Online Photo Backups

Common wisdom these days states that a file doesn't truly exist unless it exists in at least two places (one of which is off-site). Of all the files people back up, photographs may be the most important. For many people, they're high on the list of items they wouldn't want to lose in the event of an unforeseen disaster.

Several different online options exist which can be used for backing up photos; some are designed with photos in mind, and some are simply for generic file storage. I have chosen a few of the more common ones and written up a brief comparison of them below (in random order). Each option looks at the cost for backing up 30 GB of photos; this size was chosen to reveal price differences as your photo library grows.

Flickr

One of the most popular options, and also the cheapest. The Flickr Pro account starts at $2.08/month and provides you with unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, and unlimited bandwidth. The only serious drawback to Flickr is the lack of RAW file support (JPEG only). Additionally, the associated hassle and organizational issues that go along with having your backups stored in the same place as the photographs you'd like to share with everyone else. When backing up, remember to mark the photos as private, sort them into a different Set/Collection, etc.

Pro:

• Cheap ($2.08/month = infinite GB)
• Unlimited storage
• Aperture plugin
• iPhoto plugin
• Automator plugin
• Broadly supported due to popularity

Con:

• No RAW support
• 10 MB file size limit
• Organizational issues with other sharable photos
• Designed for sharing rather than backing up

Picasa

Google's Picasa service is a direct competitor to Flickr, but lacks an unlimited storage option and costs more money per month. For $1.67/month you get 10 GB; for $6.25/month, 40 GB, for $20.83/month, 150 GB, and for $41.67, 500 GB! I can't see any direct benefit of Picasa over Flickr for the task of backing up photos, although for sharing photos with friends, viewing on the iPhone, etc., it may have some benefits.

Pro:

• Large capacities available
• iPhoto plugin

Con:

• No RAW support
• Somewhat expensive ($6.25/month = 40GB)
• Organizational issues with other sharable photos
• Designed for sharing rather than backing up

Photo Shelter Personal Archive

Photo Shelter is actually designed for backing up photos in a permanent, redundant archive. For $9.99/month, you get 10 GB of storage, $29.99/month gets 35 GB, and $49.99/month 100 GB. Photo Shelter allows you to upload almost any format (including RAW), and the only real drawback I can see is that it's extremely expensive for the average user. This site is targeted more at professional photographers and those with money to burn - if you have the cash, this may well be the best option.

Pro:

• RAW support
• Aperture plugin
• Large capacities available
• Designed with backups in mind

Con:

• Expensive ($29.99/month = 35 GB)

.Mac iDisk

Apple's popular .Mac service comes with online file storage as well as e-mail, backups, and syncing between multiple computers. The cheapest plan starts at $8.33/month, and provides 10 GB of storage. For $12.49/month you get 20 GB of storage, and for $16.66/month, 30 GB. The iDisk has the benefit of always being a single click away in your Finder sidebar and hence is fairly easy to backup photos to - just drag and drop or export directly from Aperture or iPhoto. Any file format (including RAW) is acceptable since it's simply an online disk. The main drawbacks of .Mac are that you can't view the photos online, and the extremely high expense - this is the second most expensive option considered. Yes, it's true that you can create a Web Gallery or website with photos to share, but the first option uses lower quality files (not good for backups), and the second option makes them available to everyone by default.

Pro:

• RAW support
• Finder file copy
• Direct export to folder from iPhoto/Aperture
• Multipurpose generic storage space
• Designed with backups in mind

Con:

• Expensive ($16.66/month = 30 GB)
• Limited data storage capacity (30 GB)

Amazon S3

One advantage of Amazon's S3 service is that they charge you based on exactly how much data you store - if you only have 2 GB of data to store it will cost you significantly less than if you have 30. S3 provides 10 GB for $1.50 a month, 20 GB for $3 a month, and 30 GB for $4.50/month. As stated above, you can scale this to whatever storage size you need (a big advantage) although it becomes expensive when you get up to 70 or 80 GB. As with .Mac, absolutely any file format (including RAW) can be uploaded since it's simply online file storage. Amazon does charge a $.10 per GB upload fee unlike the other services, but since you're using this for backup, the one time fee shouldn't affect you too much. The main drawback of this service is the lack of convenience, and the price if you need a large capacity.

Pro:

• RAW support
• Multipurpose generic storage space
• Large capacities available
• Don't pay for capacity you're not using

Con:

• Somewhat expensive ($4.50/month + $3.00 upload = 30 GB)
• Have to use a third party tool to upload

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, Flickr offers the best value - for a whopping $2.08/month, you can have unlimited photo storage. The major drawback is the lack of RAW support, but for the price it's probably still the best choice. For someone like me with about 60 GB of photos to backup, Flickr is still $2.08/month, whereas Picasa would cost me $20.83/month, Photo Shelter would be $49.99/month, S3 would be $6 upload plus $9/month, and .Mac doesn't even appear to allow that much data storage, maxing out at 30 GB. If I had money to burn, I'd lean towards Photo Shelter since it's geared directly towards backup and archiving use. As it is, Flickr remains the best option for me, but your mileage may vary as they say.

Comments/corrections with your preferred online backup solution are encouraged.

Grapher Review

When Apple first introduced the PowerPC based Power Macintosh computers in 1994, they included an innovative product called Graphing Calculator which was made by Pacific Tech. In addition to being a great way to show off the speed of the new PPC chip, this program turned out to be a useful educational tool and helped teach basic math skills to many grade school and college students. Unfortunately, with the switch to Mac OS X in 2001, Graphing Calculator was abandoned by Apple and users were left with a hole.

Apple responded to the need for a replacement beginning with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and bundled a program they dubbed "Grapher" (originally Curvus Pro by Arizona Software). Although Grapher doesn't feel as fast as the older Graphing Calculator, it offers much of the same functionality including 2D and 3D graphing, integration and differentiation support, and built in examples. In some areas such as customizing the graph display, Grapher is even more flexible than Graphing Calculator.

Grapher is freely bundled with every copy of Tiger and can be found neatly hidden in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Why Apple would hide this useful piece of software (which is clearly not a Utility) in the Utilities folder is anyone's guess, and as a result of this hiding many Mac users aren't even aware that it exists. Since Grapher does indeed reside on your system, it's worth checking out.

Note: Pacific Tech finally started supporting OS X independent of Apple, and you can still buy Graphing Calculator on their website today.

• By Apple, Inc.
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GraphicConverter 5.9.5 Review

GraphicConverter is many things: a poor man's Photoshop replacement, a versatile photo organizer with IPTC and EXIF tagging support, an excellent way to present a slide show, a robust photo editor, a batch processor, and an image format converter. The software has been around for many years and pre-dates OS X although it is frequently updated and now a universal binary. GraphicConverter can open files in nearly 200 formats and export in nearly 100. It is also available in twelve languages!

Since Photoshop is a bit of a beast and takes its time launching, you may find yourself using GraphicConverter for typical Photoshop tasks such as cropping, resizing, alpha layers, and basic photo corrections. GraphicConverter launches in a snap and is ready to do your bidding. The batch change feature is quite powerful (although the interface is antiquated) and makes short work of entire folders of images. It's easy to use for tasks such as creating thumbnails with different titles or file formats and is used extensively for the images which end up on this web page.

GraphicConverter may be used indefinitely with a short startup delay, however, it's well worth paying the small fee to support this fine software. The developer is also unusually responsive; if you find problems or have reasonable feature requests, he will often fix or implement them within weeks or months - quite different from the experience you'd get contacting Adobe.

The only real drawback of GraphicConverter is the sometimes obtuse user interface, portions of which (batch processing, etc.) haven't changed much since the early nineties. GraphicConverter also suffers a bit from "featureitis" and it can sometimes be difficult to find a desired feature or figure out how to set the preferences to achieve the desired goal. Still, the program is affordable, robust, fast, and hard to do without. It's a venerable workhorse and is sure to find a place in your workflow!

• By Lemkesoft.
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Google Importer 1.0.1 Review

Google Importer is a convenient Spotlight plugin which queries Google whenever you perform a Spotlight search and includes the top Google hits in the results list. This provides a quick alternative for missing local search results; when information you thought was located on your local computer isn't actually there, you can seamlessly use the top Google hits instead.

Unfortunately, results can sometimes take quite a while to show up, but this may be a fault of Spotlight and not the importer. Perform a general query which returns many thousands of results, and a long delay will ensue before the Google hits appear, however, a more specialized query produces results relatively quickly.

Note: the software was tested on a 1.5 GHz G4, so the speed should be improved on newer Intel based Macs. Since results are filed under the "Bookmarks" heading, make sure to enable this category in the Spotlight system preference pane.

• By Caffeinated Cocoa.
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bookit 3.7.1 Review

There are many decent web browsers for Mac OS X such as OmniWeb (see review), Safari, FireFox, Camino, and Opera. Each browser offers a slightly different feature set and as expected, some browsers perform certain tasks better than others. As a result, it is often desirable to move between browsers on a daily basis; e.g., you may use OmniWeb most of the time, but Safari for a few pages, and FireFox for some others. Having your bookmarks remain consistent between all your browsers is virtually impossible to achieve by hand since there are several file formats in use - that's where a tool such as bookit steps up to the plate.

Bookit merges all your bookmarks and allows you to manage them within its interface and sync them with all your browsers. Alternately, if you have one master browser which you use most of the time and manage your bookmarks with, bookit will read them in and allow you to overwrite the bookmarks of your other browsers with the master browser's bookmarks. Other features include an optional global bookmarks menu extra and dock menu. Nearly every web browser for OS X is supported.

• By everyday software.
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OmniDiskSweeper 1.5 Review

Find your hard drive filling up? OmniDiskSweeper can help. This handy little utility scans your drive and hierarchically sorts every file and folder by size - even the invisible ones. This is very handy for finding those huge cache files or old applications, movies, and music that you forgot about. The demo still sorts all your files but forces you to go to the Finder or use the Terminal to delete them manually. Pay the small fee for this software and you gain the ability to delete unwanted files directly within DiskSweeper.

• By The Omni Group.
• download (demo)
• screenshot

Google Notifier 1.9.90 Review

It's encouraging to see Google expanding their Mac software offerings with Google Notifier. Notifier lives in the menu bar and provides notifications of incoming Gmail and Google Calendar events. As email arrives, a black translucent window appears with a summary of the message; it automatically fades after a delay or when clicked upon. In addition to mail, Google Calendar events can now get your attention more readily by playing a sound and popping up on your screen. The menus also provide a summary of recent mail and upcoming events including links to the appropriate Google pages.

Unfortunately, the app is not without its quirks. First of all, rather than being a "real" menu extra, Notifier is actually a normal application located in the Applications folder. This means it doesn't behave as other menu extras do - e.g., ⌘ (command) clicking and dragging the icon doesn't allow repositioning or deletion as it does with other menu extras. The colorful icons are also against Apple's standard menu shades of grey, and a little too big - hence they look slightly out of place.

Notifier checks for updates every minute, but this setting is not customizable in the preferences. When waking the computer from sleep, it often checks before the internet connection is fully active and annoyingly reports an error condition in its menu icon.

Even given the flaws, this program is a good start and worth taking a look at if you use Gmail or Google Calendar. Things can only get better from here.

• By Google.
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Full Key Codes 1.1 Review

A useful program for software developers, but the casual user won't find much to use it for. Extremely simple and to the point - this program displays characters as they are typed along with their key codes in hex, dec, and the ASCII number. Lower rating due to the 'unmacness' of an empty File menu and grayed out Preferences which don't work, but the app itself still gets the job done. A Windows version is available as well.

• By Denis Bajram.
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LaunchBar 4.1.1 Review

Quite possibly the best efficiency enhancement available for Mac OS X! One of the main drawbacks of modern operating systems including Mac OS X is the difficulty of finding things - especially applications. Spotlight is a step in the right direction, but still far too slow for true harmony. The dock can hold a limited subset of commonly used applications or even a folder for hierarchical browsing, but these methods fall short as well. Searching visually for a given app can be time consuming and frustrating especially for those less commonly used.

Launch Bar is another application from the NeXT days which aims to solve this problem. To access a given application, simply type ⌘ (command) space, and then the first few letters of its name. A list of close matches will pop down from the menu bar; if the desired choice is at the top, hit return. If not, type a few more letters or use the arrow keys (or mouse) to select it. What could be simpler?

Extensive preferences for what to index are available as well as support for opening or viewing far more than just applications. Web site URLs, folders, files, address book entries, system preference panes, bookmarks, etc.. You'll wonder how you ever lived without this wonderful app!

Note, see also Quicksilver which was reviewed after LaunchBar.

• By objective development.
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OmniWeb 5.5 Review

A "power user's" web browser which hails from the NeXT glory days but has been thoroughly updated for Tiger. Useful features include resizable graphical tabs, collections of windows and tabs called workspaces, and preferences customizable on a site by site basis. Web browsing is a fast and pleasant experience since the rendering core is shared with Safari.

The joy of using this browser is in discovering all the finishing touches that have been put in. For example, to duplicate a given tab, hold down the option key and drag the tab in the vertical tab drawer (akin to copying files in the Finder). When relaunching the browser, the previous workspace is restored including all windows, tabs, and scroll positions, enabling you to pick up browsing right where you left off. Begin typing in a window and matching links are highlighted; hit return, and the selected link is followed. ⇧⌘ (shift command) F jumps to the web search field which defaults to Google, but is completely customizable.

Other interesting features include searchable and sync-able bookmarks, RSS feed support, speech recognition, HTML source code editor, ad blocking, ability to send a workspace to another user, and form fill. The peace of mind attained by using this browser will make you forget you had to pay for it! A free demo is available.

• By The Omni Group.
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