iPod touch Photos: How to sync a folder of photos across all my devices?

The crux of having a neat solution is to have a wifi internet connection for your iPod Touch. Is that a budgetary thing, security concerns...? With it, you can use either Dropbox or iCloud. Without it, whatever you do for sharing the photos among your other computers has to be supplemented by syncing your Touch whenever you've made changes to the contents of that folder.

Let's say you do add wifi... I'd recommend using iCloud over Dropbox.

The files in Dropbox are only available when you have an internet connection. Obviously, not a problem for your computers, but if you want to view the photos on your Touch when off-grid, you'd need to save the photos from Dropbox to your Photo Library as a separate step, at a time when you are connected.

If you use iCloud (I'd recommend an iCloud Shared Photo Stream), any changes to that Photo Stream would be saved to your iPod Photo Library automatically whenever and wherever you have a wifi web connection. Photos is tightly integrated with the iOS environment - you can access your Photos library from any number of apps, whether for editing, embedding in email, whatever. The same is not true of Dropbox. It makes the most sense to me to use the method that puts the photos in the Photos library right from the start.

With an in-house wifi internet connection you could then take advantage of iCloud's other features - automated backup (if your Touch is left in a charger overnight and it has a wifi connection), "live" syncing of calendars, contacts, mail, reminders, etc. Dropbox doesn't do that. Then there are the basic benefits of having an internet connection for your Touch: browsing, messaging, emailing, etc. It's a long list.

Without wifi internet at home? If your Mac and Windows computers are networked, you could obviously just create a folder on whichever machine you use to edit/manage the photos you import from your camera(s), and share it across your network. If they're not networked, then Dropbox works for the file transfer.

"Boot" implies that you don't leave all your computers up and running round the clock. If so, it pays to have those files in a place where they're always up and running (either Dropbox or iCloud), so that you're not dependent on having the machine hosting the photo folder up and running at all times.