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Web based storage can be an extremely useful tool for photographers and the benefits are incredible. Having access to your photos from anywhere is invaluable. The chances of losing your final products and the hours spent creating them are now down to near zero. However, storing images in the cloud comes with an obvious price: the access to those photos, as demonstrated in the recent past, in vulnerable to attack by hackers.

With every movement in technology, there comes an equal and opposite reaction from photographers who resist it. And for good reason as noted above. Google Drive has options for free (15 GB) and some paid options starting at 1 TB for $9.99/month and up to 30 TB for $299.99/month. You could certainly buy an external 1 TB drive for about half the price of the web-based Google Drive but you’d need to remember to carry it with you and you run the risk of losing it or it getting stolen or damaged. So you’d need a backup drive of at least the same size which then equals out the value.

Photographers may soon have a new reason to either rejoice or gripe, depending on which side of the cloud they sit on. Adobe and Google have been working on a future version of Photoshop that will be browser based. The app which will be available through Chrome is called Photoshop Streaming. The program is in its infancy and is being beta tested through educational channels (i.e. universities). As of now, Photoshop Streaming will access only the photos that are stored on your Google Drive and it would work much like accessing a computer remotely or on a virtual server. Adobe says they are “about 90% there” to getting a full-scale version of the program to run in this manner. There are certain CPU-intensive features that will not be available as of now such as 3D rendering but common uses like layers, filters, healing, etc. are available.

During this beta phase, Photoshop Streaming is only available to those with an education version of CC 2014. The reasoning behind this makes sense: Adobe wishes to test this on those who likely have, shall we say, more affordable equipment available to them.

My feelings on this are mixed. I applaud Adobe and Google for giving the end user the potential to work on their images from virtually anywhere (as a matter of fact, I’m writing this very blog with Google Docs that is stored on my Google Drive) but I question the real need for this. If you are a heavy user of Photoshop, you likely have it installed on your laptop so why the need for a virtual version? Also, I’ve been around the world and I have yet to find a WiFi connection that could provide a remote connection to my computers that doesn’t make me want to tear out what’s left of my hair. Even working on my desktop, some PSD files make my Mac sluggish so a virtual cloud-based solution makes me raise a very skeptical eyebrow. In addition, we all know that Adobe is not immune to attacks by hackers and anything stored in the Cloud is susceptible to being stolen or hacked. But as this type of technology advances, so does personal security technology. You can check out deep file inspection security for the best cloud service.

Putting my skepticism aside, I’m sure Cloud-based storage and applications are the way of the future and we’re just feeling the growing pains of integrating this new technology into our ways of life.

Doug Hill

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