Family photo management / storage - iCloud or Google or other?

[RedTomato]

I'm in a bit of a dilemma, hope you can help me guys.

I have about 300GB+ of photos / videos, my partner also has about 100GB of photos / videos, and we have two kids who also like taking photos.

- I have a 128GB Macbook Air which is far too small to hold my photos. At the moment my photos are mostly in Photos on an old 500GB HD that I plug in whenever I need to clear photos off my 64GB iphone, and this is backed up to a Time Capsule.

- My partner is very non-technical, also has a 128GB MBA and a 32 GB iphone, and she puts her photos onto Photos on a SanDisk Ultra 200GB MicroSD card, that however keeps failing to launch and wanting to be rebuilt (which I have to do for her). This could be an issue with the card, or with the Nifty Minidrive MicroSD MBA adaptor

- As I said, two kids with an obsession with taking photos of cats and themselves pulling silly faces. Once or twice is nice but I don't want my timeline filled with 2000 photos of the same cat in slightly different positions.

- We both sometimes take photos for work / not to be shared with family.

- I often take 200 photos in one session then review and delete 197 of them. At the moment I do this on my phone but it's a pain in the ass. I often do minor editing, mainly cropping and some levelling in Photos.

- I'm wary of cloud-only, so being able to continue with the local-backup would be good.

I'm fed up with this situation. Can you advise me which is the best way forward at a reasonable budget friendly price?

Go with iCloud family plan or Google or seperate Flickr accounts or Smugmug or whatever?

TLDR: Circa 400 GB of photos, about 4 of us, devices with limited space, must allow easy review / deleting, minor editing, budget is limited, some futureproofing / ease of export needed.

EDIT: After reading some of the other posts on similar topics, I'd like to add we have a good unlimited optic fibre internet service at home. Uploading 300GB over a couple of weeks is not a problem.

I'm also open to the idea of a home server or NAS for backup purposes - I don't have one at the moment but I've been toying with building a miniITX hackintosh. However I wouldn't want it to be switched on all the time - waste of electricity - this was partly why I took down my last home server / NAS a few years ago.

 

[400]

Cannot help much but I would be backing up with as many options as is reasonable. Certainly not relying on the cloud and a single hard drive. I would factor in an off site option as well, maybe updated a few times a year and kept at friends/family etc.

I use an iMac with attached hard drives and keep my library on external drive, easier I suppose than a laptop as I can leave it all in place and connected. I do use iCloud but find it a faff to share, I would rather there were more options to add family in rather than share out, with 37,000 images or so and 300gb worth, it would be easier for me. Maybe I am missing a function and not understanding iCloud sharing.

I use time machine and Carbon Copy Cloner to manage backups.

 

[Apple fanboy]

I'm in a bit of a dilemma, hope you can help me guys.

I have about 300GB+ of photos / videos, my partner also has about 100GB of photos / videos, and we have two kids who also like taking photos.

- I have a 128GB Macbook Air which is far too small to hold my photos. At the moment my photos are mostly in Photos on an old 500GB HD that I plug in whenever I need to clear photos off my 64GB iphone, and this is backed up to a Time Capsule.

- My partner is very non-technical, also has a 128GB MBA and a 32 GB iphone, and she puts her photos onto Photos on a SanDisk Ultra 200GB MicroSD card, that however keeps failing to launch and wanting to be rebuilt (which I have to do for her). This could be an issue with the card, or with the Nifty Minidrive MicroSD MBA adaptor

- As I said, two kids with an obsession with taking photos of cats and themselves pulling silly faces. Once or twice is nice but I don't want my timeline filled with 2000 photos of the same cat in slightly different positions.

- We both sometimes take photos for work / not to be shared with family.

- I often take 200 photos in one session then review and delete 197 of them. At the moment I do this on my phone but it's a pain in the ass. I often do minor editing, mainly cropping and some levelling in Photos.

- I'm wary of cloud-only, so being able to continue with the local-backup would be good.

I'm fed up with this situation. Can you advise me which is the best way forward at a reasonable budget friendly price?

Go with iCloud family plan or Google or seperate Flickr accounts or Smugmug or whatever?

TLDR: Circa 400 GB of photos, about 4 of us, devices with limited space, must allow easy review / deleting, minor editing, budget is limited, some futureproofing / ease of export needed.

EDIT: After reading some of the other posts on similar topics, I'd like to add we have a good unlimited optic fibre internet service at home. Uploading 300GB over a couple of weeks is not a problem.

I'm also open to the idea of a home server or NAS for backup purposes - I don't have one at the moment but I've been toying with building a miniITX hackintosh. However I wouldn't want it to be switched on all the time - waste of electricity - this was partly why I took down my last home server / NAS a few years ago.

1 TB of free storage on Flickr. You can then access your images from any device.

As for the original just buy a couple of 1 TB drives. Use carbon Copy Cloner to make two copies and keep one offsite (e.g. Work) so your covered for theft/fire/flood.

As long as you do them regularly your covered when one fails.

 

[Fishrrman]

I lean towards AppleFanboy's advice above.

You have 300gb+ of data.
Your partner has 100gb+ of data.

I can think of two ways I'd handle this:

FIRST WAY:
- I'd get TWO 1tb hard drives
- I'd partition each of the drives: 1 partition 700gb, the other partition 300gb.
- I'd put YOUR pics on the 700gb partition and the partner's pics on the 300gb.
- Then, I'd use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to CLONE EACH PARTITION to a second drive, similarly partitioned.
- Then, I'd keep ONE of the drives in a safe, off-site location as disaster prevention.

SECOND WAY: (a little more $$$)
- I'd get a 480gb SSD and a 240gb SSD, and a 1tb platter-based hard drive
- I'd partition the 1tb hard drive same as above.
- I'd put YOUR pics on the 480gb SSD, and your partner's pics on the 240gb SSD. (the reason for SSDs are no moving parts to fail, hopefully for longevity)
- I'd back up each SSD to the backup 1tb drive (just as above)
- I'd store the backup at the off-site location.

 

[one more]

I use Google Photos and am pretty happy with it. You have an unlimited storage with the only downside that your photos should not exceed 16 MP: https://www.google.com/photos/about/

For privacy, you can create a random Google account having nothing to do with your real name, place, date of birth, etc. and use that for your Google Photos collection.

Apple’s iCloud problem is storage, especially when we talk about photos & videos. My cloud synchronised Google Photo library dates back to Jan 2015 and currently takes 131 Mb of iPhone’s space. My Apple Photo app currently contains 32 photos & 4 videos (4 minutes of video in total between them), all taken with SE’s 12 MP camera. This lot takes 1GB of iPhone’s storage. I know I can move it all to the iCloud Photo Library and have lighter versions stored on the phone, but at this rate (4 GB of photos/videos per months) I will fill up the 50GB of iCloud storage in one year, 200GB - in 4 years, etc. I won’t have this problem with Google. Besides, I have read on the local forums that people with large Apple photo libraries were having their devices heat up & lose a lot of battery power with beta 11 installed, as all of their local footage needed to be converted to the new file formats & reindexed. No issue with Google Photos either.

Lastly, just as an extra bonus, historically Google offer better reliability of their online services than Apple.

 

[Ray2]

My opinion of cloud storage: 4.7 gig of important documents. Financial, medical, work related, etc. on iCloud. Image appeared as a 4.7 gig file but my iCloud usage did not show it. Tried to open the image, nope. Worked with Apple's support crew for 3 weeks. They never could get the image back.

Yes, backed up to an hdd other than 500 mb of imaging files I could easily get back from the imaging center.

Need I say more?

 

[RedTomato]

1 TB of free storage on Flickr. You can then access your images from any device.

I lean towards AppleFanboy's advice above

I use Google Photos and am pretty happy with it. You have an unlimited storage with the only downside that your photos should not exceed 16 MP: https://www.google.com/photos/about/

Guys thanks for your suggestions. Local backup hardware is easy for me to sort out, it's the online / multi-device part that is giving me pause.

I'm a strong believer in having two local copies and one off-site copy. For me, the cloud copy counts as the offsite copy.

At the moment, it seems the two main options are Apple iCloud and Google Photos, and I'm going to do some more research.

Edit:

iCloud
Advantage: Apple native. Ease of use for my partner. All photos and videos accessible on all devices. Full resolution saved.
Local backup process: Plug in external drive, open Photos, open external library, Photos / Preferences / iCloud / Download Originals to this Mac. Happy to do this once a month or so. Second backup of external via Time Capsule.
Cost: £7 per month for 2TB (£84/year)
+ this 2TB will be enough to back up all our other iDevices / laptops (family sharing coming with macOS 11)
+ we already pay 2 x £1 per month for 50GB icloud for our iphones. so this will be only £5 extra on top

Disadvantage: Apple's always struggled with cloud services.

Google Photos
Advantage: Free. New services and concepts continually coming online.
Disadvantage: Free. In a state of flux. Not Apple native. Complex restrictions that I have to remember, especially with respect to videos (we take a fair number of short videos). I still have to sort out / pay for data backup for our idevices / laptops, which is a pain point.
Local backup process: No idea. It looks like Google Photos deliberately makes it hard to keep a local backup.
EDIT: So far, it looks like the concept is throw all new photos and videos from all devices into Google Photos online, select the best ones, put them into folders, then download these favourite folders (as zip files) once a month or so with an external drive. If a folder is updated online, then the whole thing needs to be downloaded. Also I have to manually keep track of which folders I've already downloaded, or need to be redownloaded. Is that right?

---
So far, the balance tilts heavily towards Apple iCloud, especially as the 2TB will provide off-site backup for all 7(!) of our family devices, which is worth £5 a month in its own right. I think I need to open a Google Photos account and play with it before making a final decision.

 

[ChrisA]

I have about 300GB+ of photos / videos, my partner also has about 100GB of photos / videos, and we have two kids who also like taking photos.

Adobe Lightroom works well for organizing and minor edits. Add keywords and other meta data and you will be able to find the photos later.

Where to store: You really need a local disk drive. 300GB is not a lot. A 3TB drive would only be 10% full

Adobe allows you to keep the original files on the hard drive and the catalog on other computers. The catalog contains reduced resolution "tiny" versions of the photos so they would futon a notebook computer. (you get to pick the size, go really-type on a small 128GB MacBook air)

You can work off line and do things like edits and leveling using just the catalog then sync the changes back to the library next time you connect.

Backup: You need at last two backups of the library. Two is the minimum. One of those can be cloud stage. but NOT something like iDrive a Google drive. Those are for live data and don't hold old versions. Go with a service like Backblaze for $5 per month and they will store the computer and the external drive. A second or third backup can be to a disk you keeping the closet and to the Time Machine disk you should already have running

This setup lets you work on a disconnected notebook, or if at home a connected one. It allows several people to use the library and keeps a copy off site and another copy near by.

 

[RedTomato]

Adobe Lightroom works well for organizing and minor edits. Add keywords and other meta data and you will be able to find the photos later.

Where to store: You really need a local disk drive. 300GB is not a lot. A 3TB drive would only be 10% full

Adobe allows you to keep the original files on the hard drive and the catalog on other computers. The catalog contains reduced resolution "tiny" versions of the photos so they would futon a notebook computer. (you get to pick the size, go really-type on a small 128GB MacBook air)

Adobe LightRoom would work for me, but it's too much for my partner and kids. I'm really leaning towards just going for iCloud's 2TB option, as it would solve several other issues too. Local backup will be via TM / SD or CCC.

One unknown is how High Sierra / APFS deals with Time Machine / Super Duper / CCC etc. We're getting really close to showtime and vast oceans of uncertainty remain. Super Duper's CEO has advised holding off on High Sierra for several months if backups are important to you.
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My opinion of cloud storage: 4.7 gig of important documents. Financial, medical, work related, etc. on iCloud. Image appeared as a 4.7 gig file but my iCloud usage did not show it. Tried to open the image, nope. Worked with Apple's support crew for 3 weeks. They never could get the image back.

Yes, backed up to an hdd other than 500 mb of imaging files I could easily get back from the imaging center.

Need I say more?

Yes that's why I want local backup as well as cloud-based. 2 local copies, one remote.