Photo management software that can organize local photos and cloud libraries together
Asked 8/27/2015
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2 answers
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I’m looking for photo management software for Windows or Linux that can handle my local collection and also work with photos stored on cloud services such as Google/Picasa Web, OneDrive, and Flickr.
Ideally, I want one place to organize images into folders or albums, add tags, and browse by date or location regardless of where the files are stored. I’m currently using Picasa for local files, but it doesn’t really integrate cloud-stored photos beyond upload features.
Is there any software that truly combines local and multiple cloud photo libraries seamlessly?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
2
In my experience, Lightroom comes closest to this ideal. It is not exactly the use case you mention, as the different services all have different capabilities and different methods.
Lightroom allows you to manage your local collection with ease; in fact I would argue that it is among the best tools around for managing your local collection. In its recent versions, Lightroom provides the capability to Export and a slightly different capability to Publish. Export is familiar, as this is the ability to convert from native RAW to JPEG, with automation to 'Export to' a location, such as your hard drive, email, or even a few online services like Flickr. In this case, Lightroom is essentially creating a JPEG, uploading it to the service, then deleting the JPEG locally.
However, the newer Publish feature is closer to what you are needing: Publish allows you to create and manage 3rd party cloud services like Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa and others, creating folders, and 'publishing' images to those folders. Lightroom then remembers what photos are in what folders, and displays them, just like it displays local images. (these are not duplicate, but essentially fancy 'smart folders'). Arranging the images in these Publish folders will arrange them on the associated service, once you 'Publish' those changes.
For more extensive capabilities in this area, I strongly encourage you to investigate Jeffery Friedl's Lightroom plugins that extend Lightroom's capability to several other cloud services, and are essentially required add-ons for Lightroom.
For more on how to use Publish Services in Lightroom, see:
Jeffery Friedl's excellent explanation of Flickr Publish Service
Originally by user4880. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4880
10y ago
0
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There isn’t really a fully seamless, universal photo manager that deeply integrates multiple cloud photo services and your local library in one unified catalog.
From the answers, Adobe Lightroom is probably the closest mainstream option. It’s very strong for managing a local collection, and it can export or publish to some online services such as Flickr. But that is generally upload/publish workflow support, not true two-way integration of multiple cloud libraries.
That limitation is common: most photo apps are strongest within their own ecosystem and offer only partial integration with outside services.
A practical workaround is to make cloud storage appear as local folders if the service provides a desktop sync client or mounted drive, then use your operating system or photo software to index those files. This can help with searching and browsing, but it still isn’t the same as one app natively managing all services equally.
So: true seamless multi-cloud photo management is generally not available; Lightroom comes closest for local management plus some online publishing.
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