The Magic of Apple Photos

There are a lot of cloud options for your photos these days. If you have an Office 365 subscription for $99/year you get a terabyte of storage along with it so you can throw your photos up there. Dropbox is another good choice, once you get over the hump of agreeing to pay $99 for a terabyte for the service instead of mooching off the free service forever like I used to do. Google wants all your photos too, and while you can store lower resolution photos for free you’ll shell out a wee bit more at $119 for a terabyte and get full resolution storage.

Apple was seen as the high cost alternative because for the same $119/year as Google, you only got 500GB of storage instead of 1TB. In the latest announcement though, Apple doubled the storage to match Google’s cost of a 1TB plan for $9.99/month. They also dropped the price of the other plans, so 200GB is only $2.99/month which is probably enough for most normal people. Not NosillaCastaways of course, but you know, like your brother or your neighbor or your hair dresser, normal people. Heck you brother can probably fit in the 50GB plan for a dollar!

Anyway I bring all this up because as you know I’ve been a proponent of Apple Photos and iCloud Photo Library since it came out because I just love having access to all of my photos from everywhere on every device. This last week I had the perfect example of how it makes me so happy.

In April of 2011, Steve and I went wine tasting with our good friends Diane and Bill up to the Santa Ynez Valley and visited the Fess Parker winery. You know, the Daniel Boone guy? Well anyway we ended up outside with a lovely and somewhat nutty woman named Adriana doing the pouring for us. She was a good sport, and since she was fun, and I’d had some wine, I decided to turn the tables on her and pour her a glass of their wine, The Big Easy. Steve thought it was funny so he snapped a photo of us, and Adriana made these googly funny eyes at us. We had great fun with her.

Now fast forward to this week, when Steve, Devon, Maryanne and I went back to the Fess Parker winery. We walked in and Steve noticed that the same woman, Adriana, was there pouring wine again. I grabbed my iPhone, opened Photos, ran a search on Fess Parker, and there was the photo of me pouring wine for Adriana! I didn’t say a word to her, just walked up and held the phone up to her. She SCREAMED with delight! She was supposed to be going off shift, but instead decided that we MUST reenact the photo. We realized that she had black on again, and I happened have on a red shirt, so we were able to take a nearly identical photo, down to pouring the same bottle of wine, The Big Easy.

Before we had spotted Adriana, the other woman pouring for the tastings had told Maryanne that she could not have pinot noir in her tasting list, but after goofing around with Adriana she bent all the rules just for us and I think Maryanne ended up with 3 different kinds of pinot.

The bottom line is that I continue to be a big proponent of iCloud Photo Library for the fun of pulling up old photos to have more fun. And now the pricing isn’t a penalty, you get all of the photo editing tools and the storage for photos and all of your photos on all your devices, AND you can store other types of file sup there too. So iCloud for the win and Apple Photos for the fun.