Full iCloud for iPhoto?

Question

Full iCloud for iPhoto?

Since iCloud launch in UK and the gradual turning on of features like photostream, and iTunes match, the possibilities of how this can be of benefit to me a normal home user seem great. I've all my music secured to the cloud, my iPhone backups etc, the biggest liability to me now is that all my photo's are stored on my local HDD, and while I take time machine backups, it would seem ideal feature to have all photo's stored in the cloud and available to all my devices on demand similar to how photostream works.

Does anyone know if there are any plans for Apple to add iPhoto full backup to iCloud in next year or two or any possible 3rd party solutions?

iPhoto '11, Mac OS X (10.7.2), iCloud

Posted on Jan 18, 2012 5:03 AM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Jan 18, 2012 5:14 AM in response to mister_potato_head

No one outside of Apple knows what their plan are, and they won't say until they're ready.

You can back up your iPhoto Library to the Cloud now using services like DropBox et al. But the volume of data being moved is very large and we regularly see people complaining here about the days it can take to back up or restore a library.

FWIW I don't think the clound is ready to use for backing up large amounts of data conveniently at this time.

Here's what I do: It's a mixture of Hard Drives on and off site, as well as onlone.

My Library lives on my iMac. It’s Backed up to two external hard disks every day. These disks are permanently attached to the iMac. These back ups run automatically. One is done by Time Machine, one is a bootable back up done by SuperDuper

It’s also backed up to a portable hard disk when ever new photos are added. This hard disk lives in my car. For security, this disk is password protected.

I have a second off-site back up at a relative’s house across town. That’s updated every 3 or 4 months.

My Photos are backed up online. There are many options: Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug etc. However, check the terms of your account carefully. While most sites have free uploading, you will often find that these uploads are limited in terms of the file size or the bandwidth you can use per month. For access that allows you to upload full size pics with no restrictions you may need to pay.

Every couple of months I test the back ups to make sure they are working correctly. It’s very easy to mis-configure a back up application, and the only way to protect against that is to do a trial restore.

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Answer 2

Jan 19, 2012 9:16 AM in response to Yer_Man

Terence, thanks for your response.

Fair enough there is nothing official and if you'd have asked me last 12 months ago I would have agreed and said we're a long long way off. But as iCloud is now launched, all my music is stored in the cloud, as are my last 1000 photos with photostream, I would guess we're heading towards and in another 12 months who knows.

I agree whole heartedly though there is no present convinient solution, I like what you've done with the multi site HDD backups but for me that would be too complicated to remember to keep doing. So for now will stick with the backup to single time machine HDD, as while being only one extra point of failure at least it looks after itself.

I've toyed with the idea of some services like, Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug etc, and may go for one of these as an interim step. But I've invested alot of effort in adding metadata to the iPhoto library, like nearly all photo's are face tagged and location geotagged, and again the simplicity of uploading from 2x iphones and a DSLR to the one point and then easy syncing out photo's back to ipad \ iphone by selecting the events has become a bit embedded in our process. The addition of the iCloud music service when you start using it frequently just gets the mind racing about how good it would be to have access to thumbnails of all your photo's all the time which you could download and cache as needed.

Presently its a bit of a null point as there is no planned changes to move iPhoto fully into iCloud, but if there was I think I'd be one of first to try and sign up. In the interim I'll have to try and work something out with Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug etc, or rent a domain name with some GB of storage and place the backups on there.

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Answer 3

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Jan 19, 2012 11:05 AM in response to mister_potato_head

I don't think the point is storage in the Cloud. There's plenty of that. It's the speed of access that the issue. With Photo libraries well in excess of 100 gigs there are very few people with broadband speeds that make backing up or restoring anything but a multi-day exercise - and heaven help anyone with a broadband data limit.

So, even if Apple add some sort of permanent photo storage to the cloud, actually basing iPhoto up there is dependent on your ISP and not Apple.

Regards

TD

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Answer 4

May 27, 2015 1:14 PM in response to Yer_Man

Hi Terence, it took a while but we got there with the Photo's app :-)

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