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Author Topic: Lightroom and cloud storage  (Read 7989 times)

jrp

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Lightroom and cloud storage
« on: May 24, 2015, 01:58:31 pm »

Do people use Lightroom as a way of archiving their photos?

I know that we have Lightroom Mobile, but it seems to be a way of sharing work in progress, rather than a longer-term way of storing and accessing your pictures.

Similarly, Behance, which is presumably built on top of Amazon's S3 service, offers quite restrictive storage limits for the sort of person likely to have enough pictures to make Lightroom worthwhile.  Again, it seems to be aimed at "creative professionals" for sharing projects, rather than a comprehensive solution for photographers.

Amazon is offering cheap unlimited storage for photos, but in a way that makes the service suitable only for backups.  Dropbox is good for photos's but expensive.  MS's OneDrive offers 1Tb / unlimited photo storage, but for at least some types of subscription, the number of files stored is limited to 20,000, which makes it less useful for people with photo libraries.  Google seems to be thinking about how best to serve the photography market, reversing the unsuccessful integration of their G+ and Picasa offerings.  Apple has the right answer, but at an unaffordable price.  Services like Mylio (again, presumably built on top of S3) also provide a great solution, but with size/price limitations for photographers.

Lightroom appears to be ignoring all of these developments, providing little proper integration with any of these industrial strength services, assuming that Lightroom Mobile, with all its limitations (I have still not managed to upload 1,000 photos from my iPad back to Lightroom) is an acceptable answer.

What do people use to backup their photo libraries and to share them?  What part does Lightroom play in the process?  What am I missing?
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Hans Kruse

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #1 on: May 24, 2015, 06:30:33 pm »

Do people use Lightroom as a way of archiving their photos?

I know that we have Lightroom Mobile, but it seems to be a way of sharing work in progress, rather than a longer-term way of storing and accessing your pictures.

Similarly, Behance, which is presumably built on top of Amazon's S3 service, offers quite restrictive storage limits for the sort of person likely to have enough pictures to make Lightroom worthwhile.  Again, it seems to be aimed at "creative professionals" for sharing projects, rather than a comprehensive solution for photographers.

Amazon is offering cheap unlimited storage for photos, but in a way that makes the service suitable only for backups.  Dropbox is good for photos's but expensive.  MS's OneDrive offers 1Tb / unlimited photo storage, but for at least some types of subscription, the number of files stored is limited to 20,000, which makes it less useful for people with photo libraries.  Google seems to be thinking about how best to serve the photography market, reversing the unsuccessful integration of their G+ and Picasa offerings.  Apple has the right answer, but at an unaffordable price.  Services like Mylio (again, presumably built on top of S3) also provide a great solution, but with size/price limitations for photographers.

Lightroom appears to be ignoring all of these developments, providing little proper integration with any of these industrial strength services, assuming that Lightroom Mobile, with all its limitations (I have still not managed to upload 1,000 photos from my iPad back to Lightroom) is an acceptable answer.

What do people use to backup their photo libraries and to share them?  What part does Lightroom play in the process?  What am I missing?


Archiving is not part of Lightroom. I personally use HD's to backup locally and https://www.backblaze.com to backup all my computer files including all my photos in the cloud.

jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2015, 02:07:50 pm »

If you want to archive or backup your work, as Hans says LR is not the tool. It is however great for organising your work and editing it.

Some interesting info on what various backup services say about your photo rights can be found here.
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jrp

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2015, 03:24:58 pm »

Yes, I have seen those t&c before.  Of more concern to me is such fine print as back blazes, which deletes your backups if you have not inserted the original disk within the last 30 days.

I completely understand that Lightroom does not help you with an automatic backup facility that should be part of every non-trivial workflow.  My point is that that lack of integration is a nail in Lightroom's coffin. 

The clunkiness around social media sharing and backups are what will strangle Lightroom (just as Aperture has gone, and just like DSLR and even mirrorless sales are diminishing partly for ergonomic reasons and partly because getting pictures out of them to places where they can be seen is more work than it should be).

Yes, we could all continue using tried and tested decades old workflows. But they will have fewer new adherents as time goes by.
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Simon Garrett

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #4 on: May 25, 2015, 03:48:40 pm »

If you want to archive or backup your work, as Hans says LR is not the tool. It is however great for organising your work and editing it.

Some interesting info on what various backup services say about your photo rights can be found here.

Thanks for that link jjj.  

I think there are other issues they don't mention. There was a case last year (sorry, I can't remember names or links) where a cloud storage provider was shut down by the US government, as they were suspected of hosting illegal material.  A number of wholly unconnected photographers (I mean unconnected with the alleged illegality) had images hosted on the site, and the US government were refusing to provide any access to the images, saying that when they shut down a service, they have no obligation to return third-party property - ever.

Personally, I would not recommend cloud storage as the only means on backup - even if held with multiple service providers.  The legal aspects are not fully established yet, and you may have no control over the legal jurisdiction that applies.  
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #5 on: May 25, 2015, 03:53:07 pm »

I completely understand that Lightroom does not help you with an automatic backup facility that should be part of every non-trivial workflow.  My point is that that lack of integration is a nail in Lightroom's coffin. 
Well LR can back up your work every time it closes and can also duplicate your files on import to another location, but sadly it cannot duplicate work done on them during import. Backing up one's various TBs of image files which can be on drives not attached to your computer is best done by backup software.
LR Mobile can make smart previews of anything you want on your computer.  It's limited by the size of devices accessing it and is not just for works in progress, but it is not backup.

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The clunkiness around social media sharing and backups are what will strangle Lightroom (just as Aperture has gone, and just like DSLR and even mirrorless sales are diminishing partly for ergonomic reasons and partly because getting pictures out of them to places where they can be seen is more work than it should be).
So how would you improve on the excellent export and publish features within LR to place work elsewhere such as social media?

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Yes, we could all continue using tried and tested decades old workflows. But they will have fewer new adherents as time goes by.
Er LR and it's workflow is relatively new actually as it's only 8 years old.
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #6 on: May 25, 2015, 03:56:02 pm »

I think there are other issues they don't mention. There was a case last year (sorry, I can't remember names or links) where a cloud storage provider was shut down by the US government, as they were suspected of hosting illegal material.  A number of wholly unconnected photographers (I mean unconnected with the alleged illegality) had images hosted on the site, and the US government were refusing to provide any access to the images, saying that when they shut down a service, they have no obligation to return third-party property - ever.
That was Mega, Kim Dotcom's file hosting/sharing business. But it was well known for hosting dodgy stuff, so not somewhere I would choose for back up.
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #7 on: May 25, 2015, 03:59:16 pm »

Yes, I have seen those t&c before.  Of more concern to me is such fine print as back blazes, which deletes your backups if you have not inserted the original disk within the last 30 days.
If that is the case, then it should be 72pt flashing red text as you first read contract and not buried in fine print.
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jrp

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #8 on: May 25, 2015, 05:28:45 pm »

The fact that certain cloud services do not give you the t&c that you would like, does not preclude Adobe providing a service that does.  As they stand, the various publish services provided as plub-ins for Lightroom are too clunky, as I have said.  It should not be necessary to fiddle about with collections to publish pics to your facebook or apple photos timeline.  Lightroom mobile would be OK for certain usage scenarios, but it is just too slow to be practicable.
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Simon Garrett

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #9 on: May 25, 2015, 05:40:12 pm »

That was Mega, Kim Dotcom's file hosting/sharing business. But it was well known for hosting dodgy stuff, so not somewhere I would choose for back up.

Thanks for reminding me.  What hapens if a legit hosting service gets caught up in a dispute and someone serves an injunction on them? 

The likelihood is probably small, I'm just making the point that nothing is risk-free.
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #10 on: May 25, 2015, 05:42:06 pm »

The fact that certain cloud services do not give you the t&c that you would like, does not preclude Adobe providing a service that does.  
no-one said otherwise.


Quote
As they stand, the various publish services provided as plub-ins for Lightroom are too clunky, as I have said.  It should not be necessary to fiddle about with collections to publish pics to your facebook or apple photos timeline.  Lightroom mobile would be OK for certain usage scenarios, but it is just too slow to be practicable.
So how should it be done? Don't just moan, be constructive. Complaining takes very little effort whereas coming up with good ideas is considerably harder. What would be easier/better?
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #11 on: May 25, 2015, 05:43:26 pm »

Thanks for reminding me.  What hapens if a legit hosting service gets caught up in a dispute and someone serves an injunction on them? 

The likelihood is probably small, I'm just making the point that nothing is risk-free.
Don't use just the one cloud service would be a simple get around that, as you say, unlikely issue.
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Simon Garrett

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #12 on: May 25, 2015, 07:13:41 pm »

Don't use just the one cloud service would be a simple get around that, as you say, unlikely issue.

Agreed, or better (IMHO) is not rely cloud storage - even multiple suppliers - as a sole method of backup. 

It's rather hypothetical for me: my broadband uplink speed is too slow for cloud storage to be practical other than for small amounts of data. 
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #13 on: May 25, 2015, 07:16:44 pm »

Cloud backup is only ever really in addition to on+off site backup.
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jrp

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #14 on: May 25, 2015, 07:27:23 pm »

So how should it be done? Don't just moan, be constructive. Complaining takes very little effort whereas coming up with good ideas is considerably harder. What would be easier/better?

Something along the lines of mylio or apple photos but with unlimited storage and an affordable price (like Amazon Photos) combined with Adobe Camera Raw editing capability is surely the way to go.
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James R

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #15 on: May 25, 2015, 09:06:42 pm »

Using a RAID set-up on site is best.  I've used Drobo and now use Pegasus.  Never had a problem.  I messed with cloud services before and found them slow. 
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bassman51

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #16 on: May 25, 2015, 11:06:28 pm »

Something along the lines of mylio or apple photos but with unlimited storage and an affordable price (like Amazon Photos) combined with Adobe Camera Raw editing capability is surely the way to go.

I personally don't see the need to get my editing/DAM services from the same place I get my offsite backup services.  In fact, they seem completely unrelated to me and there's no reason to think a vendor would necessarily be world-class at both.

With a non-destructive editor like LR, you only load your image files to the backup service(s) once. After that you need to backup the catalog, which LR is happy to do to any attached storage, including services like Dropbox. 
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Hans Kruse

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #17 on: May 27, 2015, 12:23:26 pm »

Using a RAID set-up on site is best.  I've used Drobo and now use Pegasus.  Never had a problem.  I messed with cloud services before and found them slow. 

RAID is not a backup solution. This is for availability and great for that if you use a RAID with reduncancy. Backup in the cloud is for me for disaster tolerance and not for normal backup which I do on HD's locally.

jrp

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #18 on: May 27, 2015, 04:02:49 pm »

The Mylio people do seem to be thinking about Lightroom availability https://support.mylio.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457554-Mylio-and-Lightroom-A-Conceptual-Model.  Sounds good, but the limit on how much you can put up in the cloud and the price rule it out for me.
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jjj

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Re: Lightroom and cloud storage
« Reply #19 on: May 27, 2015, 06:27:58 pm »

The Mylio people do seem to be thinking about Lightroom availability https://support.mylio.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457554-Mylio-and-Lightroom-A-Conceptual-Model.  Sounds good, but the limit on how much you can put up in the cloud and the price rule it out for me.
That article only underlines why a third party archiving LR work is a waste of time. They cannot replicate a lot of the editing done to images by LR, so rather useless in my view.
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