An Engineer

Since the sale of Phanfare to Carbonite, my workflow has changed a bit and become pretty complicated.

I shoot mostly with a smartphone now and from time to time with my Canon DSLR. That probably makes me like most prosumers.

When I was CEO of Phanfare, I did not keep any deliberate local copy of my photos and videos. I did have photos and videos on lots of computers but not organized. After the sale in 2011, when it became clear that Carbonite was going to let Phanfare languish, I downloaded a full copy of my account to my local hard drive.

I took the local copy of my Phanfare account, about 250GB, and put it in Dropbox. That’s a big directory and I don’t want it mirrored to all my computers, so I now have selective sync turned on most places.

I tried to get into Dropbox Carousel, but never found it very engaging. The sharing is not great – initially there was no way to really view on the web at all. And Dropbox does not do much to auto-organize your collection.

For smartphone photos, I usually share select favorites on Facebook, usually within minutes of shooting. Those photos also get mirrored To Dropbox, since Carousel is on my phone. You can’t beat Facebook for getting the immediate gratification of having your photo seen and acknowledged.

I have iCloud Photo Library activated on my laptop, desktop, iPad, and iPhone and it does a reasonably job of keeping my Apple-ecosystem photos synched. I rarely open the desktkop version unless I need to grab a photo for use in email or iMessage from my home computer. But I do like seeing my whole collection on my iPad.

Turning on iCloud Photo Library quickly used up my 5GB free limit from Apple so I pay them.

When I shoot with my Canon 5D DSLR, I acquire the photos into Adobe Lightroom on my home iMac desktop and then create a dated directory within my Phanfare archive in my Dropbox folder of the form ‘2015-07-15 Geocaching with the Kids.’ Sometimes I share a few on Facebook.

Recently, I discovered Google Photos. Google Photos is much like iCloud Photo library in that it will sync your content across your devices and keep a master copy in the cloud, but much, much better.

Google Photos automatically brings together sets of photos as stories, organizes all your photos by face, and groups them by scene (skiing, boats, golf, etc). They also create videos, panoramas, animated gifs and ask you if you want to add them to your permanent collection.  It is the most successful attempt yet of cracking the problem of organizing your long tail of personal photos and videos automatically.

If you shoot with a smartphone,  Google Photos has location info for each photo and a timestamp and does a terrific job of creating stories of your photos that include location and dates. They can pretty much figure out when the excursion started and ended.

Google photos is more hit and miss with older media that is not geotagged, like photos taken with DSLRs, but it is clearly the best attempt so far. I liked it so much, I decided to pay Google to store fullsize images for me. I also run Google Photos uploader on my desktop and it watches that Dropbox directory, uploading anything I place there from my DSLR.

To help Google Photos do a better job, I have started to geotag my DSLR photos, which you can do with a tracking app that keeps a time-keyed log of where you have been.

I still get a quarterly DVD archive from Phanfare, although I now add only major events to Phanfare. So at this point, I use Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Phanfare for my photos and videos. I pay the latter three. I have these services arranged in a way that they don’t interfere with each other.

I still love my Phanfare website, with its carefully curated album,  custom music and descriptions of each event. But if that site goes away because Carbonite accidentally or deliberately ends the Phanfare service, I will never go to that trouble again. I have the meta data downloaded from Phanfare, so the information won’t be lost, but it will probably never be seen by another person outside myself.

My current prediction is that Google Photos wins for the long tail of our personal media. They are cross platform, free for most users (images below 16 megapixels and video of 1080p or smaller), and seem to be making enormous investments in photo analysis and automatic organization.