iCloud and Aperture
By PhotoJoseph
October 9, 2011 - 12:47pm
I was perusing the Apple iCloud features and spotted this… it was expected, but nice to see it in print!
“Keeping a complete set of your photos on your Mac is as simple as turning on Photo Stream in iPhoto or Aperture. Every new photo you take appears in a Photo Stream album just as it does on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.”
I can’t wait!
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Comments
on October 9, 2011 - 9:03pm
Thanks for posting this. I was expecting it as well, but with Apple, you can never be sure they do “what seems obvious”, so I’m just glad to see that Aperture at least is included in this :)
I do wonder, however, what to do about Gallery, now that they remove MobileMe Gallery from iCloud? I like to use the MobileMe Gallery to quickly share an album with friends/family and just keep it hidden on my album page, no need for logins etc. Really easy to create and share. I wonder if we will see something similar with iCloud, though I have my doubts.
on October 9, 2011 - 9:39pm
Joseph,
This is pretty cool that your photos will just show up on your Mac with iCloud. And if it can be setup to go to Aperture 3 that is really neat. Really looking forward to see how good this all works. I was able to get in on the pre order for the iPhone 4S. Upgrading from the 3G. Received an email from Apple that it would arrive on Friday, October 14th. Of course in no way will this iPhone replace my main Canon cameras, however with the 8MP it will be interesting how good this iPhone really is for images. Having 1080p video is cool also. I remember my first digital camera was the Sony that used a floppy disk. Look where we have come over the past years. Now what will be coming in the future, that is the question?
Best,
Stu
Stuart
Website: http://www.stuartonline.com
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+StuartSchaefer/
on October 9, 2011 - 10:19pm
Joseph, how are you understanding this to work exactly? It seems that on the iCloud page they say that Photo Stream content doesn’t count against the 5GB storage we get; but does that mean every single image we have in Aperture will get stored on the cloud for free and not count against the 5GB? That’s quite a bit of free space and would seem counter of Apple’s typical approach to these types of things.
Thoughts?
R
on October 9, 2011 - 10:21pm
Robert,
I seem to recall something about “1000 photos”, so when you’ve reached that limit, they start removing the old ones automatically. Their reasoning was that by the time you reach that, you would have opened up iPhoto /Aperture on your computer by that time, to have sync’ed your iCloud Photo Stream. I think they mostly want to use Photo Stream as a way to sync photos between devices, not store them in the cloud for ever.
I can be wrong though :)
on October 9, 2011 - 10:21pm
Klaus, if you figure out how to replace the MobileMe/iWeb gallery please do share. I have the same need, and I’ve looked into RapidWeaver with plugins so create a site on Amazon S3 as well as SmugMug. Of the two, SmugMug is the easier one, but also not cheap/free.
R
on October 9, 2011 - 11:09pm
Klaus, if that’s true then… Meh :) I mean OK I think it’s interesting that you can at least get all the images from iPhone or iPad into Aperture quickly over the cloud, but what would be more interesting is to have the whole library in the cloud.
As an iOS developer, I’ve already started using parts of the cloud with iTunes Match, and that sucker is very very very interesting and I like it a lot. But clearly the data for iTunes match is nothing like our images. iTunes has at least songs that are common to many many users, and so space usage is minimal; photography is a whole different beast.
Right now I use crashplan for everything and it is absolutely wonderful. Crashplan even has an iOS app so you can get at your data when you need to from iPhone or iPad; it’s not the ease of use of iCloud, but it’s better than not having anything at all for sure :)
For the images, I think I’m going to go with smugmug. I’ve started actually selling prints, so going with the pro account, will do what I want it to do for everything photography.
So let’s see:
iCloud for music, personal files (bye bye DropBox), Photo Stream
Crashplan to backup everything else (no more backing up music)
SmugMug for my photography work
Too bad we can’t do it all in one place at a reasonable cost, but I think that’s a pretty darn good combo.
R
on October 10, 2011 - 3:41am
Robert,
I understand your “meh”, but on the other hand, I believe they designed it to do what it does, so a photo backup/storage in the cloud was probably not one of their goals :)
Do hope though, that they will introduce some kind of Gallery feature with iCloud.
I use CrashPlan too - really great solution!
on October 10, 2011 - 3:50am
Folks,
Of course until we have it in our hands, we don’t really know anything, but I think most of you are on the right track.
Yes, 1,000 (most recent) photos from the iPhone/iPod are held in the cloud. If you don’t launch Aperture before you hit 1,000, then presumably next time you do launch Aperture, you’ll have a gap in photos. They won’t be lost though, because they’re still stored on the phone, and also they are backed up to iCloud. I believe the difference between the backup and the 1,000 is simply that the 1,000 sync to your other iDevices, to your Mac, etc. automatically.
As far as storing all your photos in the could… we’re still a long way off from that. Look at my photo collection; it’s in the TBs, not GBs. Until there’s bandwidth fast enough and compression good enough and storage cheap enough, we won’t have that “everything in the cloud” ideal. And remember that as all those things get better, our files get bigger (hello, 8 megapixel iPhone). But we’re getting closer.
In the meantime, the fact that you can back up everything to the cloud through services like Backblaze and Dropbox are pretty spectacular.
I don’t expect to be dropping Dropbox any time soon, but we’ll see what features iCloud really has for documents. Personally I wish that Apple had bought Dropbox; they succeeded where iDisk failed. Now I’m not sure there’s a need for both. Time will tell.
For photography storage and display, yes Smugmug is awesome for many reasons. But don’t forget as well that you can upgrade to a Flickr Pro account for $25/year with unlimited storage, and once you go Pro, you can upload full resolution files. That’s the best deal in photo storage out there, I believe.
Lots of changes, lots of fun, and in the end, we win :)
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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