I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about putting my photos on the cloud (1, 2, for example) but have always been stuck because of scalability issues. And plus, it sucks that you need a network connection to see your photos.
One day, I had an interesting idea. Instead of putting all my photos on the cloud, why don’t I just carry them around with me! I have a phone and there is “16GB” of storage. What if I can fit all my photos on my phone? It’s certainly not possible with 16GB only but I decided that it’s not important to have full resolution photos (I settled on 720p as the max resolution) and I can live with some compression because the point is not to carry around photos for editing – but to have my photos with me.
So I batch processed all my photography and resized it to 720p with decent (JPG 80) compression. Photos ended up being around 100-200kb each. And all of my photography from 2012 ended up being under 250mb! In the end, for not more than 3GB of space, I can carry around my entire photo collection; and with new technologies to output from your phone (via HDMI or chromecast etc), it should be even easier to browse the photos.
I can even sync this up to DropBox if I want it on the cloud!
With this approach, I have some drawbacks which are:
- Not a viable backup for my photos
- Introduces another step in “photo processing” (although I’ll probably only update the photos in my phone several times a year)
- Not high resolution or original quality
- Difficult to see on large screen for now
Hi! and welcome to the eclectic personal blog of Kevin Quan. Come in, stay awhile, peek into the nooks & crannies, and learn a bit about me and my interests.