Using Mylio for photo management
In Bringing my photos in from the cloud I wrote that “Photo Mechanic is my Librarian”. That may be changing now that I’ve started testing Mylio as a way to sync, backup, and manage my edited photos.
Here are a few reasons I’m testing Mylio:
- Photos are synced quickly everywhere and the sync is very robust and seems to work well
- Mylio does NOT keep my photos in any sort of “cloud” storage. Everything is managed right on my devices, as files that I can see right in the finder if I choose to.
- When using “source folders”, Mylio maintains my original folder structure.
- It has flexible storage rules. I can determine whether any device keeps full copies, thumbnails, or an in-between preview version.
- Everything works offline and syncs when back on the network.
- Vaults can be on internal storage, NAS, or even cloud storage if I wanted that.
- I can keep multiple “vaults” which then gives me additional copies of each original.
I still export all “keepers” to full-sized jpeg files in my Digital Print Archive. I have this DPA set as the “Source” folder for Mylio. This means everything in the archive is immediately available to Mylio on all devices. If I organize folders using Mylio on my phone, the same folder structure changes are mirrored in the DPA. This is exactly how I want to work.
My old system required that I import iPhone photos occasionally and export them to the DPA from Capture One. Now, I have the iPhone’s photo library automatically imported to Mylio. I ruthlessly cull photos from my phone so I end up with only “DPA-worthy” photos anyway.
I’ve read reports of people with more than 1 million photos in their Mylio libraries, and they have nothing but good things to say about performance and capabilities. That’s encouraging.
So, Mylio is my new librarian. It replaces Photo Mechanic in that role. I lose some of the fancy bits of PM but I gain enough convenience features (e.g. face recognition, maps, calendar integration, etc) to make it worth the change.