Sh*t my brain says and forgets about

Tag: photography

Choosing Between Google, Amazon, & iCloud Photos

PhotoOptions

I recently went down the rabbit hole of figuring out if I am using the right solution for offsite storage of my photo library. I’ve been using iCloud Photos for over a year and am not totally happy with the solution. I decided to try out both Amazon Prime Photos and Google Photos.

My home Internet connection has a 5Mb/s upload speed which feels pathetically slow. I wanted to test each solution with a good chunk of my photo library uploaded which made this a time-consuming experience. Here’s what I came up with after about two weeks of futzing.

My Scenario & Options

  • Using macOS & iOS primarily. Support for Android would be nice but isn’t 100% required.
  • 20k photos & videos
  • 120GB of disk space
  • Sources of images:
    • Canon Digital Rebel (including CRW RAW)
    • Canon 40D DSLR (including CR2 RAW)
    • iPhone 1st gen through iPhone 7 Plus
    • iPod nano videos
    • Other shitty digital cameras over the years
    • Handful of scanned photos & negatives

iCloud Photos

This solution sort of just works for me. I can take pictures on my phone and they’re automatically backed up into iCloud when I’m back onto a WiFi network. My iMac at home downloads all originals so I have a copy of every photo and video on disk without an Internet connection. iCloud sync is built into the Photos Mac app and into iOS.

The downside is every time I take an HD video or a ton of photos it swamps my WiFi connection. During the summer we’re at our camper/cottage and have a very slow 2Mbps down/1Mbps up connection. I have to frequently shut off WiFi on my phone so our connection is usable. There is no way to be explicit about when sync happens.

iCloud Photos can also intelligently cache items on your devices with less storage than your library size. While this seems magical it also means it uses WiFi or cellular data when you want to view a photo or video that isn’t cached on the device yet. Spending an evening reminiscing with friends going through images and videos from years back can easily chew through gigabytes of cellular data. There is also no way to mark an album or set of items as more important so they’re always cached.

Faces also do not sync across iCloud. Every machine/device that is connected has to process faces independently – or so it seems. If I take time to train/teach/curate faces on my iMac they don’t show up on my laptop or iPhone.

Storage is pretty cheap – 200GB is $2.99/month. I’m getting pretty close to that limit which means my only option is to move to 1TB at $9.99/month. When that limit is breached I’d probably end up using iCloud for more file storage (instead of DropBox) since I’ll be paying for it.

Amazon Prime Photos

I have Amazon Prime for our house which means I get their Prime Photos option included. This service provides for unlimited image storage and 5GB of video storage. You can upgrade to unlimited storage of any files for $60/year.

Amazon has a sync tool that you can drag your Apple Photos library file onto and it’ll sync all of your master images. The uploader gives you options for the number of concurrent uploads as well as how much bandwidth each upload can take. If you leave it with the default settings you’ll most likely swamp your connection if you’re at 5Mbps or less so some tweaking is required. Sync can be automatic as well but I don’t have a ton of confidence that it’ll be able to sync changes “magically”.

Uploading took forever and I never let it finish as I wanted to try out the service before investing in a week of uploading. The web interface has face detection, subject detection (find me photos with dogs, etc), and places if you recorded GPS coordinates in the metadata. Randomly some of my RAW images shot with either Canon camera would be mirrored for no real reason. This was a hard stop for me.

Google Photos

Google Photos gives you unlimited photo and video storage for free if you choose their compressed option. With this option they’ll shrink the items down without any real visible difference. You can also buy more storage if you want to store the originals without compression.

The uploader tool seems to understand how an Apple Photos library is structured and handled initial sync really well except for my RAW images. All of the raw images I shot with my Canon Digital Rebel from roughly 2004 – 2008 couldn’t be imported. I should take the time to convert to Adobe Digital Negative format as this is better supported by software since it’s not hardware-specific.

Google’s photo interface is a bit weird especially if you’re not familiar with Android and the material design paradigms. After a while I did get used to it and preferred it over Amazon. I ended up uploading my entire library and purchased 100GB of storage for $1.99. That and the extra storage I earned was just enough to store all of my originals which means iCloud has 20GB or more of bloat.

I ended up not going with Google Photos because of the failed import of all of my older RAW images. Every time I restarted my computer the sync tool would try to re-upload all 2,500 failed images taking time and bandwidth up. If I end up converting those old images into DNG format I may try again.

The Comparison

Storage

  • iCloud Photos – 5GB free, 50GB $1/month, 200GB $3/month, 1TB $10/month, 2TB $20/month.
  • Amazon Prime Photos – Unlimited Photo Storage (included with Prime $99/year), 5GB free for videos & everything else, unlimited everything $60/year (plus annual Prime membership).
  • Google Photos – Unlimited Photo & Video Storage (if you’re okay with compression/reduction in quality), original quality uses Drive storage plans: 15GB free, 100GB $2/month, 1TB $10/month, 2TB $20/month.

Winner? Depends. If you have Amazon Prime already their $60/year unlimited beats them all. If you’re okay with compressed images & videos, Google is the winner. If you want original images & videos stored then iCloud has the best price breaks under 1TB.

Sync

  • iCloud Photos – Relies upon your library being in Apple Photos or iPhoto and on a Mac or solely stored on an iOS 9+ device. Sync is automatic on WiFi on iOS, automatic all the time on any Internet connection on macOS. All metadata except detected faces is synced. Client is integrated with the operating system – nothing else to install. Sync includes new photos, changed metadata, edited photos, and deletion. Devices can also choose to not sync all images and only download on demand.
  • Amazon Prime Photos – Amazon has an app for syncing your Drive folders and also functionality for uploading items without syncing. If you upload your Apple Photos library it knows how to pick out the originals only. Further changes to your library aren’t synced automatically so I’m not sure how well deduping will work later on. Amazon Prime Photos does not then keep your photo library in “sync”.
  • Google Photos – Google has an app for syncing your Drive folders and a Desktop Uploader app. The uploader app knows how to access an Apple Photos library to upload originals and it’ll keep track of changes so Google Photos gets all new items and possibly edited items. It will not remove deleted photos.

Winner? iCloud Photos. Being able to keep a library synced on multiple devices and changes pushed across all of them makes it the clear choice on my end. If you want to make Amazon or Google the “system of record” for your images then real synchronization isn’t as important.

Bells & Whistles

  • iCloud Photos: macOS Photos app, iOS Photos app, and iCloud.com Photos browser. Apps have Face detection, geolocation, shared photo streams, automatically generated albums like “best of last two weeks”, etc. Supports a ton of RAW camera image types going back 13+ years of models.
  • Amazon Prime Photos: iOS & Android apps, Amazon.com Photos browser. Face detection and tagging server-side, geolocation, family albums. RAW image support is advertised to be fairly limited to newer models but does support older cameras albeit buggy.
  • Google Photos: iOS & Android apps, Google.com Photos browser. Face detection, tagging, geolocation, and automatically generated albums are all server-side. Supports a much more limited RAW image format range & uploader app does not gracefully handle failed image uploads.

Winner? Google Photos. The discovery mechanism for finding memories is the best experience by far. Their photos assistant will suggest fun animations, photo treatments, album groupings, and mosaics. iCloud Photos feels like it’s emphasis is on flawless sync rather than server-side experience consistency with the discovery features like faces and locations.

Verdict? Sticking with iCloud Photos

For now I’m sticking with iCloud Photos. I didn’t want to lose any fidelity in my library and I wanted a sync solution that just worked that included deletes and edits. It’s not the cheapest solution after 200GB or the most flexible with the software options for syncing and bandwidth throttling. Amazon’s flakey RAW image support & Google’s graceless unsupported RAW images in their uploader stopped me from picking either of those options.

Discing or Disking

I prefer discing.

IMG_8467-2

Why? Because I can.

Sonic Energy

I love that you can add energy to anything at Sonic. I am feeling a bit run down today – still have a cold – so I juiced up a Cherry Limeaid with Energy!

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How to take a (proper) selfie

A majority of the selfies I see being taken are usually taken wrong. Well, let me clarify – most selfies should never be taken. The remaining ones are taken incorrectly because people tend to look at the camera wrong. What do I mean? Take a look:

Looking at screen

Looking at the screen

In this example I’m looking at the screen when taking the picture. It feels the most natural since I’m looking at myself and then the picture snaps my eyes looking downward. Now look at the picture when I look at the actual camera lens:

Looking at camera

Looking at the camera

Much better, right? Next time you’re taking a selfie make sure you tell yourself and whomever else is in the frame to look at the camera lens, not the screen!

iPhone 6s

Camera on an iPhone 6s

If you’re not using an iPhone you’ll want to dig into the specs for your phone to determine which sensor is the camera. You can also just put your finger over each of the sensors while the camera app is running to figure out which one is the camera.

When you’re using a selfie stick the aiming of the eyes is less important.

Don’t use a selfie stick.

Missing my DSLR Camera

I love photography. My love for taking photos is an ebb and flow. I’m not sure what exactly affects the arbitrary direction of those currents other than the nature of my brain. I still take a fair number of photos but sadly they’re only with my iPhone 6 Plus as of late.

I have a fair amount of camera gear, centered around my Canon 40D from a few years back. I was seriously proud when I bought that digital SLR. I also have a number of pieces of studio lighting equipment and related paraphernalia. I enjoy the whole concept of being a full time photographer – but for some reason I just peter out and lose interest. I’ve been pondering why lately and this is sort of my mental dump on the subject.

I miss my DSLR because it forces me to take the extra moment to compose the shot and find the right way to convey the emotion and special effect on my being at the time. I’m not sure I miss my film-based SLR as much but this effect is definitely amplified when it’s not easy to see the results immediately on a screen.

Carrying around the iPhone/3G/4/5/5S/6 Plus over the years has made photography more accessible to me. (Well, to the world actually)  I find carrying around the gear is not super easy but it is definitely the mark of a photographer. I’ve tried smaller bags and those help but then I discover soon I left a particular lens filter in the larger bag at home and I get all crabby. Having the iPhone in your pocket means you can take a picture whenever the need arises. The other huge improvement a smartphone gives you is you can put it away to enjoy the moment easier.

How many times have you been to a serenely beautiful place and can’t help yourself but take a large number of photos and videos? What we’re trying to do as photographers is capture that moment so well so we don’t forget it and then we can share it. With large memory capacities, high frame rates, auto-bracketing, effect filters, etc we start to reduce the quality and forethought into a photo and replace it with quantity. Being worried about getting the right shot from every angle and a slow motion video of all the movement can ruin the moment. Don’t forget to just sit … and watch … and compose the photos in your mind as well.

 

Blogging U.’s Photo 101 Course: Post a Photo a Day

WordPress.com’s Daily Post is holding an online photo blogging course called Photo 101.  It starts Monday, November 3rd and it goes through November 28th.  Each day a topic is presented and it’s your challenge to post a photo that is your interpretation of the topic.  Along with the topic are tips and tricks for you to learn.  Posts are tagged so they’re visible on the WordPress.com Reader.  WordPress.com-hosted sites and self-hosted sites are both encouraged to join in!

Visit WordPress.com’s main blog for an intro post regarding this course.

I will be posting the daily photos over at Astral Imagery, my photo blog.

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