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  • unwashed
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2008
    • 694

    Online photo services

    Do any of you guys use online photo services like Flickr, Google Photo's, iCloud, Dropbox to store and access large 'professional' photo libraries?

    I'm thinking of switching from my NAS to an online paid service for that extra feeling of security and being able to access my photo's anywhere anytime. I'd like to hear your reviews for any services. I have read some online reviews, but I cannot tell if those are really objective or sponsored.

    I read some good stuff about Google Photo's with a very good search engine (no surpirse since it's their core business), but also read about poor streaming from phone to chromecast and buffertimes of video's. also the free account gives unlimited storage but limits the size to 16mb. I have photo's exceeding this limit so this is no option. then it's $9.99 for 1TB per month. Same price as iCloud.

    Why ask on a fashion forum? Well I'd figure there would be amature or pro photographers here and possibly working in the fashion business with large libraries.

    Like to hear user reviews from you guys!
    Grailed link
  • absintheparty
    Member
    • May 2013
    • 39

    #2
    I suppose it comes down to identifying what your personal needs would look like. Both photo and video are quickly becoming handled in the same way, so I’ll speak for both. I do not believe an online service to be a direct replacement over local backups, rather a supplement.

    Coming from a professional standpoint, I love how convenient online services are for quick references and limited distribution. Though if you shoot in uncompressed formats to be backed up, you can run into a lot of trouble. bandwidth, limitations on file types etc. If you are using these formats, even local playback is a problem. Anything hosted to be viewed online may change your original colour space and wouldn’t be suitable as an original backup. Of course, web could be your only intention.

    Are you looking for permanent backup for data with large or a lot files? For a professional solution, I believe LTO taping to be the best long(er)-term storage (~30 years). Less of a risk compared to hard-disks, and less degradation over time. Also this way, you would no longer be at the mercy of an online service going under at any point - complete self reliance, however offline. Great as combo with a NAS for live work, and later indexing. The decks are expensive (tapes themselves are cheap), but should be able to rent a deck in a major city long enough to clear a NAS when you start to run out of space.

    I personally would use a NAS (and since you already have one) preferably with disk-redundancy, and you should be able to set up an FTP to have access to anything you may need. Less convenient and more of a learning curve, though unlimited options. You could combine this with an online service as well, in the event a complete drive failure you still would have a lossy copy. Additionally, for weeding out your 'selects' and having a very presentable and convenient digital album.

    For an online photo service, the best I have encountered is SmugMug. the basic membership is real cheap, and their design/customization is step above others, seeing as aesthetics is very important to us here. 150MB per image limit and some video support. Can’t comment on the Chromecast as I haven’t used it, but looks like there is some support for it.

    Of course, I don’t know what your particular needs may be, how much data you're dealing with, and how important the media is to you, so these are just a few options to look into.

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    • unwashed
      Senior Member
      • Dec 2008
      • 694

      #3
      Thanks for the advise.

      I have read a review of smugmug. It was in a top list of best online photo storage services somewhere.

      I have tried Flickr and Google so far. It's insane how Google can analyse your photo's and tag them. I have uploaded some random photo's from the last couple of months and did some random searches. 'Holiday' resulted in a photo with a christmas tree, 'shoes' in some shoes I sold but also in random pictures of me wearing shoes and 'baby' resulted in the pictures of my son. Very cool but also scary.

      Too bad I cannot auto-sync my video's to Flickr, because the 1TB is very nice. I might still go for Flickr because of the storage.

      I will still use my NAS (currently in JBOD) for all the raw files, make a local back-up on an external HDD. But the web interface of Flickr or Google is better than Photo Station, therefore need an online service as well. The only thing is how to keep everything synced, this will be the biggest challenge
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