Comment by cannikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cannikin | Hacker News Reader

I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream.

Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud.

The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.

I had my iCloud backups for my iPhone corrupt and I lost months of text messages. Fortunately everything else was backed up. Apple was unable to help recover anything. I will not be jumping on this store all my stuff with Apple. I need tridundancy between different cloud providers to have any semblance of faith I'll be able to recover my data if something happens to my device.

Two comments:

1. You lost your device at the same time as your iCloud backups were corrupted? How did they even get corrupted? I've never heard of that happening before. 2. If you're worried, you can always do local backups with iTunes.

How does this compare to Carousel, Dropbox's photo backup offering from last year?

https://carousel.dropbox.com/

Carousel is great as long as you have enough Dropbox space for your photos. Anecdotally, I find I could trust Dropbox's backup model more than Apple's because I understand it better.

Apple's solution has the advantage of working with every app that reads from or writes to the camera roll - i.e. photos are downloaded on demand, and uploaded when taken - rather than only a single manager app. Of course, this is an unfair comparison, since third parties are not allowed to hook that deeply into iOS, but it is what it is.

On the other hand, Carousel uploads are in Dropbox, automatically syncing to laptops and desktops, giving direct access to any application.

Well, Photos is a photo management & editing solution in addition to being a photo backup. While Carousel is only a photo backup solution (no albums, no editing controls). So it's not really comparable.

Carousel does have albums:

https://carousel.dropbox.com/help/7475

More annoying is the lack of Chromecast support :).

(Slightly off topic) One thing I haven't figured out yet (I haven't dedicated more than a couple of hours though) is how to backup all of the pictures from my photo library. I have a NAS, and I'd like to copy all of the photos (not the library) to a particular share. Do you know if Photo will help with that?

all the source photos are contained within a "masters" folder inside the library package(folder). point your backup mechanism to that subfolder and you should be all set.

Perfect, thank you!

    >>> FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work

duh, dropbox resolved this problem... how much, ten years ago?

I think the biggest difference here is that the iCloud Photo Library functionality will back up/sync new photos but won't delete existing photos unless you explicitly tell it to do so, which prevents data loss from corrupted or accidentally deleted local files (which Dropbox will cheerfully sync along to each other machine you have).

Dropbox isn't even close to this experience. Yes the files themselves would be everywhere, but I don't want to have to go into the Dropbox app to view my photos (not to mention the Dropbox app being extremely slow in my experience). With iCloud they're all in your regular Photos app ready to be shared or used in other apps just like the photos you shot with your phone.

That's more of a problem with iOS than a problem with Dropbox.

"The stock app works the way it should without me having to find another service" is a good thing, not really a problem.

I'm glad Apple's improving their software offerings, because not everything of theirs is "works like it should" good.

The stock app working well is a good thing.

Not being able to have another app fix issues in the stock app is a problem. If dropbox were able to express an intent to be notified of all photos taken, they could have solved this problem long ago and roughly as well, but they couldn't and so didn't. The problem is not that Apple solved this problem, but that no one else could have due to how apple treats all non-apple apps as second class citizens.

That's a probably a limitation of iOS. E.g. on my Android phone, I sync photos with Bittorrent sync. I can view them using the gallery app, like any other photo.

Sure, Dropbox will allow access to the files across all your devices. But it doesn't expose the photo metadata -- things like location, date/time, face recognition -- in a way that lets you filter meaningfully.

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