Just thoughts …

Tag: Dropbox

  • Getting photos to the cloud(s) and back

    This article is prompted by a combination of a casual enquiry about sending photos from your iPhone to Google Photos (hosted on a Google Drive), and my own discovery that I was backing-up iPhone photos to BOTH iCloud and Google Photos.

    Observation one. Google Photos and iCloud Photos don’t work in quite the same way. Whereas you can access the Photos you may have stored on Apple’s iCloud storage from icloud.com through the iCloud Photos app, you cannot access Google Photos from drive.google.com directly – you have to go to photos.google.com to access them. Google Photos uses up some of your Google Drive storage – you get 15Gb “for free” with a Google account – but it’s a standalone application, in the same way as Google Mail is. It’s an important distinction. Google provides you with applications which make use of their cloud storage, Apple provides cloud storage alongside access to applications which use that storage and which synchronises back to devices.

    The iCloud window {Access to all Apple applications and cloud storage}
    The Google Drive window {NB No access to Photos, or Mail}
    The Google Photos window {separate from Google Drive}

    Observation Two. This article concentrates principally on Google and Apple, because they are the two principal players in the Camera and Cloud Storage space. There are other cloud storage solutions on which you can store photos, eg Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Dropbox. I will only refer to these briefly at the end of this article. There are undoubtedly other cloud storage solutions, but I won’t be writing about them.

    Observation Three. Anything I write about the link between Camera and Photos on an Android/Google system is second-hand knowledge, and I cannot verify it!

    Observation Four – the final one. This article does not seek to cover the general topic of transferring photos from a phone to your computer. This is more than adequately covered in this article. I suggest you read it too.

    Not wishing to be dismissive, but just because it’s so straightforward – I’m going to discuss Google Photos first. If you have an Android phone and thereby have a Google account, you automatically have 15Gb of cloud storage and the two are linked, and by default any photos you take on your phone are backed-up to your Google account. This is described well in the Google Support article. A couple of things are worth highlighting however: a) you can switch-off automatic back-up and synchronisation of your photos, in which case all backups would need to be done manually; b) you should carefully choose the “quality” of the photos you back-up – they may not be the same as that of the photo on your device; and c) it would appear that you could backup photos to a different account from your main one, thus adding to the free 15Gb you get with each account. [Alternatively, for £15.99 a year you could get an additional 100Gb of storage from Google. If you aren’t an Apple user this is definitely worth considering.]

    It’s not that much more difficult if you want to save photos from your iOS (iPhone or iPad) device to the Google cloud storage. Again the Google Support article describes the process and the options quite well.

    Similarly if you’ve transferred photos to your computer (eg from a camera SD-card), then Google’s got you covered to back-up and sync to their Cloud storage in this article. You should nominate a folder on your computer that Google Drive will monitor for newly added files which will then be backed-up and synced to either Google Drive, or to Google Photos, or both, depending upon the option(s) you’ve chosen.

    Note (4) – you might get two copies if you don’t uncheck “Sync with Google Drive”

    For this to work however, you do need to be sure you’ve a) installed the Google Drive on your computer, and b) you’ve set the preferences the way you want them. In my case, since I’ve increased the amount of Google storage I have, I’ve chosen to Mirror a folder (in itself called Google Drive) – then both the folder on the computer, and the one in the cloud should be exactly the same. A mirror in fact. Anything I add to (or edit on) my local Google Drive will be copied to my Google Drive in the cloud.

    So we turn next to the Apple ecosystem. [I should feel more confident here, but as you may have noted that I disclosed at the start of this article that I was doing something extremely stupid and not noticing my idiocy.] Here the support page on Apple Photos and iCloud I think really does a good job of explaining your choices and how to set up backup to their cloud storage. I don’t think I can improve on it. But what if you’ve got Google Photos installed as well on your iOS device? This is where I made my foolish mistake. I enabled Backup and Sync on my iPhone and so I got TWO copies of every photo – one in my Google storage in Google Photos and the other in my iCloud storage. Duh!!!

    Disabling the Backup and Sync left me with an image which was shared locally between the Google Photos and Apple Photos apps. How could I get that image (or group of images) onto Google Photos to perhaps share with friends or family?

    It turns out that there are two reasonably easy ways of doing this. By enabling iCloud Photos on the phone (or tablet) …

    Set iCloud Photos to On

    … I can then download from iCloud to a folder on my computer which I can then upload to Google Photos from. Really rather simple and not a use case for Google Photos Backup and Sync to be employed.

    Alternatively, I could go into the Google Photos app, select the image I want to send to Google Photos in the cloud and Share it by getting a link and then sending myself a message. The act of sharing it copies the image to the cloud, from which I can then add it albums, etc.

    Using either of these approaches allows you then to obtain a link for the album which you can then Share to a list of users, or obtain a link for public sharing.

    Once you get the photos onto Google Photos the fun starts. It’s not intuitive what happens when you decide you want to delete them either from the cloud, or from your device. In fact it’s downright confusing. I’ve written about this before and life is too short to repeat anything that I believe still to be correct. Best of luck!!!

    The situation with deleting photos from Apple Photos and iCloud Photos is slightly more straightforward and is detailed below …

    “I can confirm that deleting a file on iCloud Drive from the Files app on an iPhone will delete it from icloud.com and your iCloud drive on MacOS as well – which is what you would expect should happen.”

    However, the situation of Photos stored in the Apple Photos app (on iPhone or iPad) and iCloud Photos should also be noted – for completeness.

    I’m not going to write anything; just provide three links to follow to clarify …

    How to Delete Photos From iPhone but Not iCloud

    How to Delete Photos From iCloud (While Keeping Them on Your iPhone)

    and

    How to recover a deleted photo or video on your iPhone or iPad

    If you want to delete a Photo from both device and iCloud Photos. Just ensure Sync is left on and then you can delete the image from either the device or icloud.com

    Having confirmed all this, and having more storage space on iCloud, and understanding that sharing Photo Albums is about to come to Apple Photos, and having checked that Sync’ing does seem to be working for iCloud Photos (from my Apple devices), I checked my Google Photos settings settings and switched-off Back up and Sync. I was doing far too many cloud backups!!! Always worth checking. If I want a Photo to be on Google Photos (for sharing for instance), I will now Upload, not rely on syncing.

    It goes without saying that keeping it all in the Apple ecosystem (for me) makes a lot of sense, and with the ability to share albums on the way – it’s not yet as sophisticated as the Google Photo Albums service – I may transition away from Google Photos altogether in time.

    If you’re a PC Windows user with an iPhone, then a solution is beginning to appear that enables you to use the Windows Photo application with iCloud. You can install iCloud for Windows on your PC and then you should be able to manage your iPhone photos from your desktop.

    For Dropbox users, you can setup an automatic upload of photos to the service. They even give you a bit more free storage if you enable this, or at least they used to!

  • Just supposin’ … [Part 2]

    Just supposin’ … [Part 2]

    Reaction to my previous post from an old colleague and friend Brian Kelly and the lack of response to my enquiry about using diaspora* and any of the Indieweb offerings has led me to put those ideas to sleep. However, having set the hare running, I need to close the issue with a short description of what cloud-based services I do use, and offer a justification of why – remembering that continuity and reliability are of huge importance to the individual who has no access to corporate systems.

    Unlike Google, I recognise the value of RSS feeds so Feedly has become a really important part of my personal IT infrastructure. Being able to track the posts on a number of blogs and/or websites that I have chosen to follow places it for me above other services such as Flipboard, which I do use to create magazines of content I want to archive, but not as an RSS aggregator at which it is rather poor. Having farmed my RSS feeds, what do I do with them – well I tend to save them in Pocket which I can then access offline as well. [I should mention that it is essential for me to also have services that have an iOS app (for the iPhone/iPad) as well as being able to be accessible from a web browser.]

    I think with these two I have chosen niche applications that have no stronger competitors and therefore I have a reasonable expectation that they will be around for a long time.

    The same is the case with my next piece of “kit”. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realise the significance of this until rather late on. I’m talking about Evernote.  It’s difficult to find a thing that Evernote cannot do. It’s not only a note taker, but it can hold clipped webpages, store video and audio clips and even do a reasonable job as a word-processor! If you don’t use it – give it a look. I just love the way you can share a note or a notebook with someone else. Such a convenient way of sharing ideas.

    Of course I could use the services offered by Apple as all my kit is provided by them, but I’m not yet convinced by iCloud. Let me give you an example. One of my most-hated pieces of software is iTunes because of the limitations of its data base. Despite that I use it a lot – perhaps I shouldn’t, but I have invested a lot of time and effort in getting it to work for me and now it does, on multiple devices including my Apple TV, using an ingenious workaround that involves storing my iTunes Library in my Dropbox folder and the media on a separate external hard disk. Why don’t I use my iCloud Drive? Well I can’t get it to work on that drive because … would you believe it … iTunes can see my Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive folders but NOT my iCloud Drive!!!

    In any case it makes sense to use multiple cloud storage services so I make use of all the main ones with subscriptions to Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud.

    That just leaves collaboration and social media services. Until very recently I was convinced that Google had the service offering that was best for me. It provided the granularity, security and functionality that I wanted. It integrated with my main interest – photography – exceptionally well, and even provided a photo storage and editing facility that was as good as any other around. I’ve previously blogged about my discontent at the demise of Picassa, and the confusion of Google+ Photos and Google Photos. Well the latter is beginning to emerge as a nice piece of software but what has happened to Google+ is just not acceptable.  How can you expect a piece of software to develop when you take away functionality. It doesn’t make sense to me. So I’m now looking more seriously at returning to using Facebook more, after all I now know how to share Google Photo Albums on Facebook.

    So that’s about it … my personal cloud-based infrastructure. If I’ve forgotten anything, or I change my mind, I’ll update this post at a later date. Bye for now :-).

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