Cloud-based video/photo storage solutions?
March 14, 2016 2:51 PM   Subscribe

I'd like to have quick access to all of my photos and videos on my Mac and on my iPhone. The issue is that my photo/video collection is now getting larger than my Mac's internal HD. What are some options for me?

I've been mostly a fan of Apple's iCloud Photo Library - I can access all of my stuff on all my devices, which is my goal. I love the ability to do intelligent searches ("Tokyo, 2008") on my phone and find the exact images I'm looking for.

The problem with it is that 50% of the time I try to load videos from iCloud, and 15% of the time I try to load photos from iCloud, it's either spectacularly slow or never loads.

For the moment, that's been OK, since I still have local copies on my laptop. But my photo library is getting larger than my laptop can handle, and without local copies of my stuff, I worry that I won't be able to get access to a video I'd like to see when I want to see it. So are there other, better cloud-based options that integrate well with Macs and iPhones?
posted by sirion to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm pretty happy with smugmug which offers unlimited number of uploads. In practice this is throttled by the average consumers upload bandwidth, but it's plenty big for me. The app allows you to sync galleries etc for offline use/caching. I think its $60/year or so. They made a bunch of their users unhappy a while back by raising their prices but it's still a great value I think.
posted by H. Roark at 3:13 PM on March 14, 2016


WebFaction + OwnCloud
posted by humboldt32 at 4:03 PM on March 14, 2016


Google Photos is pretty cool, and it costs nothing (if you let it recompress some of your photos) so it's worth a short to see if you like it. The search is pretty great, and I like that photos I take anywhere all go there, whether from my desktop, laptop, phone, or wherever, and I can make shared albums that other (authorised) people can contribute to - good for pictures of my kid, for instance.
posted by The Monkey at 4:11 PM on March 14, 2016


I use Google Drive/Photos but the paid option that gives 1TB for a year. I like it because I can upload all of my camera's raw files to Google Drive as a tertiary back-up and it will automatically make them accessible as photos. Also auto-awesome is a fun feature. If you download the Photos app for iOS then it can automatically backup all your photos and videos on your phone as well.

I also use Flickr and Microsoft's OneDrive, but I get the most use out of Google Drive/Photos.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:50 PM on March 14, 2016


We use the Amazon Photo app, which continuously uploads your photos and videos to Amazon’s cloud storage. Unlimited photo storage is free for Amazon Prime members ($20 a year otherwise). If you also have a lot of videos, you might have to spring for the $60 a year plan (we did). Use the Amazon Cloud Drive web application to upload any other pictures you take with a camera that’s not a phone. The iPhone app and the web app provide a pretty nice browse and display.

I also use Flickr, but that's more for display of select items (to share holiday pictures with the grandparents, for example) than for storage of everything.
posted by kzwa at 1:32 PM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


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