Hello, the Internet. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a question about photographs.
My spouse and I both take pictures. We both anticipate taking more pictures in the near future. No reason, just a total coincidence.
We both have iPhones, and we both have medium-nice cameras that are still nicer than iPhones. We would both like to curate and touch up these photos and actually do something with them; ideally we would do this curation collaboratively, whenever either of us has time.
This means that there are three things we want to preserve:
- The raw, untouched photographs, in their original resolution,
- The edits that have been made to them, and
- The “workflow” categorization that has been done to them (minimally, “this photo has not been looked at”, “this photo has been looked at and it’s not good enough to bother sharing”, “this photo has been looked at and it’s good enough to be shared if it’s touched up”, and “this has been/should be shared in its current state”). Generally speaking this is a “which album is it in” categorization.
I like Photos. I have a huge photo library with years of various annotations in it, including faces (the only tool I know of that lets you do offline facial recognition so you can automatically identify pictures of your relatives without giving the police state a database to do the same thing).
However, iCloud Photo Sharing has a pretty major issue; it downscales photographs to “up to 2048 pixels on the long edge”, which is far smaller even than the 12 megapixels that the iPhone 7 sports; more importantly it’s lower resolution than our television, so the image degradation is visible. This is fine for sharing a pic or two on a small phone screen, but not good for a long-term archival solution.
To complicate matters, we also already have an enormous pile of disks in a home server that I have put way too much energy into making robust; a similarly-sized volume of storage would cost about $1300 a year with iCloud (and would not fit onto one account, anyway). I’m not totally averse to paying for some service if it’s turnkey, but something that uses our existing pile of storage would definitely get bonus points.
Right now, my plan is to dump all of our photos into a shared photo library on a network drive, only ever edit them at home, try to communicate carefully about when one or the other of us is editing it so we don’t run into weird filesystem concurrency issues, and hope for the best. This does not strike me as a maximally robust solution. Among other problems, it means the library isn’t accessible to our mobile devices. But I can’t think of anything better.
Can you? Email me. If I get a really great answer I’ll post it in a followup.