We are about a week away from leaving. So we are into last minute preparations. A moment to vent...
In 2018, why is photo management so hard? We have a combination of camera phones and real cameras. The camera phones are a mix of Android and iPhone/iPads. Google Photos and Apple Photos each seem to get us about 90% of what we need, which can't possibly be that unusual. We want photos and videos that are taken by any of us -- Shelby, Eli, or me -- to show up in one central repository that we can curate to make albums, books, share with friends and family, etc.
If we use Google Photos, we can share between family members, but only one family member. So I can set it up so Shelby and I can see one another's photos, but not Eli's. Google Photos also can't seem to upload videos from my Olympus m43 camera from OSX (though inexplicably, it does fine from iOS). Also, Google Photos and iCloud Photo Library do not co-exist gracefully on iOS. iCloud Photo Library stores a thumbnail of cloud-available photos that Google Photos then download in full-resolution to upload to its servers, which undermines the entire point of iCloud's quite elegant option to cache photos/videos locally on demand.
If we use Apple Photos with iCloud Photo Library, photos and videos upload seamlessly from the iOS devices, but there is no reasonable cross-platform support for the Android devices. I can transfer the photos manually from Android devices into the Photos.app on OSX and then they upload into the iCloud Photo Library. But even then, unless Eli or Shelby share their photos/videos explicitly in the 'Family' album, there is no good way to create a single central repository of all our photos and videos.
I'm reflecting on this because I like to take a lot of photos and videos but spend nearly no time going through them in the moment. I'm much more likely to look back on them years from now than I am days after I take the pictures, so I want the management solution to be robust and automatic. Especially when I'm planning on making a lot of memories on this trip, and my ability to actually remember things in my brain isn't what it was when I was younger.
