Apple Photos cloud Library

[JamesMay82]

I’ve been running an Apple photos and Lightroom cloud library. Which is great with the convenience of it all but I’ve become conscious of how much this is costing me a month in cloud storage. It got me thinking about just going back to local storage only and syncing the photos to iPhone the old fashioned way.

Is anyone else storing local and how do you find it with syncing other devices?

If I’m syncing photos from my computer to my phone will my phone still do all the photos of the day recommendations etc?

 

[drrich2]

I don't have answers, but I have questions that might help others answer. What sort of local storage are you contemplating - keeping the photo library on your Mac's internal drive, or on an attached external drive, or on a NAS (whether physically connected or via wifi)?

Do you want your entire photo library physically on your iPhone? If you set up a NAS device to act as your own personal cloud with your Photos library on it, will you still want to keep your entire library on your iPhone, too?

How do you anticipate syncing your iPhone and home systems? Do you just keep everything on your phone and run a cable from your Mac to the phone and download to the Mac, or is there more going on?

My iPhone 12 Pro Max does remembrance shows on occasion, despite that I don't use iCloud to sync photos with my 2017 iMac nor do I keep a copy of my whole photo library on the phone, just a chosen assortment of photos.

I believe unlimited photo storage is a benefit of Amazon Prime's service; if you use that service anyway, it might be another way to backup in case you're concerned about losing your work.

 

[JamesMay82]

I don't have answers, but I have questions that might help others answer. What sort of local storage are you contemplating - keeping the photo library on your Mac's internal drive, or on an attached external drive, or on a NAS (whether physically connected or via wifi)?

Do you want your entire photo library physically on your iPhone? If you set up a NAS device to act as your own personal cloud with your Photos library on it, will you still want to keep your entire library on your iPhone, too?

How do you anticipate syncing your iPhone and home systems? Do you just keep everything on your phone and run a cable from your Mac to the phone and download to the Mac, or is there more going on?

My iPhone 12 Pro Max does remembrance shows on occasion, despite that I don't use iCloud to sync photos with my 2017 iMac nor do I keep a copy of my whole photo library on the phone, just a chosen assortment of photos.

I believe unlimited photo storage is a benefit of Amazon Prime's service; if you use that service anyway, it might be another way to backup in case you're concerned about losing your work.

My plan was to keep them just in my Mac’s internal drive and then Back up to an external drive.

For my phone I was just going to sync via the mac finder like how they do with syncingmusic.

The fact your phone does the photo memories without being on the cloud is a good thing.

It is nice having the photos on my phone but must admit I do most of my browsing on my computer anyways.

I can always use cloud sharing albums for my favs as well if don’t sync them to my phone I think.

I know it sounds like petty but I think with all the subscription services we have these days it all adds quite quickly and some of it is expensive when you factor in how much we actually use them all.

 

[drrich2]

I know it sounds like petty but I think with all the subscription services we have these days it all adds quite quickly and some of it is expensive when you factor in how much we actually use them all.

The phrase 'death by a thousand cuts' comes to mind, yes, I agree.

I don't have a NAS, at least not yet. Here's a PC Mag. article on them from Nov. 2023; check this out:

Synology DiskStation DS220j​

Best Budget Two-Bay NAS Device for Personal Cloud Setups​

4.0 Excellent

It helps to start somewhere. For sake of argument, let's say you picked this up and put a pair of drives in it to use as your personal 'Cloud' server, and when you wanted access to your entire Photos library from your phone abroad, I'd think you could do it. The review on it's from April 2020, so you might want something newer/higher end.

MacWorld has a Feb. 2023 article on NAS for Mac and speaks highly of a Western Digital option.

While I'm not pushing any single option (though Synology is reputable and where I might start looking), does the NAS option look good to you? Any particularly limitations you see with it?

 

[Ray2]

Until very recently I did Photos locally. Primarily as I was, and continue to be, unimpressed with the basic DAM functionality Photos has (sorting images within albums as an example, though there are others). Images now reside on a 2 gb internal. Prior to that, on a 4 TB ssd running off a, then, Thunderbolt 3 hub. Subscriptions don’t bother me as I have all of 2, of which one is Adobe's 20 gb Photography plan.

I’m syncing 1 Mac, 3 iPads and 2 iPhones. Too much of a hassle so I dedicated some of my Adobe space to 92%, 2048 max size images. That’s 2,000 images, spread over 35 albums, easily batch named, sorted and keyworded the way I want, taking up 9 gb. Plus a free website and an excellent 1-shot publishing tool used during travel.

If I decided to abandon Adobe, I’d go back to local as I continue to view Apple Photos' DAM as borderline useless.