I wanted to share Nick Heer’s post on iCloud Photos not perfectly storing his data.
I have long been suspicious of iCloud Photo Library. I have duplicates of anything shot with my Big Boy Camera in Lightroom, but I rely on iCloud Photos and have been uneasy about this for some time.
Some quick thoughts:
I have heard it said that storage is cheap, but in the world of Apple, storage is still quite expensive. So while I am fortunate enough to have reams of it, not everybody can afford to simply store it locally. Is there a reliable cloud solution? (Even Dropbox has failed me often enough that its year-long backup option has saved my bacon a couple times when I’ve noticed it.)
is there an easy way to get photos taken with an iPhone, or videos taken with one, outside of iCloud Photos and somewhere else on a Mac?
what apps or tools might somebody use to explore these photos? And since so many of us look at our pictures on the go, what about mobile options?
This is a complicated, thorny topic, and I’m worried I’ll regret bringing it up. But c’est la vie.
That’s not an excessive price for cloud storage if your 2TB is close to full. Good luck finding a reliable alternative for cheaper on the market, other than running your own NAS (which is not a silver bullet).
Cloud is ideal for a few dozen gigs of data. If you have a lot of data (multiple terabytes) it’s more economical to store it in your own hard drive. iCloud’s sin is not its price but a bad emigration experience.
It can be. So I’m just going to ask what, beside photos, are you storing in iCloud? Can any of your data be moved to local storage, or something like AWS Glacier? Amazon’s tiers for data, that is not frequently accessed, are much less expensive that iCloud or Google Drive.
Several years ago I decided to delete my collection of ripped movies, that I hadn’t looked at in years. I did the same with much of the ripped music that I still have on CD. And I now have more room available on Google Drive and am paying less for my Backblaze B2 backups.
What’s wrong with thinking behind the shared article is that he considers the Photo library to be a backup. It’s not a backup, it’s a production library.
The only reliable backup is all photos exported to jpegs, stored elsewhere using the 3-2-1 rule. Export to jpegs eliminates all the reliance on Apple’s or any third-party software, or cloud service, ever. At least exporting pictures from Photos is quick and reliable, and it downloads the full resolution images.
Interesting article with useful insights. Sad that Apple creates such a proprietary lock-in approach. As to your questions.
One issue is not with iCloud as a storage option per se, it is with the lock-in of Photos + iCloud. You could take your photos out of the Photos app, put them in Finder folders, and sync the Finder folders with iCloud. But then, you have the other issue - the reliability of your chosen cloud service as a robust backup method. As they say, depending on your choice for cloud “backup” service, YMMV. At which point, after reviewing options, you may find you are better to use a true backup service provider (e.g. BackBlaze) rather than rigging up a DIY cloud approach.
As noted, export photos in unmodified format. Easy … yes (select the images, select File->Export (unmodified format)). Tedious … yes.
What do you mean by “explore”? Just view them? Or also analyze them and edit them? A range of apps exist along this spectrum. Perhaps this question in particular is worthy of its own thread.
I don’t use iCloud for backup.
I use it for access from multiple devices.
I have had iCloud eat data from what I suspect are syncing flaws.
I backup photos along with everything else I can via TimeMachine and iDrive
I download photos I care about (Favorites) to an external drive.
I have a Pro subscription to Flickr c. $75.00 US /year unlimited storage
Most people can’t consistently detect the difference between “High” and “Maximum” quality when exporting jpegs, though, and for most images it doesn’t matter. And if you can see these differences, you are a photo professional, and you should not be using iCloud Photos to manage your photo library anyway.
I’m storing a bunch of plain text (thanks to Obsidian, iA Writer, Ulysses, etc), and these photos. Not much else. But I want to clarify that this post isn’t necessarily about getting out of iCloud entirely. If I lost a few plain text files, oh well. But I see Photos proprietary file structure and iCloud’s inscrutable black box as serious problems for long-term image storage, particularly once you get beyond hundreds of gigabytes.
I also suspect this topic will get more popular in coming years, so it’s worth surveying the landscape now.
There are indeed a range of apps across these purposes. I use Lightroom Classic and Capture One for work, although I wouldn’t expect most people to have access to either, and they are on the DAM + editor side of the spectrum.
I think the primary need on mobile in particular would be exactly what Photos does: exploration and lightweight image editing.
The problem is that, as you’ve mentioned, you end up paying for the cloud somewhere, so you have to pick a solution you trust. I’m not sure I trust any of them, and they’re all unbelievably expensive.
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I want to be clear; I don’t mean to imply that I have an urgent problem that needs solving. I am sharing the article because, in general, I think the Apple community doesn’t have many alternatives to the built-in Photos bundle. Perhaps I am just not aware of them.
My contention is with your use of “JPEG” and “full resolution” in a recommendation about the preferred format for export to backup.
Regardless that other iPhone image formats are lossy, the recommendation for backup must always be to export unmodified, also regardless that one is replying to a man on the street (who, as you say, has no discerning eye for the differences) or to a professional (who, as you say, might already be well aware of the limitations anyway).
I might read this line as hesitations that can be overcome by informed reading and focused self-assessment on two questions: a) what security levels are your absolute minimum and b) what monthly investment is within your budget.
iPhotos/Photos exists as a default. It is easy to use across a broad spectrum of common needs.
The tragedy is not as much that other options do not exist. The greater tragedy is that, once someone locks themselves into using the Photos library by default and then realizes they want out, getting out requires a sequence of well-planned steps.
Well, you can always import them into Lightroom Classic, which is what I do. Since I don’t use the Photos app, I just plug my iPhone into my Mac and open Lightroom. When I’m in the Library module, my iPhone shows up as a selectable device in the left panel. I select it, hit Import, and it’s done. I don’t know if you can import directly from the Photos app on your Mac, however.
I store my photos on an external SSD drive, which gets backed up to Backblaze. I don’t store my photos in iCloud, Dropbox, or Google drive since I have too many terabytes of raw image files for that to be practical. Since your Lightroom catalogue sits on top of a directory of Finder folders, I don’t see why you couldn’t selectively sync those to a cloud service, though.
Not an issue for me as I use Lightroom with my own storage, but technically, doesn’t Apple have a lock-in here on iOS?
No 3rd party app is allowed the same seamless background access to photos on iOS as Apple’s own Photos/iCloud?
It’s been a while since I tried others, but don’t you still have to leave the app open or re-open a 3rd party cloud storage app so it can grab the latest photos taken on an iPhone?
That’s depends on your definition of lock-in, IMO.
Both Apple and Google have a way to transfer files directly from their service to the other’s. Apple’s method is available via privacy.apple.com. Google’s via takeout.google.com.
And the Google Photos app on iPhone or iPad, or Google Drive app on Mac will sync Apple Photos to Google. The process is manual on mobile (app has to be in foreground), automatic on the Mac.
Yeah, that was point. It may seem trivial to power users, but my SO and the majority of my extended family in the real world, would have tremendous problems using a p photo/library app that isn’t fully automatic.
Hence, the eco-system “lock-in” that Apple and Google have is significant for day-to-day photo tasks for “normal” users.