Justin Williams on the different options available for both backing up our photos and sharing them with friends and family. He looks at Dropbox’s Carousel, Apple’s Photo Stream, and Google+ Cloud Backup, and email.
Aside from my writing, I really can’t think of anything else I make that is as important to me than the photos I am taking. If you’re casual about your photos and only care about sharing the most recent snapshot and then you never really care about that photo again, then things aren’t that bad. You take a picture, upload it to Instagram/Facebook/Twitter and/or email it/text message it to your friends or family and you’re done.
But once you start caring. Once you realize that you want your favorite photos in some sort of album for easy trips through memory lane, and that you want all your photos to be available on all your devices, and that you want to more easily define who you share what photos with, and that you want all your photos to be safely backed up in case your toddler tosses your iPhone into the potty, well… that’s when you realize the state of photo sharing and backup in 2014 is still a confusing mess.
I touched on this yesterday in my link to Federico Viticci’s iOS 8 Wish List article. While pontificating what Apple has in store for the future of iOS, surely improvements to Photo Stream and iCloud storage are on the list. With how aggressive Apple is when it comes to enhancing the iPhone’s physical camera and the software that drive is, it’s mind boggling how much they’ve neglected the storage, syncing, and sharing of those photos.