Photo Organization - Online Only

Hello all,

First off, this is my first post so thank you in advance (and apologies if this is already answered somewhere else).

I am looking for a photo organization app that will let me manage my online albums, whether it be in Flickr, Picasa, or others. I would also like this app to allow me to import photos from a camera and upload them to an online service. The major caveat is that I do not want to manage a local copy of the photo's, I want everything online, and only online.

I was testing out iPhoto, and I thought it did what I needed. I imported some photos from an SD card, shared them to my mobileme album, and I was happy. But when I started deleting them from my iPhoto library, it also deleted the ones online. Does anyone know of a program that will do this?

Hope this makes sense...

You could give Picasa a try. It integrates with Picasa web albums and might suit your management needs a little better than iPhoto might.

Thanks for the quick reply vansmith. I was using Picasa, but I am not sure if it allows me to only have online albums. I don't want to sync a local album to an online album, I want to upload directly to an online album with nothing store locally.

I will give it a try again to see if it does what I am looking for. I was hoping to find something that could talk to multiple online services.

Why were you deleting the photos from iPhoto?

The whole idea behind iPhoto is that it's a safe place to save your original files and the fact it has the facility to share them is a bonus - but as you've found out they synchronise with whatever online accounts you uploaded them to so if you make any changes to a photo whether that means cropping it, rotating it or deleting it.

Personally I'd say put all your photos in to iPhoto and click on the Share option to easily upload your photos to Flickr etc.

Not sure if I understand exactly what you are asking for, but you can give Smugmug a try. It's not free, but worth every penny. Unlimited photo hosting ( I have about 250K photos on there!) You can also edit from there too...

HelpdeskRules said:

Why were you deleting the photos from iPhoto?

The whole idea behind iPhoto is that it's a safe place to save your original files and the fact it has the facility to share them is a bonus - but as you've found out they synchronise with whatever online accounts you uploaded them to so if you make any changes to a photo whether that means cropping it, rotating it or deleting it.

Personally I'd say put all your photos in to iPhoto and click on the Share option to easily upload your photos to Flickr etc.

Click to expand...

Sorry guys, a better explanation is probably in order, I have just been trying to avoid it because I tend to be a little overly verbose Anywho, here goes...

I have around 3 Apple devices, and I use all of them throughout the day. The only problem is, they aren't mine, they are company issued. I do not have my own personal machine, I have never seen the need to drop the money on something that my company already provides. I don't want to store all of my photos on company equipment, for plenty of reasons. After all, if I get fired and they reclaim my machine then my photos are now "company property".

I have a few cameras that I use to take pictures, and I usually just pop the SD card into my macbook. I would like to upload those pictures to several different online services (preferably mobileme/icloud and picasa). I do not want to maintain a library of photos locally on the device.

So in short, I want an app that allows me to manage multiple online albums hosted at different services, without requiring me to also keep a local copy.

I feel like this would be easy if iPhoto allowed me to just create an album directly at a online service. It only gives me an option to create a local album, and then I can "share" the photos to a online service.

Hope this clears up any confusion about what I am trying to do. Thanks

I just had an idea...to store the "local" albums on my mobileme idisk. This would allow me to still keep the physical files off of the hardware, and still use iphoto (which I already dropped $15 on).

I would still welcome other ideas/suggestions.

I believe you can upload directly to Flickr from your sd card. Not through iPhoto. When Flickr asks whwant you want to upload from choose the sd card and pick your files. There will be no pictures on your computer that way.

If the only reason you don't want to use a local copy is because you are worried they will become your employers property, then just get an external drive..... they take the computers back and you still have your external with all of your photos.

Agreed with Rocketman -- local storage is the best option, since most online photo storage services DON'T store the full-sized, original resolution image (Flickr Pro being a notable exception, but just try uploading a batch of 300MB RAW files sometime).

iPhoto can have libraries anywhere you like, and supports multiple libraries. Launch iPhoto with the option key held down to see how to create new libraries and specify where they should be stored.