The originals are transferred without modification, so the EXIF will contain all the metadata, so you shouldn’t lose any of the metadata, unlike for example Google Photos that resizes and compresses the images and some of this metadata may be lost.
As far as transfers go, what method do you use? The common procedures are:
1- Let it sync with iCloud on iOS, then let is sync again on MacOS photos app, then finally do an export from Photos app to save as files. This works fine except with you have lots of photos (100K+ photos for example), then it can take many days.
2- Connect your computer to your phone using USB, but we literally could not get it to work for 100K+ photos sample size, even after waiting hours, and even then it still just loads them into the Photos app, requiring exporting again.
3- Upload to OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Dropbox, etc. but still not easy to select 100K+ photos and the folder/album structure is not maintained.
If you have a better method we don’t know about, please let us know. As far as I know, there currently aren’t any apps out there that allow for complete syncing (mirroring) of the iOS photo library to Storj.
I use modified number one. iCloud is a source of truth, photo library resides in iCloud. However many photos and videos I take with a phone get uploaded within a day, other photos and videos get ingested on a Mac (from a CF card), and the sync to iCloud from there. (By iCloud i mean iCloud Photo Library.).
The reasons to pick iCloud and not Google drive or OneDrive…
… is because iCloud is a first-party solution and there is only one company responsible for making it work. The fewer dependencies - the better.
Google photos makes it extremely difficult to take data away from them. I’ve tried, and deleting photos from your account is maliciously needlessly difficult.
OneDrive is a moronic resource hog. It’s crap. Microsoft is done. They peaked at SkyDrive. It’s all downhill from there.
I disagree; both syncs are automatic and fast: You don’t have to wait for all photos to sync because only new media is, it’s incremental. I have about 120k photos and videos there, it’s pretty fast to access even offloaded media.
And there is no need to export — originals are located in the “originals” folder in the photo library bundle.
That’s not what this discussion is about, I was responding to
But let’s consider sync to outside, because you do need to backup your photo library (I don’t see any other reason why would you want to sync to any other service otherwise?).
Since photos are already local in the “originals” folder, one can simply do unidirectional rclone sync to any cloud, including Storj.
I strongly disagree with an approach of having an iOS app do that — there is no reason to upload photos twice from a resource constrained mobile device with a battery.
That’s the gist of it: take advantage of the ecosystem and sync from another machine (in fact, your iOS app can be use on Macs as-is, so this is not an issue)
The value of your app I see in its ability to materialize offloaded photos and videos (if I understand correctly it can do that) and this is the selling point. ArqBackup7 does the same with data less files in iCloud Drive, and other Drive services but not with photos.
And honestly, for immutable media using deduplicating compressing backup app is an overkill — it media can be synced to immutable /object locked glacier bucket directly. Your app solves this with the UI.
Of course software and compute savvy people have a myriad of methods at their disposal to transfer photos from their phones to their computers and backup their photos. But not everyone is computer savvy, and many people don’t have a dedicated computer at home, or perhaps only have a laptop that they may use occasionally.
So this app is more for these type of people who don’t mind paying about 80 cents per month to be able to directly sync their photos to Storj for backup and other purposes.
S3Drive for Android can be used for to Sync folders on Android (though it requires an upgrade to do a full sync as the free version just does only a copy and not a sync).
However, on iOS, the sync option seems to be limited to only syncing between remote cloud destinations. The option to select a local album or folder is grayed out.
S3Drive is a good app though when one just wants a “backup” only as a long list of files and maintaining the defined folder/album isn’t important. This is also the problem with relying on the “originals” folder inside the “Photos Library.photoslibrary” file on MacOS. Everything appears as just random file names with no folder organization!
This is a cool app, but it’s essentially a linux emulator running as an app. There is no access to the iOS filesystem or photos from within this app. It only exposes its own container with the Files app, so in order to copy files to this app, one has to use the Files app to save photos to this app.
The Sync with S3 app we provide is meant to simplify and automate syncing your photo library with Storj. Copying files to Storj can of course easily be done manually using the many file management apps available. The only reason for using an app like ours is to save time.
