Photo Management for Dummies (i.e. Me)
As part of my quest to get rid of a Windows XP PC and the nightmare that is iTunes, I've spent a couple days sorting out how to get photos from my phone (where I live), to Tara's PC (for her amusement and backup purposes), as well as to http://attackrabbit.net. It's been an interesting few days of investigation, here's what I found.
(You may also be interested in a couple diagrams I created in past posts:
http://progeneering.tumblr.com/post/39069921364/diagram-of-a-theoretical-complex-photo-publishing
http://progeneering.tumblr.com/post/39069828334/diagram-of-the-simpler-photo-publishing-process-i
Note that the end goal of each diagram is my wife and my Mom - not dissimilar from the rest of life, really.)
At first I had high hopes for iCloud and Photostream (http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html), until understanding its limitations a bit better. My phone is already backed up to iCloud, and it seemed like a public Photostream would be a great way to let anyone see photos as I take them. I originally read the limitation of Photostream as "up to 1000 photos", which would be fine since I only have ~500 photos on my phone at the moment.
But Photostream is actually limited to 1000 photos AND 30 days, and photos disappear from the stream after either limit is reached. So while Photostream is a convenient way to see fresh content and share across devices, it doesn't seem like a reliable way to push out content, particularly since you'd have to check back often from the public web site.
I then looked at iCloudControlPanel, free software from Apple (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1455). This lets you sync between PC folders (upload and download) and device photostream, and it's automatic on the device side. But, it only syncs the photostream (still a problem - it's not organized), and the PC location is only one download folder.
As part of the investigation, I found another problem - the iPhone "Photo Library", which contains photos you synced onto the device from iTunes, doesn't get backed up to iCloud, because Apple is pretty sure that those files exist on your PC with iTunes instead. This is the exact opposite of what I'm trying to accomplish - I want the device to be the master copy and get backed up, or at least have only one PC that needs to be backed up, not two.
Because of my confusion about what's backed up, what's in photostream, etc., I also found that my most recent transfer from an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4S didn't include all the photos I thought it would, or at least they weren't all in my library where I expected. After a bit of resynchronizing between devices I got this squared away.
1. Go to a flat photo album strategy. The 'Photos' app for iPhone doesn't allow nested photo albums, so I now have about 70 photo albums (!). They tend to start with "YYYY MM" in numerical format. Some albums start with some other designator ("House" for house related projects, etc.) so that they sort together.
I organized it this way in my PC photo library, then synced to the device one last time. At this point, I can turn off that PC forever - everything relevant on my phone (backups, (new) photos, music, apps) can be driven from there and is backed up from there.
(Note that the original photo library isn't backed up into iCloud, but I will manually copy it to my wife's PC one time, and it will get backed up from there).
2. Upon checking my phone, I found that the 'Photos' app can't modify photo albums from the original PC Photo Library (again, because Apple thinks those originals are sacrosanct). This is OK for albums started before this year, those are effectively sealed in stone.
For albums where I'm still adding stuff (i.e. Christmas photos), I made a new album in 'Photos' of the same name, and added all the content of the unmodifiable original into this new album. Then I sorted the album list in 'Photos' to put those originals way at the bottom, and I only make changes to the new albums.
3. From here on out, I never dump photos from my phone to PC directly, and I never clear out the camera roll. Photos that live on the device camera roll are backed up by iCloud, and I can classify them into albums right on the phone.
4. Photos go to Tara's PC for her to see, and for backup purposes, via a nifty $2app: http://www.photosync-app.com/ . With the free PC companion tool, it allows me to automatically push photos and albums from phone to PC over Wi-Fi. It has the capability to sync only new photos (I still need to test this out). So far I've synced all the interesting 2012 photos to Tara's PC, and it seems to be working well.
5. Photosync also claims to sync to a variety of web services, and I'll be trying the webDAV sync to http://attackrabbit.net soon. Assuming that works, this covers everything in the 'simpler' photo syncing diagram I showed above, and I'm home free!
Photosync Notes: This app also supports device to device and PC to device syncing, but for now I'm not as interested to enable this. I may eventually turn on PC to device syncing so that I can grab some of Tara's photos to keep locally.
Also, it doesn't appear to sort albums in the same nice order I see them in the 'Photos' app. I may submit this to the app creator as a nice improvement.
