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Solution for Shared Media Library with Spouse

purdnost

purdnost

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 2, 2018
497
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I want a shared photo/video library that both my wife and I can access on our devices, as well a something that will automatically sync new content (or at least allow for upload).

This rules out Apple Photos and iCloud Files.

Is Dropbox a good solution these days? Open to suggestions.
 
Are you ruling out iCloud as you are android users? Or do you share the same Apple ID? Can you setup family sharing and achieve it?

Dropbox is good especially now that it allows you to keep files online thus freeing up space but I think it mucks about with JPEG’s when uploaded to optimise them for storage.

Are you looking for access anywhere or just at home? I ask as a NAS device or a USN hard drive connected to your wife router may work.
 
I have had really good luck with pcloud. It has apps for all devices, and even a Linux client. The other nice thing about is is that you can do monthly payments or a single lifetime payment, and they take user privacy very seriously.
 
Old school would be an external drive with permissions disabled. Not super practical if you are accessing via iPhone...

FWIW I have no complaint as to how DropBox handles JPEGs. However I keep my images to a max of 1250 pixels wide or 850 pixels tall. If there are issues they might relate to images bigger than that.

OTOH OneDrive seems to apply its own sharpening filters rendering it effectively useless.
 
What I don’t care about on Dropbox is how big of a memory hog it has become. For what should mostly be a background process, it takes up a fair amount of RAM (500MB). Not a big deal if you have 8GB+, but not so good if you’re running an older system with less than 8GB. What I do like is they also support all platforms, including Linux. That’s a big plus for any cloud system, IMO, as it gives you freedom to change platforms, or use more than one platform.
 
purdnost said:
I want a shared photo/video library that both my wife and I can access on our devices, as well a something that will automatically sync new content (or at least allow for upload).

This rules out Apple Photos and iCloud Files.

Is Dropbox a good solution these days? Open to suggestions.
Click to expand...
Why did you rule out iCloud? Use iCloud Photo Library, create a shared album, add your wife, and both of you can upload your photos/videos to that album. Anything you put in there will automatically shown on your wife's device.

Any cloud services would work with shared folder, but if you have Macs/iPhones, iCloud solution is easier as it integrates with the Photos app. Another option is to use Google Photos, but they don't have good desktop client. OneDrive is another option, but the photo viewing experience on the OneDrive app is quite poor/basic. Dropbox is similar, and you only have 2GB free (Dropbox used to have a separate photo viewer, but they discontinued that).
 
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Darmok N Jalad said:
What I don’t care about on Dropbox is how big of a memory hog it has become. For what should mostly be a background process, it takes up a fair amount of RAM (500MB). Not a big deal if you have 8GB+, but not so good if you’re running an older system with less than 8GB. What I do like is they also support all platforms, including Linux. That’s a big plus for any cloud system, IMO, as it gives you freedom to change platforms, or use more than one platform.
Click to expand...
I just access DropBox from my web browser, so no memory issues at all.

I did not like the DropBox application, and when I removed it, I ended up reinstalling my system from a back-up disk image. That was the only way I could get rid of the hole DropBox punched in the Snow Leopard firewall. That was several years ago so I make zero claims as to that information being current.
 
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ian87w said:
Why did you rule out iCloud? Use iCloud Photo Library, create a shared album, add your wife, and both of you can upload your photos/videos to that album. Anything you put in there will automatically shown on your wife's device.

Any cloud services would work with shared folder, but if you have Macs/iPhones, iCloud solution is easier as it integrates with the Photos app. Another option is to use Google Photos, but they don't have good desktop client. OneDrive is another option, but the photo viewing experience on the OneDrive app is quite poor/basic. Dropbox is similar, and you only have 2GB free (Dropbox used to have a separate photo viewer, but they discontinued that).
Click to expand...
I suppose my only concern is the thumbnails, when viewing content, take up a ton of space on my nearly full 64GB iPhone. I wonder how iOS handles this.
 
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