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What media family cloud storage solution?
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ShortcutToMoncton
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Jun 24, 2020, 02:59 PM
 
iCloud really bothers me....mostly because 1) it’s fairly expensive, 2) I only need about 500gigs for basic system backup and photos/media, and they only offer 250gigs or 2Tb; and 3) their Family Sharing setup is completely and utterly wack. My wife and I have two different phones, two different Apple accounts, but obviously want to share family photos and videos—but there’s no obvious way to seamlessly do that on the same “feed”, and Apple still makes us each pay for storage. It’s a really confusing system.

HOWEVER: what we do find is that most of our family photo viewing now comes on the Apple TV’s Photos app. It’s really great to just pop on the TV and the kids love scrolling through the photos and videos. It’s really dumb that my wife’s photos won’t show up (since the ATV uses my Apple account, even though I have family sharing turned on with my wife’s account), but it’s still a seamless way to solve the problem of actually getting to look at old pictures—pulling out the proverbial family album if you will.

Is there actually a better solution here? Should I use iCloud for backup and another service for photo/video storage? And if I do that, is there an easy way to see them on something like an AppleTV similar to the current Photos app?
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Laminar
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Jun 24, 2020, 03:40 PM
 
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ShortcutToMoncton  (op)
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Jun 28, 2020, 09:46 PM
 
Nothing eh? I can’t be the only one with iCloud family photo sharing issues.
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OreoCookie
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Jun 30, 2020, 09:43 PM
 
First of all, you shouldn't consider iCloud a backup. That's what Backblaze and the like are for.

I have iCloud and Dropbox. For family sharing, Dropbox isn't an improvement over iCloud. I'm on Dropbox Plus, which costs me $12/month for 2 TB (after currency conversion). They have Team plans where you get to share (5 TB on the lowest tier for again about $12 per user). I haven't used the Teams plan, but it is clearly aimed at businesses. So switching to Dropbox would at the very least be significantly more expensive.

I'm not sure why you claim that iCloud Storage makes each of you pay for storage. That's not true if you opt for a Family Sharing plan, which is what we use. We share 200 GB amongst two users, and I pay $4/month. Sharing files and photos amongst your family sucks, yes, but you can create shared albums. Usually the best strategy is to pick one iCloud account and elevate it to the source of truth for all.
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andi*pandi
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Jul 1, 2020, 11:40 AM
 
we are an interfaith house so we don't have apple tv or share the photos that way. Our roku would let us mirror from the phone to the tv, so if I wanted to do a slideshow I could use that.
     
OreoCookie
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Jul 1, 2020, 11:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
we are an interfaith house so we don't have apple tv or share the photos that way. Our roku would let us mirror from the phone to the tv, so if I wanted to do a slideshow I could use that.
That's an important point, too. Except for my sister, who doesn't like iOS for some reason, all of our immediate family has iOS devices. And so she is frequently left out when we share photos and videos with our family. Part of me really wishes that Apple had made its communications tools (FaceTime and Messages) cross-platform.

Sharing across families still does not seem like as if it was given serious thought. I feel that no one has a great solution here. Apple's implementation of family sharing is very, very bare bones. They are lucky that in my experience, none of the other cloud providers are better.
( Last edited by OreoCookie; Jul 15, 2020 at 12:53 AM. )
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ShortcutToMoncton  (op)
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Jul 14, 2020, 03:52 PM
 
I’ve been told that Google Photos has a much better family implementation, but I haven’t installed it yet.
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ShortcutToMoncton  (op)
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Jul 14, 2020, 03:54 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
we are an interfaith house so we don't have apple tv or share the photos that way. Our roku would let us mirror from the phone to the tv, so if I wanted to do a slideshow I could use that.
Yeah—that’s just so much more awkward! It requires active involvement of the TV and a personal device that has all the photos on it....with the existing photos app it’s just right there for anyone browsing....
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