photo storage on external HD or nas

[adrian walker]

Hi Group

can i get any recommendations for a really good (but not too pricey perhaps max a few hundred pounds?) external HD / nas that has a really good web access.
I want it to sit in a location by a desk and all access to it will be online from anywhere in the world from family members mainly and freinds that have log in access.
But it needs to be easy to access and control via iphones and ipads as well as Pc's.
We need to be able to select photos on the iphones / ipads and drag and drop them onto the storage so that they can be stored and then deleted off the iphones or ipads. then we need to be able to access and view the photos easily from iphone and ipads as if they were on a hard disk connected to them.
and if possible i would also like software onboard to search for duplicate pictures so hey can be deleted and organised better.
I used to use Thumbs plus which was quit good at that but i would say that was perhaps 15 yeas ago.... surely there is really good software / apps these days?

I have tried doing this before a few years ago but the hard drives were not great for accessing photos really.
one was an iomega store centre ix2 and the other i can't remember but i think it was a Wd product in a white case...
what let them down was the onboard software and the internet cloud access they had, also they were quite noisy when being accessed.. but that is not really a big worry.
I am hoping HD's are better these days

any good sugestions?

A

 

[RVT1K]

I've never bought a hard drive, external or internal, that had any of those features. It was all dependent upon the operating system and other software installed.

Where I work, we use something called teamviewer to remotely access computers. It will need to be installed on both ends, the computer you are accessing and the computer you are accessing from.

 

[smoke665]

Hmmmm, you need something

• Relatively inexpensive
• Has easy web access
• Can be accessed by multiple devices
• Has drag and drop capability

Sounds to me like you just described any number of cloud storage providers. Depending on your storage requirements the cost would range from free for a most basic account to a few dollars a month for larger plans.

 

[Geenphoto]

I use an external hard disk drive so. My images are on both my internal disk drive and the external. The external gets synched up with with the working copies on a scheduled bases.

Linksys router has an option to attach remote storage by way of USB. I put a small hard drive on there for a short period and allowed anyone on my network to view and copy files to the device. Nice feature from Linksys but the novelty wore off quickly.

Un-funny story. We paid a professional photographer to capture our daughters wedding. After three months of not hearing from the photog; we, the parents, contacted the photographer to get a timeline. She lost the hard drive in her computer and sent it out for recovery. I was astonished that she did not have any backups. All the pros I knew up this time imported files into two locations: the primary working directory and the backup disk drive. We did eventually get images about six months out, though she did not spend a lot of time in edit. I am sure it took that long just to get the recovered images back from her disk.

 

[Space Face]

I use an external hard disk drive so. My images are on both my internal disk drive and the external. The external gets synched up with with the working copies on a scheduled bases.

Linksys router has an option to attach remote storage by way of USB. I put a small hard drive on there for a short period and allowed anyone on my network to view and copy files to the device. Nice feature from Linksys but the novelty wore off quickly.

Un-funny story. We paid a professional photographer to capture our daughters wedding. After three months of not hearing from the photog; we, the parents, contacted the photographer to get a timeline. She lost the hard drive in her computer and sent it out for recovery. I was astonished that she did not have any backups. All the pros I knew up this time imported files into two locations: the primary working directory and the backup disk drive. We did eventually get images about six months out, though she did not spend a lot of time in edit. I am sure it took that long just to get the recovered images back from her disk.

Jeez, that must have been a sickening wait.

 

[Original katomi]

For what it’s worth I use external hard drives
My flow is
Store on pc
Store on 2 external hard drives
Finished images also on flash drive
The hard drives I use for a year, then use a second set on alternate years
I use up a lot of disk space but to me it’s worth it

 

[Original katomi]

Glen
Wow what a story you would believe that a so called pro did not have a better backup system
In the days of film you could almost forgive lost damaged film
But in digital and web access to save files, cheap mem cards there seems to be no excuse

 

[Space Face]

I'm guilty of not backing up as often as I should although I do have several external HD's but haven't kept a record of what's on them. It's a case of trawling through them in a usually vain attempt to find what I'm looking for.

 

[Original katomi]

Space face
Your post in part is me as well.i backup to much but my file name system sucks esp as I have 2 or 3 drives for a year
As well as flash drives for projects.....

 

[photoflyer]

I use Western Digital's MyCloud. In my home office I can access it as a network drive. On the road I can use the web interface or their app. Is it perfect? No but I'm sure every provider has their strengths and weaknesses.

Mine is a single 3 TB HDD. It was about 150 USD two years ago. It is not my only backup. I also have Microsoft One Drive,

You might want to spend a little more and get their RAID version so that the drives in your backup are mirrored.

It has a USB port on it and I attach to that another drive that is also accessible through their software. I use it to make annual backups of each years photos.

 

[ntz]

I am using multi-tier storage .. let's say I consider 1% of my RAWs worthy + psd/xcf files (projects in gimp or PS), I store them separately, that's my tier #1 storage .. I store them on my online VPS + I have a special HDD for them + I store each classed by year/season in desks on separate SD cards + sometimes burned on BD disks .. tier #2 storage are RAWs that I have labeled with TODO or FAMILY flags - sometime I will manage to get to them, or perhaps not, who knows .. I store them on home NAS + I burn them on BD drives, they are < 10% of my RAWs .. most of my RAWs, 88% of them, I consider as junk and I have them usually in my laptops or sometimes stored on some external drive ... I wish I will a find a strength in me to delete them but I can't ...

 

[wfooshee]

A lot of people here talking about hard disk storage, but that's not what the OP asked for; he wants online access to the storage. He basically wants to be a family version of Flickr; his family and friends will access his drive rather than a service.

Like smoke665 said, he's describing any number of cloud storage services. I feel like they should get together with a Flickr Pro account or something. Doing that privately and locally makes you responsible for everyone's images if they're trusting you for that storage, so you need the storage and some backup, and you've just doubled your space requirement. When it fills up, is it expandable?

Forget doing this yourself. Since you want online access to it, use an online service. Processes are already in place for upload, download, viewing, login security, all of that.

 

[photoflyer]

I am using multi-tier storage .. let's say I consider 1% of my RAWs worthy + psd/xcf files (projects in gimp or PS), I store them separately, that's my tier #1 storage .. I store them on my online VPS + I have a special HDD for them + I store each classed by year/season in desks on separate SD cards + sometimes burned on BD disks .. tier #2 storage are RAWs that I have labeled with TODO or FAMILY flags - sometime I will manage to get to them, or perhaps not, who knows .. I store them on home NAS + I burn them on BD drives, they are < 10% of my RAWs .. most of my RAWs, 88% of them, I consider as junk and I have them usually in my laptops or sometimes stored on some external drive ... I wish I will a find a strength in me to delete them but I can't ...

You just reminded me, each year on new years day, I backup all of the previous year's images (I'm not keeping many RAWS) to a single USB memory stick that then goes into a special binder.

 

[weepete]

I'd look at WD and Seagate My Cloud systems, both well established reliable companies.

Stay away from Drobo, they use proprietry software and are pretty much unrecoverable if anything goes wrong.

 

[AlanKlein]

Flickr Pro allows upload and download photos. You can add details or put them into selected albums by the group. You can make them private only accessible to friends and people with access codes. Photos can be put in albums on-line for viewing and any can be downloaded for storage on your own computer or iPad. Or you could download the whole album.

Normally there's one person who has administrative control.. But I suppose you can give your access code to your others in your family if you want them to have administrative power as well. I believe the annual fee is US$60