Accessing Photo Library without syncing

3 years 8 months ago #689750 by Bernie1417
Hi, I have about 100 000 photos in Photo on my iMac, but travel a lot and will move in a near future and my iMac will not be accessible for a few months. I have a MacBook Pro and I'm looking for a way of accessing my Photo Library on the cloud (any cloud storage that would work), without having an automatic downloading of all the photos, as my laptop doesn't have that much storage capacity. 
Thank s for any advice.
Bernadette


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3 years 8 months ago #689764 by Nikon Shooter
A library may contain your photos (100k is ginormous to
upload to the cloud… an eternity. Did you explore the pos-
ability to acquire an eHD to travel with your photos?

Light is free… capturing it is not!
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3 years 8 months ago #689777 by garyrhook
You can put anything you want on someone else's server, and download them as you need them. Google Drive, DropBox, etc, allow live access to your files/images, and you could then download what you want.

Photo implies you're only looking at JPEGs. You don't mention RAW files. If you only need to upload JPGs, that will likely take less time than RAW files. You don't mention your upload bandwidth, or how much time you have to implement as solution.

However, if you wish to use network storage interactively, then the answer is no.

You should already have two other copies of your images (and all other files): on a local, external hard drive or NAS system (preferably RAID-based), and also backed up to an off-site location (BackBlaze, Google Drive or some such). That said, at the very least, get an external drive and copy your images onto it. Than devise a backup scheme.


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3 years 8 months ago #689789 by Bernie1417
Thank you for your advice :-). Yes I do have have a back-up external hard drive. The library is about 600GB. I have been looking at software like Luminar for organising and visualising all photos instead of having to click each folder on the hard drive to find something. But there is one thing I'm not sure of. If for exemple I import all my photos in Luminar from the hard drive, will that be an actual download and use space on my laptop, or would it just be a virtual download ?


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3 years 8 months ago #689806 by garyrhook

Bernie1417 wrote: If for exemple I import all my photos in Luminar from the hard drive, will that be an actual download and use space on my laptop, or would it just be a virtual download ?


The term "download" typically means moving a file from a remote server (on the network) to your local system. Referencing files on a local hard drive, internal or external, is not a "download". Your external drive is just a storage device. For example, my desktop system has eight drives in it (currently). One just moves things around.

Yes, you want whatever program you use to access the files on the external drive, not try to copy them onto the internal drive.

A digital asset management system should be able to make copies of your images, or simply refer to them where they are. Lightroom has no trouble referencing files on external drives (you "Add" them to your catalog). However, I only have a copy of Luminar 3, which can either copy or move files.

I believe that Luminar 4 offers a trial period. You might also consider Photo Mechanic, Affinity, Lightroom, Capture One. There are others.


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3 years 8 months ago #689812 by Nikon Shooter
Be careful with you choice!

I use Affinity Photo as pixel editor with great pleasure
but not as converter. It it won't create sidecar files but
save as jpg a single image at the time… as converter it
is very insufficient but in a marvel of pixel editor.

As proper converter, I use Capture One… also with a 30
day trial.

Light is free… capturing it is not!
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