help sorting out ipad/camera/mac photo storage mess, should i use iphoto?

[madeirabhoy]

whats the best way for me to store, backup, share my photos.

at the minute i dont use iphoto. i have a dropbox account with enough free space, around 18 gigs, to keep my photos and still have a bit of space for other things.

i sometimes take pics with my iphone, but its 3gs so a bit crap. sometimes with my ipad, but mostly with my digital camera, then stick memory stick into mac and copy to dropbox. wife uses ipad mini. ios thingies back up to dropbox i think, but always in the wrong folder then i have to sort and move and whatnot. and im sure i have a lot of duplicates now because of this.

i used to use iphoto, i didnt like the way it sucked all the pics into it in a proprietary way, but it was nice for adding locations and stuff and for showing pics.

i see dropbox says the latest beta does a backup to dropbox from iphoto. would i be best to go back to iphoto, with dropbox automatically backing up everything, and then i would see photostream easier?

 

[Designer Dale]

I would stop fighting that proprietary organization strategy that the folks at apple developed for you and just learn it. Media organization databases like that are a huge bottle of aspirin for the headache that can be caused by the plethora of devices capturing digital images these days.

Dale

 

[ChrisA]

iPhoto works well. It allows you to sort the images many different says. It has smart folders and you can add tags and captions and. iPhoto is smart enough that you can store a image once and have it appear inside any number of
albums and folder.

Using drop box is rather primitive, There is no way to index and search and you have to invent your own file system.

I'd say let iPhoto manage your files and let DropBox act as one of your redundant backup methods. Time machine would be your first level backup, If you don't like the way iPhoto organizes image file Aperture is more flexible and can use or import iPhoto databases. Adobe has a system like this too. Just pick ONE and stick with it. I'd go with iPhoto then if you get frustrated with it upgrade to Aperture but Aperture does have a learning curve.

 

[Razeus]

The downside to iPhoto is that you can't easily get the photos out of it, especially if you need to work on a Windows machine from time to time. My best solution is Dropbox. I actually use Dropbox. Final edits are in Dropbox with a copy of it imported into iPhoto. Sure I have 2x the photos, but it's more security and iPhoto works easily with iDevices.

 

[madeirabhoy]

The downside to iPhoto is that you can't easily get the photos out of it, especially if you need to work on a Windows machine from time to time. My best solution is Dropbox. I actually use Dropbox. Final edits are in Dropbox with a copy of it imported into iPhoto. Sure I have 2x the photos, but it's more security and iPhoto works easily with iDevices.

thats what concerns me, the moving between in iphoto to the real world.

 

[Razeus]

thats what concerns me, the moving between in iphoto to the real world.

Again. My main file management is with Dropbox.

You can send large files or folders to clients/family/friends,

you can share a folder (for example my wife and I with aunts/uncles have photos of our newborn in a folder - we don't have to worry about copying our files to one another),

you can even use their built in "albums" feature and create your own virtual albums that doesn't move your files around in the folders you put them in,

you can share them to Twitter/Facebook natively, or you can get a link and share it to other networks,

you can "jump" to a certain time using their timeline feature and find all your photos.

All my photos are process via Lightroom and exported to a folder I have in Dropbox called Lightroom Exports. From there, I open a 2nd finder window and drag and drop the photos in the folders they belong to. The best part of Dropbox is I never have to worry about backing up my photos.

Some people might say, "What if Dropbox shuts down"? Well, that's the beauty of Dropbox, all of your files are still on your computer so just copy and pasted into another folder for cloud based services (ie SkyDrive). The only thing you'll lose are your albums though.

iPhoto is only used for syncing to my iPad/iPhones and Apple TV screensaver. That's about it. Well, Grandma has a photostream of the little one so she can go print photos of him as I haven't set her up on Dropbox shared folders yet. iPhoto needs serious updating.

 

[ChrisA]

The downside to iPhoto is that you can't easily get the photos out of it,...

It's really easy.

1) Find the photos you want to move, select them.
2) Click Files-> export
3) From there you select the file format (JPG) and size and the folder they are to go into.

They also have plug-ins that allow you to directly upload phots to some phot sharing web sites so you can do that in one step without having to first do the file->export thing. I don't know how it could be made more easy,

To move the photos to a Windows computer, you'd share a folder from your Windows machine and then from inside iPhoto export directly to the shared folder. Yes you might use Drop Box but that moves the photoround trip to some server far away which is to slow if the other computer is on your same local network.

The other problem with Drop Box is the space, I use am 8GB CF card in my camera (A Nikon D200) and it would take "forever" to upload 8GB and I'm quickly fill up the space and most importently HOW WOULD I EDIT the images?

 

[Razeus]

It's really easy.

1) Find the photos you want to move, select them.
2) Click Files-> export
3) From there you select the file format (JPG) and size and the folder they are to go into.

They also have plug-ins that allow you to directly upload phots to some phot sharing web sites so you can do that in one step without having to first do the file->export thing. I don't know how it could be made more easy,

To move the photos to a Windows computer, you'd share a folder from your Windows machine and then from inside iPhoto export directly to the shared folder. Yes you might use Drop Box but that moves the photoround trip to some server far away which is to slow if the other computer is on your same local network.

The other problem with Drop Box is the space, I use am 8GB CF card in my camera (A Nikon D200) and it would take "forever" to upload 8GB and I'm quickly fill up the space and most importently HOW WOULD I EDIT the images?

1) iPhoto exports simply creates another Jpeg file, reducing quality in the process. Also, I find that these exports don't save all the EXIF data.

2) Dropbox space is a non-issue. Sure 8GB's might take forever to upload, but that's were culling comes in. The card gets imported to my hard drive, no cloud service. My final edited picks are then exported to Dropbox. That saves space and jpeg files are much smaller than RAW.

Also, as far as editing, the file is on your computer in a folder. Just point your editing program to it like any other file.

Dropbox is cross platform. With iPhoto, sure I could use Photostream to sure baby photos with my familiy, but not everyone in that group has an iDevice or a Mac. With Dropbox, all you need is an email address. The bonus is that the other people you share with don't even need Dropbox to use it.

 

[diane143]

I put all my photos on the computer, in the folder already called "Pictures". Because I've been using Macs for years, I now have a few folders within that one. There are ones named for each camera I've used, plus I have some scans of negatives stored in there.

If I want to put something online or post to FB, I edit it if I want, save it to another folder in the pix folder (called FB, pix to print, whatever). I can then upload and delete. I still have my originals.

I've just started to use Aperture, but I've been using iView Media Pro for years. That I used for basic organizing, culling of pix I may have wanted to use for a calendar, or publishing to a web page (iView allowed for an export to html).

The other day I tried to export from Aperture to FB and not one person commented on the pix in an hour, until I deleted the album and reposted directly. Not sure what happened there (it was a sunset sequence so I was pretty surprised at the lack of comments!).

Anyway, pix storage is not rocket science. I only use cloud stuff as a backup of a backup.

Diane

 

[JayKay107]

It's been 7 months now going round with Apple on why my photos would not sync up to the cloud. I've got from hanging up at 22k left to load down to 1 left to load, but the albums still do not populate to my devices. Anyone else having problems? Apple engineers keep asking for more details but no solutions from them (7 Months!)

 

[robgendreau]

I'd suggest you start a new thread, rather than this zombie thread on iPhoto.