesn't mean its 'free'

Huh? That's pretty much exactly what it means.

If you receive a service in exchange for payment , then no it's not free.

I think his point is that when he made the payment, that service did not exist. His payment was for other services (such as unlimited 2 day delivery).

Now, without exchanging any further currency or otherwise paying, he receives another service.

I'd agree that that constitutes free.

But if anybody else wants "free" photo storage they have to pay. So saying that Apple is out of their mind charging money for something that everybody except me have to pay for is completely pointless argument, since it doesn't relate to anybody but the lucky once who got it for free.

If there wasn't a commensurate increase in price, then yes it is free. If you are receiving service X for a certain amount of cash each month, and then suddenly begin to receive service Y without paying more, service Y is free.

You guys sure love to argue over semantics...

No, the test is - If you cease paying money, do you still receive the service ?

Because there was no price increase doesn't mean it's free, it just means that the rest of what you're receiving is now cheaper.

Lock-in.

A huge photo collection is the best lock-in for an OS. So to have a top-notch app here is a smart move from Apple.

I have like 70GB of photos in iPhoto and somehow this stops me from fully migrating to another OS. Just the thought of moving this 70GB to another file system, OS and photo program let me stick to OSX forever. And photos especially the family ones are maybe the most important 'personal' data of a user.

Besides, iPhoto is not bad but the many format changes in the past were a bit tiring.

In general I prefer Dropbox as a cloud file storage--they have the best clients of all OSes and security features like no other (remote wipe), now I just need a cross platform photo database which is separated from my cloud storage provider.

Lock-in, as in a lock I can't unlock? As in I can't get my photos out if I want? It's only lock-in if you want to leave and you can't.

I'll be as locked into this as I'm locked into my favorite scotch. I can switch, but why?

I really don't get the lock-in argument. I like Apple's stuff, all of it. It works really well for me. I'm the happiest I've ever been with my computer environment. If Apple starts to suck I'll find something else, as will many other people and some enterprising fellow will see that and create something great. Better yet maybe Dropbox will up their game to compete with Apple on photo storage. Rising tide etc etc.

With iPhoto, you can easily move your photos elsewhere, but moving the metadata with it (what photo is in what album, recognized faces, etc) is another thing.

I call that a form of lock-in.

It creates/enables inertia rather than locks you in, I think that's what they're saying.

Inertia a.k.a. reasons for people to like and therefore stick with your product. How dare they.

No, it's clearly different to that, and to pure lock in. (And I wasn't offering judgement either way, just trying to help explain the other comment.)

I don't see how this is lock-in, unless they have somehow crippled the exporting feature. It seems like the only thing preventing you from moving that 70GB of photos is a lack of motivation.

A huge photo collection is the best lock-in for an OS. So to have a top-notch app here is a smart move from Apple.

On the other hand, pretty much anyone who once used Aperture has moved to Lightroom after feeling the effects of Apple's enthusiasm followed by Apple's indifference. Presumably whoever is making an iPhoto (or whatever) equivalent on Windows will write an import feature that imports whatever format or formats Apple uses.

I want to be enthusiastic, but I've seen one too many Apple initiatives dropped to get real excited. I've also seen iPhoto libraries corrupted and heard the screams when it happens.

I wonder what percentage of users will have to buy more iCloud storage for this. Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly, especially if someone has multiple Apple devices.

>> "Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly"

That's one way to look at it. But they need to make money somehow and I'd prefer this to advertising or selling my data or trying to convince me to make my life publicly accessible online.

Or including it as part of the iPhone's obscene 50%+ profit margins. That's what Google does with unlimited free auto-backup to Google Plus, and they don't even make money on most of the Android phones sold!

Apple doesn't need this money, just like they don't need the ugly user experience when an iPhone's account gets disconnected from its credit card.

But Apple's culture of nickel and diming for everything has to do with training users to pull out their credit cards. The more often a user hits Pay the easier it is to do it the next time it comes up. As long as the user keeps pulling out the credit card the experience is smooth and makes the user feel like they are part of an elite higher class.

In other words, it's deliberate consumer brainwashing.

> unlimited free auto-backup

For pictures below 2048x2048.

Also I'd rather pay for storage then expose my data to web app automated algorithms and lack of local editing software with two way sync.

Android does include local editing with 2 way sync.

I'm not sure how you can consider Apple nickel and diming for everything when they give OS upgrades away for free. Aside from wanting free iCloud storage, please provide a list of other services/products Apple charges for that you believe should be free?

I agree. I'm a lot more comfortable being charged (and the new pricing for iCloud storage is pretty reasonable). For comparison Dropbox only gives you 2GB free.

Apple is literally the last company in the world that needs to make money "somehow".

> They need to make money somehow.

Yes, because their profit margins are that low (!).

Considering Apple charges you £500 for a phone and £1000 for a laptop, I'd expect a bit more in terms of default cloud storage. 5 gig (and the 16 gig the cheapest iPhone 5S model offers) are incredibly stingy.

I don't understand why Apple charges for things like this. You'd think it adds up to very little cost for them but adds such value that they would sell more than enough additional Macs and Phones.

I mean... wouldn't their ideal lock-in scenario be if everyone was free to store gigs upon gigs of photos for free so they pretty much HAD stay in the Apple system or suffer the inconvenience of downloading it all and putting it somewhere else?

> Charging users for more than 5gigs of storage in 2015 seems pretty miserly

5GB of storage for every Apple user comes to hundreds if not thousands of petabytes of storage that Apple are providing for free. Calling that "miserly" seems awfully entitled to me – you're essentially complaining that Apple aren't giving you enough stuff for free.

considering this is for iDevice and Mac users, it's far from free.

Besides, Dropbox has way more coverage and is offering 16 gigs.

Apple has $150 billion in cash, so it's not an infrastructure issue.

The core is probably that they don't "need" to offer more, so don't. But that doesn't mean we can't ding them for their behaviour

> Besides, Dropbox has way more coverage and is offering 16 gigs.

Dropbox's advertised free tier is only 2 gigs: https://www.dropbox.com/plans. There are some referral games you can play to get more, but I doubt many people end up with 16 gigs (I'm at 4).

I can see it as miserly, but I wonder if it's some kind of attempt to select for the kind of customers they want, i.e. customers who are themselves not too miserly. The 20gb tier is absurdly cheap, $0.99/mo. So much so that they wouldn't be giving up much real revenue if they just bumped the free tier to 20 gigs, but then on the other hand it doesn't cost a user much to go up to that tier, either. Maybe the threshold of "people who will/won't pay $1/mo for iCloud" therefore serves a useful function for Apple?

They mention it for videos also - I hope their recommendations on how to handle videos become clearer. I used to pull my videos into iPhoto, but it felt disorganized to have them littered among my photos, and it felt clunky to pull them into iMovie. Later I changed to importing them directly into iMovie, but then iMovie had one of the worst bugs I've ever experienced on Desktop software, where over a period of months the source video of some important footage (me performing at a club) just completely disappeared, leaving only the thumbnails and audio. By the time I discovered it (reviewing year's highlights), it was gone from my time machine history as well (due to Time Machine deciding to corrupt itself and start over every eight months or so). So now I import video into Final Cut hooked up to a desktop Drobo which backs up to CrashPlan.

Photos does look great, but Apple decided to completely ignore iPhoto while making this. iPhoto has so many bugs and problems and there is nothing I can do but sit and wait for them to release Photos.

I like the looks, too! Looks to me as if iPhoto will eventually be replaced by Photos (though I believe I remember the announcement was that it would not?) as it wraps most of its functionality and has a nicer look. Maybe makes sense to have Photos (lifestyle) and Aperture (professional) as two apps with a clear focus for each one.

I'm just missing some statement on how the performance is, especially since we all have like several hundred GBs or even TBs worth of pictures nowadays. It's only a preview with screenshots though...

Unfortunately Aperture is also being discontinued...

To be fair, after years of being neglected it's probably better that they admit nobody is working on Aperture.

Photos will be replacing iPhoto and Aperture: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/27/aperture-development-sto...

I believe Adobe has already released a plugin to import your Aperture library into Lightroom.

According to The Verge[1]:

> iPhoto was often criticized for choking on large image libraries, but Apple says it built Photos to handle large and growing photo libraries, since people are taking so many more photos than they used to before. From our experience, it seems that Apple's efforts have paid off: the new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, [...]

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7979925/apple-photos-app-ne...

iPhoto is so slow, I hope they fixed that ! Even on my SSD i7 mbp with 16GB of RAM I'm surprised. My photo collection isn't that huge as most of the stuff is stored outside but it really lacks the snapiness it should have.

If you don't mind me asking, how big is your iPhoto Library? With large file sizes these days, it takes no time to generate a huge iPhoto Library. Also, when you add a photo into iPhoto Library, it automatically generates more copies of the file with smaller sizes, thus increasing the size of iPhoto Library very fast.

I strongly recommend using "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20) to divide iPhoto library into smaller libraries.

Also, I read somewhere that not all SSDs in Apple laptops are the same. Some are from samsung and some are from Toshiba. And supposedly Toshiba ones are much slower than Samsung ones and someone claimed it was barely faster than a mechanical HD.

But anyhow, the point is you should at least use "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). Or even better, I recommend using the howto I posted in this same thread.

After Apple suddenly (and still no longer "officially") killed Aperture, I no longer trust them with long-term data storage. So no "Photos" for me.

I am still thinking about how to deal with the collection that I have in Aperture.

And before you respond with "just keep the files" or "export the files and import into Lightroom", it's no longer 1999 and it's not just about the files. There is metadata, tags, collections, stacks, and other kinds of organizational structure that are not easily reflected in a directory hierarchy.

I've been bitten once, I won't be fooled again — this time I intend to develop my own solution for keeping this data in the long term.

Lightroom has a new importer to pull in Aperture data, including tags and all of that...so it's not really a "export the files and import into Lightroom" situation - it appears it should preserve your metadata.

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2014/10/aperture-imp...

Unfortunately, the Aperture and Lightroom data models and workflow are different enough that Lightroom really can't import everything that you've done in Aperture. Quote from Lightroom page: "migrate their images and key metadata"... It also doesn't support the non-destructive workflow edits that you've applied to your (potentially) tens of thousands of images. If you import them, all the edits become baked in.

I'm sad that I feel the only way to get a handle on my photos is to put them in Facebook or Flickr. For example, there was the OpenPhoto kickstarter, but even though the code is open source, their hosted service (since renamed to Trovebox) is shutting down next month.

There's also Origami, where the team and product were split in an acquihire/aquire under eFamily.com.

Photos will undoubtedly import Aperture metadata. It's disingenuous to assume otherwise.

It will import some, but some are not supported at all because the Aperture data model is more complex and complete than Photos'...

Do you have opinions on any of the current open-source programs, like Darktable [1]? Or by "I intend to develop my own solution" do you mean writing something from scratch?

[1] http://www.darktable.org/about/features/

I moved over 35k photos from Aperture to Photo Supreme for organization/metadata and DxO for editing. Photo Supreme will read Aperture libraries and much of the metadata. The capability was pretty crude when I did it (mostly relied on it to recreate my hierarchical keywording system), but it's come a long way. Best part is that the database is only for speed—everything gets stored in the image files themselves or sidecars.

DxO is pure magic. It's been a joy going back and reprocessing my images—they look so much better now. The Clear View slider does wonderful things on landscape shots.

A nice touch is that Photo Supreme understands basic DxO edits, so things like rotation and cropping get reflected in the thumbnail.

This sounds good, but if it's still going to lock all of my files behind a proprietary and obscure file structure -- and metadata library -- that totally get borked whenever I try to have some other app access them, then it's no better off than iPhoto.

If they managed to keep whatever file structure I have them in intact, and still keep the metadata/library abstracted from the file structure, then I might have more hope for it.

Agreed. I ditched iPhoto and switched to Unbound (http://unboundformac.com/) a while back for this reason.

Check out http://www.mylio.com/ - it's all about preserving your file structure.

Well, their website doesn't load, so they're not off to a good start.

I have been struggling to manage my family's photos and videos, and it has really been a nightmare. I'm currently using flickr, but it leaves much to be desired. This looks like exactly what I've been looking for.

What problems in particular were you having that makes this is a great solution?

I have always been a fan of Smugmug. It's super easy (imo) to use, and there are a number of great export plugins for LightRoom.

I love smugmug, but the import/export is getting very tiring. Seriously, MacDaddy?

I just export from Lightroom, which is part of my workflow. For everything else, I just use facebook.

I was thinking the same thing, but iCloud accounts can't be shared very easily/well between devices. I spent a bunch of time researching, but ended up shelling out for Dropbox Pro and Carousel on our multiple phones. Then I use selective sync to not fill our laptops with the full-res photos.

Another fan of smugmug here.

You can't beat unlimited storage for $40/year. Granted upload is limited by upload speed but by letting it upload overnight, that hasn't been a problem for me. Smugmug has app on iOS/Android that work well also.

Here's how I manage family photos/videos as a Mac user:

1. Use "Image Capture" to import photos/videos from camera/iphone/android into Mac. Do NOT use iPhoto to import although OS X recommends it. It's the root of all kinds of problems afaik. "Image Capture" is free tool included with OS X. Just open "Image Capture" and insert your memory card or plug in usb cable.

2. Once imported, use ExifRenamer (or other alternatives) to rename files to date/time taken. This ensures each photo/video has unique serial. With the new names, you can easily tell when/what/where/why just by looking at filename.

3. You can group files into year-mm-dd or any other method you like. You can do it manually easily or use "Big Mean Folder Machine 2".

4. Once you have grouped files into year-mm-dd, now you can import them into iPhoto. I do this purely for easier browsing/etc.

5. Within iPhoto, you have photos grouped into year-mm-dd.

#Now you should NOT keep ALL your photos/videos in ONE iPhoto database/folder. You should create 1 iPhoto database/folder for just 1 year using tools like "iPhoto Buddy' (free) or "iPhoto Library Manager" ($20). That way iPhoto data doesn't get too big.

#I back up both the renamed files (divided into yyyy-mm-dd) AND the iPhoto libraries to external HDs. Backing up the renamed files as simple files is critical imo.

#Whenever iPhoto is updated by Apple and I open an iPhoto library from older version, that iPhoto Library needs to be updated by the newer iPhoto. Not a big deal though.

#Backup to Smugmug Now after above are done, I start uploading photos to smugmug. I may do maybe a month at a time or something like it. With smugmug, I can recover photos even if I lose both my Mac and external HDs. It will be painful but possible. Obviously Amazon S3 is another option. I would just zip up the files and encrypt them if using Amazon S3.

How do you handle bursts? That's my biggest problem with iPhoto - I need an easy elegant tool to handle my 6-shot DSLR bursts before they get synced into the cloud.

In ExifRenamer, you have this option.

When files names will be identical, you can use following option:

>> Increment counter field until file name is unique.

You can also use 'A Better Finder Rename' for renaming photos.

>Another fan of smugmug here. >You can't beat unlimited storage for $40/year. Granted upload is limited by upload speed but by letting it upload overnight, that hasn't been a problem for me. Smugmug has app on iOS/Android that work well also.

SmugMug doesn't support RAW in its "unlimited" plan though, does it? You'll have to purchase the SmugVault extra.

Unfortunately no. But I don't shoot raw so not a problem for me.

All photos automatically stored in the cloud at full resolution.

At last! Here's hoping I never again spend a week recovering a friend or family member's lifetime of photos from their failed hard drive.

By the way, check your backups.

It all looks nice but I think many people are asking: How does this compare to Aperture? Does it deal with Raw? The word Raw is not mentioned on the page but they do talk about multiple formats... Come on Apple! The entire Aperture crowd is in the dark and looking for these details!

I don't have details yet, but, based on this quick review, I would say that it's much, much closer to iPhoto than to Aperture, unfortunately. I'm sure that it handles Raw, but not all the rest of what makes Aperture useful and unique.

I would just be happy with a file-based interface that would let me know physically where my photos are, where they're backed up to on iCloud, and could easily be moved to another storage device.

Now available in the public and developer OSX Beta.

Thanks, I was a bit confused over what had changed since it still said "coming this spring."

It's interesting that they appear to have removed the Places functionality. I find it the fastest way to locate many photos - vacations, nights out, etc.

I guess most folks did not use that as much, and so it was removed.

Hmmm... another thing from Apple that goes without the 'i', I sense a shift in branding. Probably gonna be a while before they drop it on the phones, though.

Seems to be the way they have been moving for a while on the productivity apps. Now only iMovie and iTunes are left.

It would be pretty ballsy (even for Apple) to drop the i and call the iPhone simply "Phone"!

I recently made the decision to use Dropbox Carousel for this kind of thing. Anyone have thoughts on whether I should stick with that or switch to photos?

As much as I love Dropbox and think Carousel looks nice, I'm finding it difficult to justify in comparison to Google Drive+Docs combo and/or the whole Apple ecosystem.

Dropbox has tough sledding against the level of integration that Google & Apple offer.

Carousel isn't going to cut it. I know they bought Mailbox and I think some startups offering nice documentation creation tools, but I'm wondering if they CAN do enough?

People say don't worry about the bumbling incumbents, but when it comes to files I'm not so sure. Anyone know how Dropbox is going to win?

I went with OneDrive for all pics. On Mac I import all pics into a folder per year/yyyy-mm-dd. This makes it available in my Android phone too. On phone use OD to upload phone pics to Camera Roll folder, which I rotate into separate Dir every year. The OD web interface is good enough and I like the simple folder hierarchy. I also move and delete a lot of files around. The OD syncs this quickly to web and phone. Lastly I like the recycle bin on web interface because I can see good size thumbnail of deleted file and also metadata to make sure it wasn't something I deleted by mistake. This is a huge plus for me over DB and GD. Only downside of OD for me is no Linux client, so limit picture management to OSX.

I like that you can optimize for storage on mobile devices keeping a smaller file size on the phone with the ability to access the higher res if needed.

After some reading about Photos, I'm beginning to see one big reason they are pushing this is for the ability to charge monthly fee for storing photos online...

Why can't they incorporate 'Iphoto Library Manager' and give user the ability to divide iphoto libraries into smaller chunks and let users easily store them on external Hds?

Is this replacing iPhoto? I can't imagine iPhoto and Photos would make sense existing alongside each other.

It's essentially a hybrid of Aperture and iPhoto. Similar to what they did with Final Cut Pro and iMovie. Basically they remove all the really powerful features and replace them with an interface a 4 year old could use. It'll probably be a win for iPhoto users who are looking to step up their photo game a bit, but it's a bit of a kick in the teeth for Aperture users who probably now need to look at Lightroom.

I just hope it will be faster compared to iPhoto which is lagging on latest rMBP 15 i7 with 2gb discrete video card.

NOTE: There is nothing actually new available here at all, other than some new marketing copy.

The app is still "Coming this spring" and the extremely basic and clunky beta cloud service is the same as what has been available since last year.

The beta is out for developers and it's pretty nice.

You mean the Mac app? Where? I just logged into the developer site but I don't see it anywhere.

EDIT: Ah I see, you need the beta of the next version of the whole OS.

I would prefer if they had layflat photobooks.

Sigh. Does Apple offer auto-awesome like G+ (and soon, OneDrive)? Do they highlight the best photos or stitch burst shots together into a GIF? Do they email you memories like Everpix used to? Critically for me, do they offer deduplication?

I currently have nearly 1TB of photos thanks to reliance on iPhoto and a decade of attempted back-ups to local storage. In reality, there's maybe 200GB of actual photos. Thankfully, cloud storage has stemmed the proliferation of redundant photos.

For a company supposedly focused on user experience, Apple's complete failure with photos has been baffling. First the catastrophe of iPhoto, then arbitrary photo streams, and now $20/month/1TB (!) for iCloud storage. What the hell. Apple usually justifies their premium and exclusivity by offering better products. Hands up, everyone who thinks Apple offers even remotely comparable web services versus literally anyone else.

This just another greedy lock-in of tech-illiterate customers by offering worse services at higher prices. Which seems pretty emblematic of the Tim Cook era -- when Apple fully pivoted to extracting premium money from their customers rather than offering premium products.

Serious question: Is there a better way than the Abercrombie/J.Crew model approach?

As someone who used to work for Apple—they source all the photos they use in their promotional materials from photos actual employees have taken.

Interesting. I've always found apple's promotional images to be a bit more casual and not so overly photoshopped.

I guess my question was whether it might be better to use more authentic imagery (whatever that means) and not just images of pristine young white people doing white people things. I'm genuinely curious about the branding here and not trying to be sensational.

Quality photos are aspirational. No one will want to see someone's poorly composed and boring photos in promotional material.

And 'white people'? The hero couple in Utah look black and latino to me. If anything, Apple's marketing is generally as interracial as typical office stock photography.

Another Apple ad on Hacker News? I wish we have a filter for "things that only apply to Apple users."

Come on, this is Hacker News. If you want to filter it... hack it....

And it isn't even like you've got to invent a wheel or anything, many people have felt the same way as you and put together some way of filtering the site and then released the source:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+filter

I've been saying this for the past few OSX releases, and this seems to just reinforce the idea:

I believe that Apple is going to unify iOS and OSX. Their UI designs are slowly converging, and in some cases, they're combining apps across both platforms.

I think we'll very soon see a single 'Apple OS' that will work on all devices; a dream that a lot of other OS's have been seeking for a long time.

I'm not entirely convinced they're going to go for the Windows 10 approach but it would be interesting to see how far they're going to take this.

If that were true, why would they be about to launch a new OS - WatchOS? Wouldn't the Apple Watch run iOS too?

There's a nugget of truth here;

'some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.' from http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/02/new-apple-photos-app-conta...

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