Reading Casey Liss’s post got me thinking about how I have managed my photos through the years and how I plan to continue managing them. I’m only going to describe how I managed photos from the point where I got my first smartphone. ¹

My needs for photo management are fairly simple:

• All my photos available on any internet connected device
• Ability to reliably search for photos

I am not worried about geotagging, face tagging, clever albums or advanced photo editing.

Early days

Photo management in the early days of iOS was..poor. You had a camera and a photo album. Your photo album kept growing and growing until you were faced with a storage issue, which if you were rocking an 8Gb iPhone like me, didn’t take long to reach.

What I’m guessing a lot of people did was delete a bunch of photos to free up that storage, which is a shame because there was no cloud element to this - when they were deleted they were gone. The only way to keep these photos was to do it the old fashioned way. Plug your phone into a computer and back up to your local drive or some other photo management software. But this was slow and not what anyone really wants to be doing. Nevertheless this is what I did at the time and I’m very glad I did.

Moving forward with the cloud

With cloud storage becoming more and more important, it made sense to look into backing photos up to the cloud. There were two main options that I looked into - Dropbox and Google Drive.

Both of these operated similarly, you could turn on auto-upload so that any time you took a photo on your phone it would automatically back up to the these services. I first started to use Dropbox as I was already using it heavily for my college work and had never had any issues with it. Dropbox also released Carousel, which provided a nice interface to view photos backed up to Dropbox as well as extra features like “on this day” where it would pull up photos from several years ago.

I was happy with Dropbox until I hit my storage limit. My free third level student storage had expired leaving me with just the free 5Gb limit. I liked Dropbox, but I wasn’t willing to spend money on it when there was another free alternative with 15Gb of storage - Google Drive. So I then backed my photos to Google Drive.

Apple enters the fray

Dropbox and Google Drive were good, but I wanted something more integrated with iOS and OS X. Apple finally started to show signs of promise in this area with the release of Apple Photos. When it was released I jumped straight on the bandwagon and backed my photos up.

So far I am happy with it. I have over 3,700 photos and 120 videos backed up to it. It’s pretty cool to have every single photo I have taken with a phone since 2009 available on any device.

Where Apple Photos is lagging, particularly to Google Photos, is in search. Basic search works for the most part. For example searching for “Spain” or “Manchester” will return photos from those places, but Google have taken this to another level, and I don’t see Apple catching them any time soon. I’m still living in hope that this will be somewhat addressed at WWDC but I’m not holding my breath.

Conclusions

Overall, I am happy with how easy photo management has become. Right now if I take a photo on my iPhone I don’t have to worry about it. It goes straight to the cloud. I can view it whenever I want on another device, or at work or wherever I am. It’s convenient and reliable, which is all I really want from it.

Now if Apple can just iron out the little problems I will be happy. Improve search, add more functionality to the Mac app, add some “on this day” features etc. There’s been a lot of improvement, but theres still a bit to go.

Crazy how much Monument Valley has grown from its first year.

Marco Arment on BlackBerry’s demise once the iPhone came along:

No new initiative, management change, or acquisition in 2007 could’ve saved the BlackBerry. It was too late, and the gulf was too wide.

And how Apple are lagging behind on future technologies:

Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for.

If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for Apple.

It’s obviously too early to say that Apple are doomed to BlackBerry’s fate, but there is no doubt that the gap is widening between Apple and and other technology companies when it comes to these new areas. We are seeing more and more emphasis that AI and virtual reality are the future of computing from the like of Facebook and Google.

If that is the case, and Apple have yet to start making any inroads into these areas, then I think that is a big problem for their future success. Google are probably best placed for this kind of future having already spent years working on natural language processing, big data and AI. These are not areas that take just two, three or five years to perfect. They require huge resources and a significant amount of attention from a company in order to become useful in the real world.

I don’t see anything rivaling what Google have unveiled at I/O when Apple showcases what’s new at WWDC next month, but I do hope that they show signs of moving into these areas in a meaningful way.

I think only a company like Panic could even think of doing something like this.

For the first time in our 132-year history, Leicester City Football Club are the champions of England after securing the 2015/16 Barclays Premier League title on Monday night.

[…]

Claudio Ranieri and his players have captured the imaginations of football fans around the world with one of the most brilliant and unlikely sporting triumphs ever seen. 

[…]

From a team that spent the majority of last season rooted to the bottom of the table and among the favourites for relegation this term, a combination of team spirit, hard work and talent has seen them transform into champions. 

I’m a bit late to this but..what a story!

Not a bad week for Leicester!

Earlier this month I posted about what issues I was having with the website, and what I wanted to fix. Here is an update on these:

• ‘Previous’ and ‘Newer’ links are now where they are supposed to be, with the exception of the final page
• Favicon got updated ✔
• Bigfoot footnotes are now supported ✔
• Support for Safari Reader ✔
• RSS entries are still duplicating, but not when using the alternative feed. Still needs investigating..
• Decided to stick with the same font ✔
• Responsiveness still needs working on

And yet there still isn’t any sign of an iPad version of their app. Apps like Flow have done a great job in bringing Instagram to iPad, but now with the changes to the Instagram API we’re back to square one. It’s sad to see them lose out because of this.

Update 3.2 rolling out. Given forthcoming Instagram API changes we have made all features free and removed in-app purchase.

— Flow for Instagram (@flowinstagram) March 17, 2016

Really good concept of what could be coming in iOS 10. My personal favourites are the advanced Control Center features, something which I have wanted for a while, and system wide dark mode. I use dark mode whenever available in apps, so to see this all over would be really great. On a related note, MacStories have introduced a dark mode on the site to mark their seven year anniversary. Some good work has gone into that site in the last few months.

Shaun Musgrave on what the App Store was like in earlier days:

Now, I’m not going to lie, friends. Playing Ravensword: Shadowlands makes me a little sad. When this game hit, things looked really hopeful for premium, relatively high-end RPGs on iOS. The market enthusiastically supported games like these, and thus publishers were able to justify sinking greater and greater costs into them. But things were already changing as Ravensword: Shadowlands hit, and the market would soon swing in a major way.

It’s a real shame that games like this are no longer sustainable on the App Store. I’d love to see something like The Elder Scrolls making it to mobile devices, but the reality is there is no way any game developer is going to sink their money into a project like that. It seems that as iOS hardware gets better, games are getting less complex, and can only stay profitable through in-app purchases.

Chris Sauvé on why footnotes on the web are a pain:

Footnotes on the web are a pain in the ass. You click on a tiny number, get transported somewhere near the bottom of the page, find the footnote you were looking for, and click on a link to go back to where you were on the page.

Chris created a solution to this problem in the form of a jQuery plugin called bigfoot. Bigfoot allows you to click on a footnote and instead of getting pushed down to your footnote at the bottom of the page, you get a nice little pop up. ¹ I decided to implement these as part of a todo list which I am still working my way through. I’m not a heavy footnote user, but I’ve seen bigfoot used on enough websites now to know that I don’t want to go back to traditional footnotes.

Camel, the engine which powers this blog, already supports footnotes thanks to this update last year. Luckily it’s fairly easy to implement bigfoot on top of this. The first step is to download the project from the website into your Camel file system. Although they can be put together into one file I chose to separate the bigfoot CSS from my site CSS ²:

<!-- Stylesheets --> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/site.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/bigfoot.css">

Next, I downloaded jQuery from the official website. Once it was downloaded I added it to my file system in a ‘js’ folder, along with the bigfoot resources. The last thing you need to do is add the following anywhere on the page to enable bigfoot:

<!-- jQuery -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery/jquery-2.2.3.min.js"></script>

<!-- Bigfoot Footnotes -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/bigfoot/dist/bigfoot.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $.bigfoot();
</script>

In order for bigfoot to work, you need to make sure that footnotes resemble something like this in your code:

<p>
    <sup id="fnref:1">
        <a href="#fn:1" rel="footnote">1</a>
    </sup>
</p>

Luckily, Camel supports MultiMarkdown which displays footnotes like this. But if you are using a different engine/CMS this may be done differently.

I had to do a lot of tweaking of the CSS to make the footnotes look how I wanted. ³ Funnily enough that is what took me the longest to figure out, and it still isn’t perfect (CSS gradients are confusing). It’s also worth noting that there are several bigfoot options available to you, each of which are detailed on the website. I wanted to retain the footnotes with anchor links as the bottom of my posts. To do this you can use the actionOriginalFN: “ignore” option. This does exactly what you would think in that it ignores any original footnote markup. This can be added to the bigfoot script tag:

 <!-- Bigfoot Footnotes -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/bigfoot/dist/bigfoot.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $.bigfoot({
        actionOriginalFN: "ignore"
    });
</script>

And that’s it! This was an interesting exercise to undertake and I think it makes a big difference to the browsing experience on the website. I may revisit the CSS of the footnotes at a later stage but for now I am happy.