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Posts Tagged ‘Backups’

Google ends free ‘original quality’ image backups for the Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL

20 Oct

The newly unveiled Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL smartphones will not include three years of free ‘original quality’ Google Photos storage, the company has confirmed. Details about the change were quietly listed on the Google Store’s Pixel 4 product page following the company’s press event on Tuesday, revealing an elimination of the perk Google has offered since the launch of its original Pixel model.

All Android mobile devices come with free Google Photos storage for images and videos captured with the handset, but there’s a catch: the content is compressed from its original quality down to ‘high quality.’

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The Pixel smartphone line has remained notable among its peers by offering atypically excellent camera quality, particularly in low-light environments. Before the Pixel 4, Google relied on computational photography, not extra lenses, to give its phones an edge. This time around, however, Google has taken steps to remain competitive with Apple by packing more than one camera into its newly unveiled Pixel 4 devices.

Many consumers, particularly photographers who prefer Android over iOS, have anticipated the launch of this phone specifically for its mobile camera capabilities. That makes Google’s decision to end its free ‘original quality’ photo storage particularly baffling. Buyers must either sign up for a paid storage plan or settle for compressed backups.

As recently noted by XDA, the Google Store’s Pixel 4 page reads, ‘Never worry about storing, finding, or sharing your memories thanks to unlimited storage in high quality on Google Photos.’ That feature comes with a small disclaimer that states:

Google Photos offers free unlimited online storage for all photos and videos uploaded in high quality. Photos and videos uploaded in high quality may be compressed or resized. Requires Google Account. Data rates may apply.

Google offers multiple cloud storage plans under its Google One subscription, which starts at $ 1.99/month for 100GB of storage if you pay annually. The Pixel 4 smartphone is available to preorder from the Google Storage now for $ 799.


Update (October 16, 2019): Corrected pricing of the entry-level Google One subscription plan.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid

30 Sep

Road trips, and other “off the grid” travel adventures are a time for slowing down, for finding the unexpected, and for reconnecting with the world around you. Unfortunately, for us photographers, they can also be a time of anxiety and frustration. How can you keep your camera charged so it’s always ready when inspiration strikes? How can you handle batteries and backups of your photos so they aren’t lost in the mix before you return home?

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - photographer shooting in a canyon

As a consummate road-tripper and photographer, I’ve spent many years fine-tuning how to keep my camera charged, and my photos safe, for weeks of off the grid travel. Here are some tips to help you do the same.

Charging 101

Many cameras, from point and shoots to DSLRs, are powered by lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. Li-ion batteries are small, lightweight, rechargeable batteries that can tolerate hundreds of charge and discharge cycles.

They are recharged by an external charger, which comes with your camera when you purchase it. That charger plugs into a wall via a two-prong plug and feeds off your house’s Alternating Current power (also called AC power).

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - external battery

Here’s where charging off the grid gets tricky. Unless you’re staying nightly in a hotel room, two-prong AC plugs (and the charging capacity to power them) are hard to come by. In order to keep your camera battery charged, you will need to adapt.

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - camper van

Essential Charging Gear

Start out by purchasing a universal Li-ion battery charger. Universal chargers can hold almost any kind of small Li-ion battery, and come with a two-prong plug as well as a 12-volt Direct Current (DC) adapter. This adapter is cylindrical and fits into your car’s 12-volt port (traditionally called a “Cigarette Lighter” charger).

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid

If you plan to drive for long distances each day and are only looking to recharge a camera battery, this may be all you need. If you plan to charge other devices—tablets, phones, and laptops—or won’t be driving, you’ll need a power bank.

Power Banks

Power banks are essentially big batteries. They receive a charge, either from a wall outlet or an alternative source like solar panels, and hold onto that charge until you need it. Power banks vary greatly in size, weight, and capacity.

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - power bank

Small USB power banks are perfect for powering cell phones and tablets. Depending on their capacity, they can recharge a phone or tablet anywhere from two to eight times.

Though they are harder to find, some small power banks also have a two- or three-prong port for plugging in a Li-ion camera battery charger. For quick trips where a little backup is needed, these power banks are just right.

If a little backup isn’t what you’re looking for, it’s time to call in the big guns. Portable power stations range in size from 150 to 1250 watts and are designed to be a full-service power solution. Power stations offer three-prong ports for AC power, multiple USB ports, and a 12-volt port.

They can charge camera batteries, laptops, tablets, and cell phones with ease (charging capacity varies by model).

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid

Portable power stations are relatively large, as well as heavy. To illustrate, they are great at a campsite but too bulky to hike comfortably into the backcountry. These power stations are recharged by plugging them into a wall outlet, or by connecting them to solar panels and allowing them to charge for 8-12 hours.

If you’re looking for serious charging power, or plan to be off the grid for long stretches, a portable power station is a wise investment.

Note: Portable power stations cannot be brought on airplanes, though smaller USB power banks often can.

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - battery in use at campsite

Photo Backups

Is there anything worse than returning from travel and finding your image files are corrupted or missing? A savvy photographer will avoid this scenario by doing daily backups of their images.

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid - on the road

Backing up images online to the cloud is an option if you have fast, reliable Wi-Fi at your disposal. Set the backup to happen overnight, and you’ll wake up knowing your images are safe.

Fast Wi-Fi is hard to find. Hotel and coffee shop connections are often sluggish, so always be prepared with another backup plan. If you’re traveling with a laptop you can either back up the images directly to the computer or carry a rugged external hard drive. If the images are critical, such as a wedding gallery or a shoot for a client, back up the images to two different locations.

Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid

When traveling without a laptop, invest in a portable backup device like a Gnarbox. These small drives have an SD card slot and will copy and store all of the card’s images. Again, if the shoot is extra-important, be sure to back up the images to at least two locations.

Conclusion

Keeping your camera and other devices charged while on the road can be a challenge, but is made easier with a few pieces of essential gear designed to meet your charging needs. Together with regular backups, you can take images off the grid with ease and peace of mind.

The post Batteries and Backups: How to Shoot Off the Grid appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Are Your Photo Backups Rock Solid?

17 Jul

What would you do if your main computer was stolen, permanently lost, or just completely died?

Did you just get shivers up your spine? If not, you probably have some form of a backup system for your data and photos. That’s great!

Rust.bucket

By rust.bucket

If you got shivers, then you best start thinking about backing up your images, pronto. Let me suggest Backing Up and Saving Your Images: Part 1 as a place to get started.

Even if you are religiously backing up your photos, are you testing those backups? How often?

This article is intended to get you thinking about how precious your images are to you, and if you are doing what you can to ensure they don’t go POOF, and are gone forever.

A Moment to Give Pause

My iMac was recently stolen. I got lucky, real lucky. The thieves did not take my external Network Attached Storage (NAS), its backup disk, nor my iMac backup disk.

It’s because those items were left behind (which were valued at more than my old iMac) that I am not still crumpled into the fetal position, crying my life away in the corner of the basement.

One thing I learned from this experience is that Time Machine, Apple’s native backup facility, is not perfect. I was not able to use the graphical interface to restore my old profile to my new machine, and that’s not even talking abut the photos themselves. In the end I had to fall back on my days as a systems administrator and relearn Unix command line tools to find and copy the files from my backup, over to my main machine.

Keep More Than One Copy

First, if your images are highly valuable to you, you should be keeping more than one copy of all of them (and any associated catalogs like Lightroom). This means at least another disk, or group of disks, backing up your originals.

Think to the future when buying backup discs. If you currently have 500GB of images, I would buy at least a 2TB backup device, like an external harddrive. A four times multiplier should be used at least, depending on your rate of photo capture (and your ability to filter photos as they come in). If you are on a tight budget, go for two times your current size, and trust that harddrives get cheaper as time goes on.

Either way, do the best you can to capture all of your images on a single backup device.

Keep Them Separate

Second, if you can afford it, and if the level of protection you need warrants it, keep a third copy of your files off-site. I mentioned getting lucky that the thieves saw no value in my external storage devices and I intend to never have to be so lucky again.

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Photo by: wonderferret/flickr

Some backup services, like Apple’s Time Machine feature, make it easy to plug in two backup drives and let the software automatically make backup copies of not only pictures, but all computer files to both discs. Once a full backup is built on both drives, you take one drive off-site. A relative’s house, a friend’s house, or even a safe deposit box. Then, on a regular schedule (mine is once a week), swap the drives.

This way, at worst, you lose a week’s worth of changes if both your main computer and your backup drive go missing, or are caught in a house fire, flood, or other disaster.

Consider Online Storage

Online. The Cloud. That jargon is shorthand for “someone else’s computer”. It can be helpful when considering where to keep a backup of your images.

There are now a plethora of services that, after you hand them some cash, will store your images for you. I suggest doing this as only a backup, but for casual users it might be handy for all your storage. Just remember, those images are on someone else’s computer.

PC magazine often does a decent job of reviewing products and they have a useful list of online backup solutions here. Also don’t forget other services like Amazon and Google’s Picasa which currently have unlimited photo storage (certain restrictions apply).

Understand What a Recovery Will Entail

Now that you have your photos backed up, do you know what it will take to bring them back to life if everything goes south?

Many of us are okay with storing our data on other people’s servers (the cloud), but fail to remember it will possibly take a couple of days to recover the images if things fail. What about a partial failure? Can your backup and recovery software detect a partial loss of data and fill in the gaps? Or will you be left to manually sift through the figurative ashes and fill the holes?

Get to know your backup software not “when I have a moment”, but today. Maybe tomorrow, but no later! You don’t have to obtain guru status, but you should know your way around recovering photos (and other data) while things are calm. I can tell you from experience that when the stuff hits the fan, and the panic of losing all your work sets in, that’s no time to be learning new software.

Screen Shot 2015-06-23 at 3.54.21 PM

Learn your backup and recovery software

Schedule Tests of Your System

There’s only one way to know if your backups work – test them!

The systems administrator in me says you should test your backups monthly. But the realist in me knows few of you will ever do that unless you have an intern, or are making $ 10,000 per month from your photography business, or both.

Be realistic, and again, it will depend on how important your photos are to you. Realistically I suggest one test every three months. Once a season. That keeps your recovery skills fresh enough (hint: write out the steps you take for recovery so you don’t have to learn it new each time) that an honest recovery won’t take too long.

So tell me, are your photo backups rock solid?

If photography is your livelihood, or even if you just take family pictures, it’s best to find out right now with a test rather than find holes in your system after things have gone wrong.

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Miscellaneous Software – Freeware to Create Backups as .7z or .ZIP Files at Two in the Morning

17 Jul

Simple Data Backup is a freeware backup application for Windows that can be configured to turn on your machine automatically to run backups at off-hours.

Most of us could do a better job making backups of our files to ward against hard drive failure, spyware or malware attack, or other disasters. One option for doing this is the freeware Simple Data Backup application for Windows, which can be set up to backup files every day. Depending on your computer setup, it can even wake up your computer to activate and shutdown when done, so you can perform backups at three in the morning, for example.

Files can be backed up directly or compressed as .7z or .zip files. Other options include forcing certain programs to close before backups occur (to help ensure files aren’t locked due to being in use), placing a shortcut to the backup options on your Desktop, and deleting files from the backup if they no longer exist in the source directory. The software even supports a variety of command-line switches….

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