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.

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.

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.

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

More annoying is the lack of Chromecast support :).

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

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.

I don't understand why Apple keeps pushing the capabilities of the system further and their hardware but haven't yet addressed the critical data storage issues that are eating away at the edges.

Perhaps it's far better today, I'm not really sure but it completely turned me off to using it at all.

I was commenting on a comment which talked about Apple's file system in a critical manner discussing how it can become corrupted. I shared a story regarding how iPhoto had many issues like this years ago which makes me wary of using any Apple photo application. Seemed on topic with the thread to me.

> it's a new codebase rather than an update to iPhoto.

Source? I had not heard this. I heard multiple things mostly which pointed to basing the new application off of Aperture's code base.

> I heard multiple things mostly which pointed to basing the new application off of Aperture's code base.

I actually hadn't heard that, but I guess what I meant was Photos.app isn't based on the iPhoto codebase. Whether it's 100% fresh code, or whether it's based on the Aperture codebase, I don't know.

So you decided to completely ignore my explanation as to what I was commenting on and simply reiterated what you already said? Why troll HN? I don't get it.

Core Storage is already moving forward as an effort to dissociate the bytes in logical storage from the bits on physical media. In the short term, we might be able to sandbox the evils of HFS+ by having it just be a software abstraction on top of a much more modern file-system-like-thing. Yosemite already moves any machine it upgrades to Core Storage, even if you don't use FileVault.

I've had drives failed, where I lost a day's data (Was traveling and away from my time machine drive) and that sucked.

But near as I can tell, beyond losing short periods of work due to catastrophic failures of drives (early SSDs were problematic!) I haven't lost any data since Journalling was added (of course, Time Machine has saved my bacon from drive failures.)

I think Apple has done a really great job in this regard. Yes, HFS+ is based on filesystem work going back to the original Macintosh, but in use it's working fine.

HFS+ is still unreliable. The journalling is only for file system meta data. The data in the files is not journaled or checksumed, and can be corrupted without detection.

How are you verifying that you've never lost a byte of data? What makes you so sure?

For proper backups, backup to a local external disk (e.g. a time capsule or NAS) and an externally with incremental backups (e.g. Arq, Backblaze, tarsnap).

I use Arq, and the nice thing (in contrast to my Time Machine backups) data is also backed up on the go.

However if it's a choice between onsite and offsite backups, which practically speaking it is for most people, definitely offsite wins. The risk of fire, theft, etc. is vastly greater than the risk that Apple has a critical syncing bug and no ability to recover lost data. (Normally they keep deleted files around for 30 days.)

Yes, but it also happens that someone deletes a photo from a stream accidentally and does not realize within 30 days. For this reason, iCloud Photo Stream is not a backup - a backup keeps copies until the end of time.

Is a backup really a backup if it's onsite? You don't want a fire to take out your PC and external disk located in the same house.

The "cloud" option itself simplifies the backup process and could potentially reduce the window of a chance for corruption, but it does not eliminate the need for a reliable, local filesystem.

That is why a good, well-integrated offsite backup solution that "reduces the window of a chance for corruption" is a much more significant impact on data security than anything we could hope to incrementally improve in the filesystem software layer.

And Apple's solution is even better than you describe. Photos taken from Apple cameras (which are the vast bulk of photos for most customers) are automatically uploaded directly to the cloud as soon as the device joins wifi.

That is the core issue.

Yes, well-integrated offline backup solutions mitigate some aspects of the problem, but when your filesystem can't even guarantee that it did its job correctly, it doesn't matter how well-integrated your "backup" solutions are because the data may already be corrupt.

Nevermind that the "well-integrated" backup solution you are describing here, because of the unreliable filesystem, can't even guarantee that it read the data from disk correctly to a reasonable degree.

This is not some anecdotal "Mac OS X burned me" story -- this is a fundamental, architectural issue. Data loss is real -- and so are my concerns about HFS+.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption#SILENT

Same goes for when it reads back the data.

NTFS, ext4, and other consumer-targeted filesystems do not have this feature either, so it's unfair to imply this is somehow specific to HFS+ or Macs. You'd have the same issue on a Windows or Ubuntu install.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS

So in the near future, Windows will have an answer for the general mainstream, while OS X will be left far behind.

Even ignoring the checksumming issue, HFS+ has known pathologies not only in reliability but in performance compared to NTFS or even ext4 on Linux.

HFS+ is long overdue for replacement.

At this point my guess is he's been running HFS+ without journaling turned on (you can format drives this way) and experienced data loss as a result because the filesystems ability to correct itself was disabled.

This would look like what he's describing.

See John Siracusa's article:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

Granted, if your iPhone is offline for extended periods of time, you're also doing it wrong. But maybe you have an iPod Touch instead.

[0] For the last few years, the newest iPhone is the #1 most common camera model found in EXIF data on Flickr, http://petapixel.com/2015/01/09/popular-cameras-flickr-2014/. IIRC, Facebook saw similar results for photo uploads.

I'm pretty sure somewhere in Cupertino a team is working on a new file-system, but I seriously hope they don't ship it before it's ready. I wouldn't mind playing with it in beta though...

Let's put it this way: OS X's filesystem is in no way "fundamentally unreliable".

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_File_System "The Catalog File, which stores all the file and directory records in a single data structure, results in performance problems when the system allows multitasking, as only one program can write to this structure at a time, meaning that many programs may be waiting in queue due to one program "hogging" the system.[2] It is also a serious reliability concern, as damage to this file can destroy the entire file system."

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7876217

I don't know if I buy that. But I do agree with you that Apple needs to improve its file system offerings.

Consider that in HFS (and early HFS+) had a fun limitation -- you could only ever create 65535 files. Didn't matter if you deleted; the Catalog (CNID) incremented with each new file created until it ran out.

Also HFS+ only has 1 second resolution for timestamps and can't do timestamps later than February 6, 2040.

Other dreadful details here: http://blog.barthe.ph/2014/06/10/hfs-plus-bit-rot/

Storing Aperture, iPhoto, or Lightroom databases on the network is not ideal. Wifi, even 802.11ac, is barely usable. Gigabit means you're wired and also has issues. Apple frequently has implementation bugs on both AFP and SMB which slow things down way below gigabit speeds, and your NAS's processor also becomes a factor. Forget about using this setup if you're not actually on the local network (i.e. VPN).

The result is having to manually manage your photo databases (which one's are on my laptop? which ones are on my NAS?) which works ok in Lightroom but Aperture and iPhoto are not very good at. This also creates backup stress (um, can I delete this?) and means I have to decide in advance if I want to look at those photos from two weeks ago before I leave the house. If so, grab a cup of coffee while they copy.

Ideally you would have a system where a) your photos are automatically stored in the cloud b) you can select which albums are stored locally and c) there is some sort of cloud backup option that you control (computer with more storage, NAS, or other cloud provider that archives your cloud data).

Doing a Time Machine backup to NAS isn't fun, I can tell you. Particularly if you use VMs (which you can exclude, but why would you when it's an entire machine image eh?)

I've had the older N36L model, an AMD Athlon NEO II processor with 8GB ECC RAM running for years with ZFS handling a few big spinning drives for storage, it's been quite nice and trouble free.

You've also failed to quantify why ZFS is "totally broken for regular desktop use" (likely because you've never actually used ZFS so can only blow smoke about it's issues).

People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead.

Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS (plus likely running Windows anyway). However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

HFS+ is creaky, ancient, but battle-hardened.

ZFS is solid and battle-hardened, but not that suitable for many of Apple's customers, who want the ability to unmount disks they added, and who will not understand that they need huge amounts of RAM (they their Macoboks don't have) to keep their disks speedy,

btrfs is promising but not battle-hardened yet, and it is very unlikely Apple will use it as long as it has a GPL license (I think it is more likely that Apple will add checksums to HFS+ in some somewhat clumsy, but working, way than that it starts supporting btrfs)

If you think HFS and HFS+ are battle-hardened I don't know what to say to you. "Shell-shocked" would be a better description.

I would generally agree that it's rare for e.g. HFS to corrupt its own metadata due to bugs but bit-rot happens. If you think you haven't encountered it, you probably haven't actually checked your files closely enough – this is particularly easy to miss with things like video or image formats which were designed to tolerate a few bit-flips.

The reason why so many Mac users were interested in ZFS was that a modern filesystem incorporates strong integrity checks so you are guaranteed to either read back the bytes you originally wrote or get an error. That's a much better way to work than requiring you to use a tool which does strong hashes periodically to see if anything has broken.

A lot of consumers are quite obvlious to bit rot. As you point out - most of this occurs in large media files which they are unlikely to notice. Even with things like corrupted documents they will likely blame it on an application glitch.

With ZFS they will see scary diagnostic messages. Consumers will want their SSD or RAM replaced. (ZFS does a great job of catching RAM errors on systems without ECC)

This would no doubt drive higher warranty costs for Apple and cause consumer dissatisfaction.

Ignore is bliss...

I'm skeptical that a proactive warning would be more dissatisfying than just finding it out years later, when other copies are harder to locate. In particular, I'd be surprised if a hypothetical feature like this wouldn't be integrated with their other services: “A local failure was detected and replaced with a pristine copy from iCloud”

The other really interesting question would be whether they'd ever consider something like the ZFS copies feature to directly trade maximum disk capacity for redundancy. That'd be much easier to implement for Apple since they control so much of the platform and the largest files which most people have tend to be things which are provably known to be local copies of something which can be re-downloaded, so the total cost of doubling storage for unique local files might be worth the peace of mind for many users.

I suspect the decision not to use ZFS was (assuming it wasn't simply spite at Sun pre-empting Jobs' announcement) that it would cause dissatisfaction, but from a different direction: ZFS was designed for Sun's customers: companies employing dedicated sysadmins. ZFS was incredibly unfriendly back when Apple would have been evaluating it. User experiences like "you filled up your filesystem? Oh well, you'll have to reformat and restore from backup." may be acceptable in an enterprisey setting, but aren't going to cut it with the iMac crowd.

In the same logic people had issues with ZFS too.

"With issues" means nothing. The number and severity of them only has meaning, and even that only comparatevely.

You're a very lucky man, then. A large part of my time, at one point in my life, was spent fixing up corrupted HFS filesystems.

Also, why wouldn't you be able to unmount a ZFS disk?

    zfs unmount ...

Generally though, you wouldn't want to manually unmount file systems unless you're planning to migrate them to a new host. In which case you would export them instead:

    zpool export ...

There are multiple businesses which sell software which exhaustively attempts to recover data from corrupt drives & cards.

It's a standard service listed on the local phone / computer shops.

I see messages on my neighborhood's mailing list every so often from someone looking for help recovering as much as possible from a flash card.

It's simply absurd to claim that the status quo works for the general public. It's not terrible, probably not that different from various mishaps which befell printed photo albums, etc. but there's still plenty of room for the industry to give people safer tools.

Use ZFS if you like, or XFS, or even ext4 instead.

Second frequent problem: Hitting 90% capacity in a filesystem has a non-trivial chance to ruin it forever. Hit the wrong code path, and, even if you immediately delete a bunch of things, I/O to that filesystem would be forever 3000% slower.

You only have to glance through this thread to see that there are people (myself included) who run ZFS on their desktop machine (laptop in my case).

People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead.

Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS anyway, so it's not worth the marginal overhead. However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.

Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time.

>However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.

If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs...

And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...

That's a fair point. I'd argue that ZFS doesn't chuck that much extra CPU time that most people would notice. However if you're one of those guys that likes to tweak your power settings to the nth degree, then ZFS probably isn't best. But those kinds of people are more likely to run a tiling WM instead of a full fat compositing desktop environment; and such like. So they're definitely not your regular desktop users

> If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs...

You seem to have missed quite a number of useful ZFS features off your list. Ignoring deduplication (as that is extremely memory and CPU hungry), ZFS has snapshotting, checksumming, superblock recovery (even if your journal gets trashed, you can recover it), online data integrity checks (no annoying wait screens for fsck to run through), better compression algorithms than is supported in most other file systems...

I could go on, but suffice to say that ZFS is an improvement over many other file systems in other areas than just software RAIDing.

That all said, in an ideal world desktops would be running HAMMER (DragonflyBSD's file system) over ZFS. I do love ZFS, but HAMMER seems a slightly better fit for desktops / laptops as it has the aforementioned features but without many of the data centre stuff that home users wouldn't need. A better compromise. However I don't see much interest for HAMMER outside of Dragonfly.

> And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...

Nobody suggested it was. However ZFS does also have backup features built into it too.

This has always been my complaint with iPhotos, and I'm betting this is no different.

Ideally, it would manage to keep the metadata abstracted from the structure so that you could set it up however and wherever you wanted.

But unfortunately for users, their model isn't about building an open and flexible photo storage solution, but rather a solution that depends on the iCloud and the need to purchase more storage capacity.

They programmed it into the client to reject iPhoto libraries when you try to drag the thing over, recommending that you export every. single. picture. and uploading that instead.

That reminds me, I need to cancel that thing...

Masters/ ├── 2015 └── 04 └── 04 └── 20150404-220940 ├── IMG_5423.JPG ├── IMG_5424.JPG

Yes, their free tier should be much larger.

By "their" you mean "Apple's," right, not "the user's"? Not being facetious, it's true but the phrasing is ambiguous.

There is nothing that I fear more than loosing my photos, my visual biography.

That is why I am super conservative when it comes to software that wants to handle my photos.

What are the requirements for software that I allow to manage my photos:

- Very good chance of still being in the market in 5-10 years. This basically rules out all Google (Picasa), Apple (iPhoto, Aperture, Photos) products.

- Possibility to backup my photos on various destinations (not only one commercial cloud)

- A library format that is readable from external applications (SQL, metadata files)

- Good tools to search, compare and sort my library

- At least support two major platforms natively

Unfortunately, the only software that meets most of these requirements is Adobe's Lightroom. And this is very sad:

- It has too many features that I do not need - I am not a professional photographer

- It does not care about native UIs and its usability I still find weak

- It asks for a premium price for professional photographers (both the one-time fee and the creative cloud version)

How about alternatives?

- Aperture was a very good alternative, despite being only available for Mac

- I was disappointed by all open source alternatives; most of which are not easily available for Mac and Windows (Lightzone, Darkroom, Digikam, Shotwell)

- Digikam comes closest, but as it's KDE based, installation and native support on Windows and Mac is still weak

- Capture One Pro 8 works on Mac and Windows but is even more expensive than Lightroom and hence not worth it

- I do not know about any other photo management tool that is stable, multi platform and meets most of the conservative demands

I switched to LightRoom when Aperture became stagnant. It has many advantages for the long term, e.g. being able to export collections as separate catalogs (ideal for backuping RAWs and adjustments for stuff that is done, e.g. holidays), storing metadata in XMP sidecar files, continuous and quick updates for RAW support for new cameras.

I agree on the pricing as well. I do use some raw editing features, but it is relatively modest. For that, it is relatively expensive, and has gone through four iterations (paid upgrades) already since I first started looking into it.

- The integration across devices is perfect (All metadata editing/sorting is synched on all devices while the Only files only reside on my Mac and on the cloud)

- All Photos are still backupped offline with my Mac and from what I see a simple symlink of the Masters folder is enough to back them up to a third party backup service. (w/o metadata but for me this is good enough worst-case protection)

I still miss a few features, but I hope an eventual release of Photos Framework for OSX will be able to add them through a 3rd Party tool:

- Metadata export for a 3rd Party Backup

- Better automation to find duplicates/corrupted images etc. (i have a super messy library of about 20'000 pictures which i cant clean up manually at this point)

- Better metadata editing, especially for geo-tagging (I have a lot of non-smartphone pictures)

- It's an open source software, created and personally (as in, it's not part of the job) maintained by one of the go maintainers at Google

- It's designed to be a personal storage for everything, but there already is a good focus on photos. Check out the demo in the video

- It has a multitude of remote storage already:

  - s3
  
  - google cloud storage

  - google drive

  - any mongoDB you can point to

- The storage format is utterly simple

- Unfortunately its installation is still quite spartan, being CLI and all.

I'm following it closely to see where it goes, because it could very well be a final solution for all content management woes.

(Edit:) 5GB seems like a pretty measly free level.

Someone with a $700+ device, likely with a $50+/mo phone plan complaining about paying what, 4$/mo to get 200GB of online storage seems strange.

But my grandma/dad who pay have probably never heard to those options and just want their photos backed up. And wouldnt think twice about not using iPad/iPhone or look for stuff beyond whats baked in.

Companies price based on value/positioning. It is naive to think pricing is based primarily on competition. Any book on pricing will tell you that is totally incorrect in the first chapter.

From the Google TOS: "Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored."

Also: "When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."

The above is much, much broader than Apple's TOS.

Google would appear to not just allow ad targeting, but even use of user photographs or videos for promotional ad campaigns on Google's behalf by third parties. I'm happy to be corrected on this, but that is the apparent meaning.

First, you didn't quote this key section of Google's TOS: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." That's a significant limitation.

Second, Apple's TOS is nearly word-for-word identical to the portion you excerpted above:

"By submitting or posting such Content on areas of the Service that are accessible by the public or other users with whom you consent to share such Content, you grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available, without any compensation or obligation to you" (https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/term...)

Third, the general TOS has to be read in concert with the privacy policy and any product-specific privacy/TOS. Those exist for Google+, not sure about photos.

Fourth, there's no evidence Google is doing what you suggest (ad targeting, etc.). What is happening is shared endorsements: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3403513?hl=en&p=plus_... But note Apple has plenty of leeway to do what it wants: "Apple reserves the right at any time to modify this Agreement and to impose new or additional terms or conditions..."

To actually read and understand a TOS/privacy policy takes some time -- so this isn't a comprehensive response. But maybe it helps...

Apple;

   you grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license
   to use... on the Service solely for the purpose for which such
   Content was submitted or made available

  you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to
  use... The rights you grant in this license are for the limited
  purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to
  develop new ones.

Everyone reserves the right to modify their agreements, so I think that's a strawman. If and when Apple modifies their ToS to allow them (and those they work with) to use my personal property for promoting, improving, or developing new "Services", then they will have stooped to the same level.

Selling products and services is a lot like real estate, it's sometimes about location, location, location. Google Drive just doesn't compare.

(Unpaid satisfied user.)

I'll be doing a local backup in iTunes, probably.

Google allows me to back up unlimited "standard size" photos for free.

which reminds me, I have a large stash of photos to re-backup.

Seems like a ripe opportunity for a product - build your own Cloud on top of an OSX machine, leave it all at home and administer it - safely - from the beach while you're on vacation.

Inevitably, the cloud is going to be full of photos/videos nobody even remembers exist. It'll be cloud hoarding. It already is that with youtube allowing anyone to upload anything but I have to wonder if that's sustainable.

What you're proposing is the next step if cloud hoarding becomes a difficult enough problem - if not, it'll be like Windows being an unbelievable resource-hog but since users keep on buying faster and faster machines, nobody cares.

Except here, Apple and the other big companies are taking the hit, not the consumers, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

That set me thinking if there's an asymptotic limit for that.

I suppose it would be for everyone in the planet to always be recording everything their eyes can see (and their ears can hear).

Greg Egan wrote at least one story about implanted devices for that, and there are calculations around for the data bandwidth.

If it gets to be too much, we'll quickly see 'pay to keep your videos afloat if they're not receiving over X number of views after X number of days' or something else to that effect.

The days of everything free are an early stage, short-lived move in order to gain massive market-share. Once near-monopoly position is established, it'll be time to monetize.

That's why the older generation shakes their head at walled gardens that gain massive momentum - they know what's most certainly going to come of it in due time.

Its a jarring experience really. you can look at 3 photos in a slide show, then in place of the 4th photo an ad. You can't even pay them to stop showing ads with your photos, as subscribing (which I did) only stops you from seeing the ads.

To keep everything backed up, I have a NAS in my basement that pulls a copy of my Flickr library on a routine basis.

Edit: Flickr Ad-Free is $49/year, but $24/year for grandfathered Flickr Pro subscribers. Sorry for the confusion.

I had an "unlimited" data plan from AT&T. People regularly get their "unlimited" $1/month shared hosting accounts terminated for going over a few megs of storage.

I keep the majority of my data at home on a NAS instead of flinging it to the other side of the world and being disappointed that I have trouble getting it back.

Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing? Will there be a cloud burst, like the dot com bubble burst?

That's a rather sweeping statement. It's more accurate to say that you can't trust a service which you don't pay real money for. I would certainly trust a paid, dedicated cloud provider like e.g. SmugMug far more than a “free” service from a large company like Google or Amazon.

> Given the lowering cost of storage and out-of-the-box ease for shoving NAS boxes on a network and them popping up in a network browsing situation, I wonder if more people will return to local storage and processing?

That model has its own weaknesses: a single NAS box requires you to play sysadmin and is vulnerable to things like theft, accidents (never assume anything survives kids & pets!), and security problems. If enough people put everything on single systems, they're going to start looking like great targets to the kind of people who make ransom-ware – once the attacker blocks your access to the only copy, you have no choice but to pay up!

An interesting project would be figuring out how to solve those problems – e.g. a box which did strongly-encrypted off-site backups with guaranteed minimum retention periods would be interesting both as a hedge against many of those threats and as a way to get the recurring revenue needed to support a serious software project with non-trivial security exposure. You could probably even open-source everything since the vast majority of people are more interested in paying someone to handle ops than saving a latte per month in service charges.

Perhaps multiple NAS boxed distributed around everywhere would help?

I can't remember the last time I considered a distributed storage service from Apple reliable, secure or flexible.

Additionally, as an Android user with a Lenovo T440s with Linux and a MacBook Pro, I am increasingly frustrated with how closely integrated all the Apple toys are these days.

And I know it's kind of always been this way, but it seems they're growing myopic with regards to other devices people may own. While I'm not in the majority with Linux on one device I KNOW I'm not in the minority with an Android device.

Now it would be possible to just copy all photos to my LAN server with a few terabytes and Gigabit ethernet, but that would make looking through and at the photos terribly inconvenient.

Even worse, parts of my photos were imported as RAW and iPhoto was doing its own magic to convert them to JPEG.

iPhoto was not bad a bad program, I actually liked it, but relying on it was a lesson for me to never again store my photos in a closed-source program.

Currently I'm still looking for alternatives, Lychee (http://lychee.electerious.com/) looks nice at first sight, but I don't want a PHP server with MySQL managing my photos.

IMO the nicest solution would be a well-defined photo directory format that gets indexed by a fast server implementing an API that you can use to access all photos through client programs. It could keep an SQLite database in the directory to store metadata, but if it is gone, the directories should still make sense.

The only downside is that it looks very unmaintained these days. They haven't even added support for Retina graphics (in a photo viewing app!!!)

What a pity there isn't some sort of operating system that can be used to present your media/content NAS to you, from anywhere in the world, with whatever front-end you desire .. seems like any OS vendor worth their salt could produce such a thing.

I guess what we need is for things like ipfs.io to take off, and get wrapped up in some ZeroConf'ism with a pretty GUI. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Home server compatible" routers would be nice. Devices could request opening a port, and you verify the action on the router GUI. Then some dynamic DNS server assigns you a nice name.

I think the desire is definitely not there to make things this easy to use - precisely because of the Cloud-Zeitgeist that we're all involved in ..

I wouldn't save my photos on a platform that changes every few months (Google Photos/Plus/Drive), might be gone in two or three years, analyses images, builds face databases, and keeps your pictures ready for the NSA to access, for any purpose other than sharing images with other people.

ASUS RT-N56U. Got one at home. It can update dynamic DNS for you (most unbranded routers can), but then goes on to add a USB port and a few "apps." One of them is a file storage host, and even file syncing (DropBox-like) app that runs from your own home.

Learn to say no to the equipment that your ISP offers you, the reason it's "free" is because it's trash.

I'd suggest an OpenWrt compatible router. It's actually free (open source) :)

Great support for dynamic DNS too (obviously, it's just Linux): http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/ddns.client

And it turned out the thing I was describing (easy port forwarding for home servers) exists and is also supported by OpenWrt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol

It's not "whatever front-end you desire", but Plex can do movies, TV, and music over the web in a mostly automagical manner. Install server app, install client app (on Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/etc), make account, log in with account on both, and it'll automatically connect the two and even do stuff like transcode on the fly on the server to make streaming work better.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/import-iphoto.html

Basically - you have to go into iPhoto, find a bunch of hidden folders that contain the original photos and then copy them out & let lightroom import / organize them according to any rules you set.

Pretty simple - longest part was copying all the files since I had a decent number (200GB) of photos.

In this case it's a walled garden, there are closed source programs that are interoperable. Google and Microsoft are often good about not locking you in and when it comes to media Adobe works 100% with standards (e.g. EXIF).

> holding me back from installing Linux on a MBP and wiping Mac OS.

What about your music locked away in iTunes?

I now prefer adobe bridge / adobe lightroom.

They update the metadata in the photo file itself. Not sure what they offer in terms of client programs.

So in a roundabout way, he/she would still be running OSX on Apple hardware.

May not be for everyone; but I love it.

https://creative.adobe.com/products/bridge

Rabble rabble rabble!

Why on earth should any software development shop cater the design of a robust management app to the person who has nothing to manage?

The utter bastards!.

Unless I'm mistaken, this looks like the standard Apple approach where its tied to a single iCloud account. Is family photo sharing/editing really that difficult? We can't be the only ones that want that right?

Also 1 TB isn't enough space. We have 14 years of photos we'd have to upload. That's a lot, and these price points are just too expensive.

> When Family Sharing is turned on, a shared album is set up automatically in the Photos app on all family members’ devices.

https://www.apple.com/icloud/family-sharing/

Edit: actually it doesn't mention editing map data in the list of editable things. That's good feedback for http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

My only issue with Photos.app is that there's no way to geotag and add/edit metadata on either platform. I've resorted to writing an iOS app to give me that functionality (using the new-in-iOS 8 Photos framework).

Is it on the App Store or open source by chance?

So what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Why is it easier for Apple to move all these features into their data center, and not just fix their operating system at the user level to make it safe, secure - and Apple-easy - to share content directly from the machine itself?

I've got an rPi at home, doing the job that Apple wishes I would do with its cloud. My rPi is available and accessible from anywhere on the Internet, with ease. Its got all my media that I want access to on the road .. and it works seamlessly with little fuss. If a $35 device can do that - admittedly with a modicum of tinkering on my (not in-experienced) part - then why can't a $99 'bleeding edge' operating system do it, without requiring that I just give all my content to a third party?

Because from where I see it, Apple, you're not competing very well with m $35 media-sharing device that just plain works.

"what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world"

You're not the target market.

For most users this is a distinction without a difference -- except that with the cloud they don't have to remember to leave their home computer turned on and online 24/7, and they don't have to be responsible for their own backups.

It's not (at all) easier for Apple to move these features into their data center -- it's easier for (the vast majority of) Apple's users.

Users who know how to do what you want to do -- run a home file server -- already know how to do what you want to do.

Put another way: "don't have the choice any more".

And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.

Half of all British people can get at most 1Mb/s upload.

That's not good enough to give decent performance. In particular, an iPhone photo is about 2MB, and that's half a minute (or 15 seconds) to download (for this use case).

It's not fast enough to stream most video, for example.

Making it easier would have massive infrastructure requirements.

An odd way to describe an optional feature.

>And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier

You've heard of Back To My Mac, no? That's a thing that exists. Pretty simple to use. Free. Built right in to the OS.

It would have been much easier, from a technical standpoint, for Apple to have extended that sort of file sharing to Photos or iTunes, than to go around building huge datacenters and etcetera.

But it wouldn't have been what most people want. Most people don't have the home bandwidth to be hosting their own media. Most people don't want to have to leave a server running 24/7. Nearly all of the drawbacks to cloud storage you've cited in this thread would be considered by most people to be _features_.

(Privacy is the sole exception. It's also the reason I, personally, don't happen to use iCloud. But I don't think Apple is stupid for choosing to implement functionality for the majority of people, even if I don't happen to be part of that majority.)

>as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.

Feel free to want what you want; I'm just pointing out that what you want is idiosyncratic.

So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...

So? Let people have control over their data back again. Promoting the denigration of these rights at the call of convenience just means that within a year or so, we'll probably be re-inventing this discussion again, only it'll be about how great it is that OS vendors have started integrating things like ipfs.io ..

I've seen people lose the only copy of important documents when their hard drive crashes, too. The average computer user doesn't have any concept of off-site backup.

> Let people have control over their data back again.

When did they lose it? I've yet to encounter a platform where cloud storage is required or the only option.

I think you're confused about iCloud. People do have controls over their data, and no rights are denigrated. Perhaps you are mistaking it for Google, or Facebook where there is no desktop equivalent.

I think the reasons this isn't a feature of OSX, itself, as an operating system is that its simply not profitable for Apple to do this - they're giving the OS away for free, after all, now. (So I've been informed.) So they can't profit from new features of OSX.

And so this whole cloud thing is to me, a distraction from poor attention on the part of Apple to the responsibilities they have as vendors of an Operating System - I get it, though. This isn't hip any more. Its far more profitable to be the BOFH's for so many millions of cloud-addled new users.

I think the economic desire is just not there - Apple have given up being an OS-vendor and are in the 'next generation' phase of things where they're producing commodity, throw-away hardware for consumers. This is all a brave new world, but my point is: I think there's a missed market opportunity here, for someone, to produce the anti-cloud.

The problem -for me- is that Apple simply isn't that good at the cloud. Their competitors seem to beat them on both features and price here. You only go with iCloud for inclusion/integration with your other Apple devices, not because it is a superior cloud service.

They could be the "anti-cloud" company if they really wanted, but I think it is easier and more profitable for them to jump on the bandwagon and offer it themselves. To be an "anti-cloud" vendor would require them to sell against overall technology / consumer trends. They don't need to do that when they can extend their profits offering the same, and especially if it doesn't hurt the "luxury" status/profit margin of their main goods.

On a long enough curve, nearly every user becomes a "power user," and if you look back, a lot of stuff that was once strictly "advanced configuration," becomes simplified, or eventually just abstracted away and the domain of mere IT mortals. Apple and others could play a role here.

This is made for "the rest of us."

I didn't realize, though, that you don't need a Mac to run Photo for OSX. That's a curious development - what I guess you mean is, all you need to buy (from Apple) is an iDevice, and they'll then own everything you do with it from that point onwards .. to the extent that they'll make it easy for you to gain access to your media/content. (Psst.. as long as you keep paying the subscription.)

Oh, and btw, I already pay a subscription for access to the Internet. Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns.

I have a Mac. I want to share my media/content with the world. The Mac is perfectly capable of doing that - and I trust it more than any other computer in the world, because its sitting there, on my desk, in my house, under my lock and key, with my network equipment, passwords for which I control. I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again. Alas, this doesn't seem too hip these days, in the technology world ..

Your DIY solution is still too complex for your average user.

> Maybe this is more of a European thing, but the backlash against cloud computing is very much still in full force - there are people actually not buying computers because all this Cloud nonsense is being shoved down our throats - are these not 'the rest of us'?

I don't think the proportion of people not buying computers because of "all this Cloud nonsense" is that big, and to be honest, if they cared that much, they won't buy Apple devices with their locked down bootloaders. Apple never had those customers to begin with, and they seem to be doing fine without them.

> Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns.

You can. You just have to do it yourself if you wanted that. Install a web server and some gallery software -- easy for most Hacker News readers, impossible for my grandma. Heck, she had a hard time understanding the concept of email. These users just want to take and share the latest photos they took, not figure out why NAT traversal doesn't work with their $20 Comcast-supplied router.

> Sorry, is ownership of your data not important? Is control over where and when your data is available, and by which means it is shared with the world, not important?

Again, to Hacker News readers, maybe. However, not to my grandma. She takes pictures of flowers and pets on her daily walk and shares it with her friends. Why does she care about "what means it is shared with the world" so long as her friends and family can see it?

> I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again.

For the average user, I would say that the cloud is much more reliable than whatever they can control themselves. I think if you allow people to run their own servers, you will find that things would be inaccessible and/or compromised most of time. Remember -- the average user manages to install all sorts of nasty adware and spyware on their own system unprompted, and I am not sure they are going to be much better at managing servers.

Before I bought my grandparents iPads, they used Windows PCs. Invariably, I will receive a call every couple of months asking me to debug their computer or router because they managed to screw it up one way or another. Now they do everything on iPads, and it is great for them (safer, easier to use) and great for me (no need to play tech support any more). iCloud Photos and the like are targeted at these people.

Yep it sure is. That's why there are many software options available for exactly this purpose. It's your responsibility to use them if that's what you prefer.

I'm with you; I don't want this cloud business. I think that the ideal solution would be a small device with a purpose-built OS and hardware device that provides storage wirelessly and via some fast wired connection and is small enough and has enough battery to serve as the backend to my phone, TV, and desktop/laptop. I've always wanted this, and I think that the problems with the state of the public networks and the free-but-with-advertising services model are going to grow impossible to ignore for some larger percentage of the user base than are currently concerned. Maybe.

Well, I guess I can see this as an opportunity more than anything else: design an application that will give users power over their own cloud. What a pity that there's no easy way for the iDevices to be gaining access to this, or maybe there is, indeed a way ..

...and they have to be able to traverse the NAT, which is possible in some way on most, but not all connections (suppose Apple could proxy, but then you get back to data centers)...

...and they have to have good upload speed, if the browsing process from the client phone is to be sufficiently interactive, which, sadly, is relatively uncommon even on connections with good download speed, not to mention the many connections that are just crap...

...and if the server's drive fails, their treasured data is lost, so they should make sure to keep backup drives around (or online backups, but ditto data centers)...

...and they have to have a Mac (or PC) to act as a server, which an increasing number of iOS users don't (yet they still want to be able to store more photos than fit on their phone)...

For what? Saving a few dollars on a cloud plan for your expensive iOS devices? Preventing the NSA from snooping on your vacation photos? (Most people don't care, but for those who do, an easier solution for Apple would be implementing client side encryption. Of course, this does not currently exist, except for iCloud Keychain.) Saving energy? (Apple's data centers use purely renewable energy, your home probably doesn't.)

Reliability, resilience to cloud outages? That's a fair point, and an option to use a desktop as a backup would be nice, but I guarantee you most users would still opt to use Apple's secret mega-data centers in the desert. (Also, Apple's servers are more reliable than they were in the past, and since we're talking about new engineering effort - if they were as reliable as, say, Google, would this still really be an issue?)

The logic causing you to use a RPi makes sense to you (and I bet part of it is the flexibility that's available to a sysadmin/programmer but wouldn't be to an average user in any scenario), but for most people's use cases, I think it simply doesn't make any sense. So it's no surprise that Apple isn't working on it.

[1] A separate device like your Raspberry Pi, or Apple's AirPort Express, would solve this problem, but not the others.

I call myself an ameteur photographer, which really just means that I have an expensive camera and took a photo class or two a long time ago.

This solves an enormous problem of safely storing all of my photos.

Sure I have come up with workflows in Aperture to sync to a cloud device, create vaults, make manual backups, etc--but this can hardly compare to a workflow of click a button to enable. Additionally, as I spend more and more time overseas it becomes increasingly impractical to lug around devices for backups.

My only worry is if this new application will be a good replacement to Aperture

As far as seamless backup, a local-network Time Machine drive, plus Backblaze cloud service, is a very easy and cost-effective way to get both superfast local backup and off-site backup. And, after a very small amount of setup, it "just works" without any specific workflow.

All of this means complicated (for me) workflows of bringing in photos as referenced objects, backing the photos up to the cloud in a way I can easily re-reference them, then backup the aperture library to the cloud with thumbnails--which is still a quite large upload on sometimes questionable connections, and then delete the referenced objects locally once I am on to the next project, making sure they all got to the cloud ok first.

Not impossible. Just the prospect of a toggle button for iCloud photo sync is a very welcome idea.

I feel like my current flow is just waiting for me to make a mistake.

1. Making my music browsable and searchable

2. Making my library pretty with a decent album art library (supplemented by manual art for missing albums)

3. Making playlist creation and updating easy

4. Integrating a large amount of media like podcats and audiobooks

5. Most important: syncing with my devices

It's fine. It's not great, but foobar doesn't really handle sync very well (iTunes will update playcounts from my device) and it requires additional pieces to handle podcasts or audiobooks in ways I want.

I've begun to let my phone handle some pieces of this (some podcasts with PocketCasts and audiobooks are great with Smart Audiobook Player), but iTunes is still a fiddle free one stop shop.

What's the big issue?

[1] It's been 100% on non-artwork metadata.

Of course I shouldn't have clicked the "Allow iTunes to manage..." button. Was it obvious what it would do?

No. It wasn't.

When you try to load apps from a device and it already has apps from the same device but a different session, you get an alert warning you about... something that doesn't make sense.

The correct option is to cancel, then iTunes goes ahead and syncs everything correctly.

Since when did Cancel mean Go ahead with Plan A?

Also, the app screen manager. To move apps you have to:

Click a screen with the app Wait for it to zoom Drag the app Wait for the target screen to zoom Wait for the other apps to shuffle around Drop the app

Why is the zooming necessary? Why can't you just drag and drop without zooming? Why does the zooming cover some screens, so sometimes you can't drop the app on the one you want?

Why can't you make folders in the file space of apps, and drag and drop files to/from the folders? Why can't you drag and drop a load of files at once?

And so on. So many elements of the design should be in textbooks as classic examples of how not to make a UI.

On Windows it has its foibles, but I still use it every single day at work. It's more than manageable, it's just not as responsive as it should be because of how it is built.

On both operating systems it tries to do too much. Where it excels is as a simple, clean jukebox. Start using it to manage movies or anything else and the flaws show up in spades, but that's never what it was to me.

I've been using iTunes since I was 9 years old. I've used every major version and it's one of the only programs I was using on OS 9 that I still use every day on OS X. As a jump-in-and-go library based jukebox, it pretty much has no equal. Throw in iTunes Match so my home library is instantly available on my phone and work PC, and I never have a reason to use anything else.

I use it on the Mac because it is small and light, and I organise MP3s by album directories with their own M3U playlists and a global large playlist anyway; I rip my own CDs. (Yes, this is considered archaic by some but at least I still have 16bit lossless physical media and fascinating sleeve notes to refer to, right?)