Photo sharing

One of everyone’s favorite parts of our photo safaris is the participant slideshow on the last evening. Everyone gets to relive the trip – which always goes by too quickly – while looking at their images on the big screen for the first time. Each of us also gets to marvel at how many different ways there are to look at the same scene. Set to an appropriate sound track, with some professional-looking touches, the show is popular enough that we normally need to run it twice. Best of all, because it is pre-timed and self-running, it doesn’t bog down the way presentations can if a presenter narrates every image. I always get compliments about putting the show together, but at the risk of spoiling the magic, the secret is simple: Photodex ProShow. Whether you lead a group or simply want to chronicle a trip with friends or family, it is absolutely worth it to put together a show as a great finale.

While most people are perfectly happy letting their smartphone photos get backed up to Google Photos or iCloud, more serious photographers typically want to have more control than the free, automated, syncing, provides. This is especially true for those of us with large libraries of images and videos captured using standalone cameras that don’t automatically sync to the cloud. There is no shortage of public cloud services you can purchase, typically for about $100 per Terabyte per year. These include Adobe’s and Google’s Clouds, and Amazon Drive. Personally I like the deal I get with Amazon, as I can purchase 1TB of space, but my 10TB of photos don’t count towards that. However, it doesn’t have the photo-friendly editing and display tools of Google Photos or the Adobe Cloud. But what if you don’t want to trust your image library to someone else? You can set up your own, private, photo-sharing cloud fairly easily, especially if you have or are willing to purchase a Network Server (NAS). We’ve outlined some of the options in a DIY article on Extremetech.com.