Cloud backup and photo management

Do you have Amazon Prime already? They offer free unlimited backup of photos for Prime members. It's pretty good if you're going to keep doing things manually. If you want to do things more automatically, especially the organization, a lot of people on the board recommend Google Photos.

I do, is it a pretty user friendly interface?

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I do, is it a pretty user friendly interface?

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I downloaded the Amazon Cloud Drive app and was able to drag and drop folders from my desktop. It's pretty straight forward. For the phone app the options are there to auto upload from your camera roll or do it manually. One thing it doesn't have is the automated organization that Google has



But if your ok manually making albums like you've been making it will be fine.

I just signed up for google photos and realized I already had some albums on there. I guess this was carry over from picasa?

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I used picasa before, did this replace that?

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Kinda sorta. Best I can tell, they are still two separate apps, but they seem to be connected on the back end, if that makes sense.

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Does Google Photo reduce the quality of the files?

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It does if you want to use it for free. If you want to store them at original size, you get 15gigs for free, or if you need more I think it's $2/month for 100gigs and $10/month for 1TB, and basically $10/month per TB after that.

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This. I use the free version because i really dont care too much.


But either way I recently switched to google photos and i am pleased so far.

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My only issue, and I need to get past it, I guess; is I would ideally like a carbon copy of photos on my computer, saved somewhere on a cloud. Google doesn't want to keep my file structure, maybe I don't need it, it's just an adjustment.

As far as managing your pictures on a day to day, are you looking at the original files on your PC or on the cloud?

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My only issue, and I need to get past it, I guess; is I would ideally like a carbon copy of photos on my computer, saved somewhere on a cloud. Google doesn't want to keep my file structure, maybe I don't need it, it's just an adjustment.

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They're easily backed up to the cloud. It's one click in the settings. They'll be right there in Google Drive.

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I had similar structure with MP3's, but since I got my iPod 10 years ago (and other iphones), I just drop music in the music folder and move it over to iTunes. I don't sub folder and all that inside my music folder anymore. I guess it's the same.

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yeah algorithms have gotten better at 'putting together' the music you have even if the id3 tagging sucks.

and also the sites hosting the music have gotten more strict about insisting on proper ID tagging.

i finally threw my hands up after years of 'fighting against' music apps wanting to read the metadata instead of my artifically and painstakenly created directory towers.

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I have photos dating back to high school (15 years) organized by year and inside each year I have sub folders (month, specific events, etc). I thought it was a great system. Moving forward, it doesn't really make sense, I guess.

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I commend you for understanding file management. I like to keep things tidy, too, but over time I realized that media doesn't play by the same rules as other files and documents. For example, a Word document or a spreadsheet is concerned with a particular subject or belongs with a set of other documents, and you have to keep them all together and organized. But we don't use/consume media that way. We might want the same photo in a "vacation" album and in a "family" album and in a "sept 2015" album. Making 3 copies of the same file is wasteful, so which album gets the actual photo and which get links to the photo? The only answer is all photos need to be in a default location, and then all albums need to contain links to the photos that you want in them. And yeah, generally that default location will itself have things organized by date just so it isn't just a massive directory of files and all the problems that creates.

So we need something besides the file system to manage them.

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I had similar structure with MP3's, but since I got my iPod 10 years ago (and other iphones), I just drop music in the music folder and move it over to iTunes. I don't sub folder and all that inside my music folder anymore. I guess it's the same.

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Exactly. For photos we have albums, and for music we have playlists. It doesn't matter whether you have your mp3's organized by genre/artist/album/whatever, because you can make a playlist of any combination.

It sounds like you didn't have much trouble changing your mindset for music, so you just need to apply that same thinking to your photo collection. Just dump your photos to Google and let it sort things by date, then start making albums. I actually have very few albums because it does such a great job of automatically grouping photos by event and by person, and like I said the image recognition is pretty good also.

Also, I like the neat little auto-awesome tweaks and stuff. It's kind of cool when you randomly get a notification and it's a little slideshow of a particular event set to music.