I do love to take photos. I was geeky enough in high school to take photos for the year book with an old 35mm camera and a good wide aperture lens, developing my own pictures in black and white. Yes, I feel old now.

From there once my son was born 13 years ago, I had to go digital with a Canon Powershot. From that moment on, I began to notice one problem: where am I going to store all these big image and video files? Am I backing them up? I can't recreate them if I lose them.

Initially, I did what I always did, I included them in a regular backup to another box on my home network in a nightly gzipped tarball, but over time that got larger and larger. To ensure an off-site backup, I burned CDs and gave them to my family. Eventually the photos wouldn't fit on a single CD anymore. My photo library, predictably, just got bigger and bigger. Go figure.

I use a Linux box for my home gateway and firewall, and it has a decent drive in it, so my next step was to keep a copy of all of my photos on my desktop, and rsync them regularly to my gateway box as a backup. Occasionally I'd copy them onto a USB drive or two and take them into work and drop on a drive where they wouldn't hurt anything, just so I could get an off-site backup. Manual, error-prone, and far from ideal, but it was cheap.

Eventually I turned to online services. There was no shortage of them, but I liked Flickr, so I paid for a Pro Flickr account and began uploading every photo I had. There were no good solutions for doing this, I had to manually upload either using a browser or an external app, but I finally got it done. Then I experimented with a critical part of my off-site backup: restoration. Flickr may have improved by now, but at the time the solution was to manually download my photos again, perhaps in chunks or even one by one. Not so nice.

Over time, cloud storage solutions popped up, and became cheaper and cheaper. Having tried out a Mac desktop recently, I decided to try the Apple ecosystem fully, and use Apple photos, paying a little extra for more iCloud storage so they could hold my entire photos library. I dumped the Flickr account, too much hassle. Now all my photos were locked-in to the Apple ecosystem, where they could easily share with my ipad Mini, my Android Phone (oh, wait...), my Linux boxes (uh oh...)... But maybe that didn't matter. I could just bulk export all my photos and videos from Apple Photos, and push them to my other machines, right?

Actually, yes. Not it an incredibly useful layout and losing much metadata, but yes. Apple did apparently not re-create the bug from iPhoto that caused it to fail to export my videos, and the export did work. But, having the photos in Apple Photos meant that new photos would show up on my Apple TVs, available on my iPad Mini, and that's cool. Not on my Android phone of course, but if it worked on the iPad I could tolerate that. But it didn't.

I had a friend over and he was showing me a bunch of his photos, so I pulled up mine on the iPad, which only has 16G of storage because Apple charges ridiculously overblown prices for more storage on their devices and is draconian enough to refuse to mount a USB stick. Bastards. ahem For another rant. Anyway, I was pulling the photos down from cloud storage with the Apple Photos app on the iPad, with it configured to minimize disk space on my iPad. So basically it stored thumbnails on the iPad and then pulled down the full photos on demand. And damn, it was slow. There's nothing wrong with my WiFi or my Internet connection, but pulling down photos from iCloud was slow as molasses in January. It was like watching paint dry. What the hell was I paying for a service that was going to treat me this badly?

To make matters worse, the "Optimize Disk Space" setting in photos on the iPad basically consumed all remaining space, and could not possibly anticipate my needs. Hey, I want to push a 1Gig video on to the iPad for a flight I'm going on. Now shrink everything and get out of my way. Nope. It's just sitting there consuming my precious space, precious because Apple is run by a bunch of money grubbing bastards who overcharge... ahem Yes. Later.

Anyway, this made Apple Photos on my iPad like a virus that had to go. I turned it off and reclaimed the space. Then, I noticed how well the mobile Dropbox app worked, and worked on IOS, Android, even on my Linux desktop. Yes, Dropbox is more expensive, but it actually fulfills my requirements. It stores arbitrary files, allowing me full control over what to store. It works on IOS, Android, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux. Nothing else works on Linux. Nothing. Sold.

So, I dumped the entire mess out of Apple Photos, wrote a Python script to parse the EXIF tags in the photos to pull out the date taken, and then automatically populate a tree of files in Dropbox with directories of year and month, with an unsorted directory for fails that I couldn't not pull the date from.

Works like a charm, and syncs to my work machine running Dropbox, and is then included in my backup solution there. I tried the Apple solution, but as is happening in increasing frequency these days, the Apple solution sucked, only interested in locking me in to the Apple ecosystem and removing my freedom. No thank you. Not good enough. Go back and try again.

It's interesting to note that now when I show my photos using the Dropbox app on my iPad, it's fast. I guess Dropbox is paying well for Amazon cloud storage. Maybe Apple should try that.