I was chuffed this evening to look at a banner in my Flickr app because as part of its latest update to iOS app, among other features, Flickr now allows users to auto upload iPhone camera roll to their 1 terabyte share of Yahoo!’s servers somewhere in the ether. I think this is a fantastic feature that is going to change the game for all other services. This is a great news for users like me who are actively seeking ways to insure their priceless photos against potential device failure, theft and few other risks.
Traditionally most of the popular cloud offerings had one or other shortcomings. I have been using Dropbox which offered a reasonable 10 GB with a very convenient auto upload feature but both my accounts are nearly maxed out. Skydrive offered 25 GB [for early birds] but lacks auto upload feature from my HTC 7 Trophy that is stuck on Windows Phone 7 and the third party apps are sub-standard. I have 4 Box accounts worth 50 GB each but similar to Skydrive, there isn’t yet a nice and easy way to auto upload. Apple’s Photostream has limit of either 1000 photos or 30 days which is only good enough to sync photos across iOS devices but not for permanent storage. Facebook’s 2 GB is next to nothing and I always hated the aggressiveness of Google’s push to sign me up for Plus.
For all these reasons, I had to delete some photos of my little one- which, by the way, are the best part of the photos on my iPhone- to manage within the limited space. Despite that, I had to be a bit moderate with the number of my clicks or review and delete the similar photos.
This is why a 1000 GB of storage with auto upload sounds like music to my ears. However there are at least two shortcomings which I am more than happy to overlook at this stage. I can’t upload my earlier photos and I can’t upload videos. But I am hopeful they will be on the road map. Even otherwise, I am delighted with what I got now. Thumbs up to Flickr for being generous with storage. Because personally, I can’t explain how much joy I experience whenever I take a look at the chronologically arranged photos of my little one.
Hopefully others will follow Flickr’s lead. I am sure, within few years even 1 TB sounds like puny and everybody wonders how we used to manage with only few tens of GB of cloud space “in those days”.
Leave a Reply