Understanding The Cloud For Photographers
By: Vince Tabora
Tags: Creative Cloud, Lightroom, Storage, Photography, Cloud

Unless you are an old school photographer who works exclusively with film, you have heard about the cloud. If you have used services like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive, then you are already using the cloud. The cloud is basically a network that provides services to end users. Storage is one of those services, and photographers need them to upload photos for archive or sharing purposes. In this article I will describe the cloud in detail and how it can be used by photographers as part of their digital workflow. I will be discussing the Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe CC) for most examples. It is easy to get overwhelmed with so much information about a topic, I will keep things basic to better understand the fundamentals. Then build upon that knowledge to get more experience.

What is “The Cloud”?

The cloud is a term used in information technology to describe an online system of storage, applications and even virtual networks are offered as services by a provider. This moves traditional information assets like servers from on premise data center in the office to a remote location over a public data network like the Internet. Storage and software applications are the benefits for photographers when using the cloud.

When photographers finish with a shoot, they must provide their clients or customer a copy of the photos. It was simple enough during the days of film. The photographer develops the film into prints and gladly either personally hand them over to the customer or snail mail the photos. With digital, photographers can now more easily distribute the photos by burning the images onto a storage media like DVD or CD. However, that requires the same process as prints, meaning the photographer must either meet with the customer or mail them. That can take some time out of anyone’s schedule. The best way to distribute images is to upload the photos to a folder that resides on a remote server and have the customer download the images individually or as one compressed file. This is what we refer to as “the cloud”.

Things have gotten better with software that it can now be offered over the cloud as well. One such software company is Adobe and their Creative Cloud suite. It targets creatives, whether they are filmmakers, editors, producers, artists or photographers. Adobe offers their software in terms of packages that cater to a creatives requirements. This makes pricing much more practical since if you are a photographer, you will probably just need Adobe’s suite of applications that are for photography and not for illustrations and drawings. You simply sign up on Adobe’s website. Once you are there you can sign up by creating your account and then logging in. During sign up you can choose the package you need, and in this case the photography subscription option (you can choose other packages as you see fit for your requirements if not photography alone).

Signing in to Adobe Creative Cloud.

Once you are signed in you will get an Adobe ID. Save this to your password manager if you have one, otherwise remember your username/password or sign in from Facebook or Google’s g-mail (options).

How to use the Creative Cloud

You don’t always need to sign in to the portal on Adobe’s website to use the Creative Cloud. You only sign in to make changes to your settings, update billing information, change address or add new applications to your subscription plan. The best way to use it is by installing the software on your desktop or laptop computer or the app version for smartphones and tablets. The instructions are available from the website and is really straightforward once you have created your account and subscribed to a package.

When using the software application on your desktop (example is from a macOS), you should see the following icons installed from the /Applications folder (also can be seen in Launchpad):

Adobe Creative Cloud installation on macOS.

From a smartphone or tablet, you should get the app from the Play Store for Android users or the Apple Store for iPhone iOS users. You should then see this:

Lightroom (LR) app installed on Android device.

The subscription will give users access to storage on the cloud where their Lightroom application stores images. The last time I checked, Adobe offers 20 GB of free storage for the photography plan. Some photographers will be willing to pay more than others. There are other ways to get access to free storage on the cloud which I will be discussing later.

Using The Cloud For Creative Workflows

I am going to get straight to it on how you can use the cloud for your workflow. There is no formal step by step process since I am sure everybody has a different workflow. Some photographers prefer to process from their desktop prior to the cloud while others post straight to it. There are two ways you can leverage the power of the cloud I will discuss here.

#1 Lightroom

Adobe has two versions of Lightroom (LR) now. The version most photographers may be familiar with is now called Lightroom Classic. This requires installation of the software on your laptop or desktop just like in the old days. You can use this pretty much the same way you have been using Lightroom. The new Lightroom CC (Creative Cloud) also requires installation but is cloud aware. This means that you can open RAW, JPEG and other file formats in Lightroom CC and synch it to your Adobe CC storage on the Internet.

NOTE: Do make sure that you have an active Internet connection when synching photos to the cloud.

Adobe Lightroom CC.

You will notice that there is a cloud icon on the upper right corner. This shows you if the images are synching up to the cloud storage. The convenience of this is that you can take photos you edited with Photoshop directly to the cloud. You can then access it from anywhere you go where you have access to the Internet. You can open it up with your Lightroom CC app on a smartphone and make some minor edits on the image. From here you can share it on social media. The new Lightroom CC provides photographers with mobility to have access to their images and work with them from anywhere they go. Only requirements is access to the Internet to open the images from the cloud.

Use LR to make adjustments to photos before sharing online using a smartphone.

The main feature of Lightroom CC is its support for mobile devices. You can simply take a photo on your smartphone and then add it to your photo library in Lightroom CC. From there you can make some minor adjustments to edit the image before sharing. The storage Adobe provides with the photography plan is 20 GB, which may not be suitable for most professional and commercial photographers unless they pay for additional storage. The costs could add up quickly, especially with more shoots that require more storage. This is where the second way to use the cloud helps.

#2 Cloud Drives

You can sign up for free or subscribe to other cloud storage services. You can call them “cloud drives” or “online folder”, they are basically a place where you can upload your files for sharing or backup. Examples are Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive and Dropbox to name a few. When you use these services you don’t need an Adobe ID, they are separate. In this case you might be retouching photos from the Adobe suite using LR and Photoshop. After you are done then you can upload the photos to the cloud storage provider of your choice.

On Microsoft’s OneDrive, users get 5 GB of free storage. A photographer who shoots plenty of TIFF or archives RAW images can quickly max this out. That is why cloud storage providers also offer more storage by signing up to their premium plans. It can make a lot of sense especially if you require more storage space for your images. Dropbox offers 2 GB but users can upgrade to higher tier plans to get as much as 3 TB to however much space they need.

The sign in page to Dropbox (Source Dropbox)

Once again, having the cloud means you can roam anywhere and access your images. This also provides an easier way to share images with customers. For example you can upload photos to a Dropbox folder and then share and password protect it. You basically e-mail a link from the Dropbox website to your recipient i.e. the customer. The customer then opens that link which is either password protected or not and then get access to the shared images.

These two cloud storage solutions should work fine for most photographers. Obviously not if the requirement is commercial printing of the images. This is ideal for online work that includes portfolios, e-commerce and headshots.

Benefits of The Cloud

So what I hope I was able to show is what the benefits are to using a cloud solution for photography.

Fast. In just a matter of minutes, you can share images over the Internet without having to develop into prints and snail mailing them.

Convenient. No more burning to CD and meeting with customer. Just upload files and let them download it.

Cost Effective. Even if you have to pay for additional storage, it can cost much less to share the images online rather than use an overnight delivery service first class to ship prints or a DVD. It might also depend on how the customer wants to receive the images, so take that into consideration as well.

Immediate feedback. Get quick comments and reactions when sharing images. This works well when your customer is located many miles away and you can collaborate online without having to meet in person. Meeting can take up more time and costs.

Availability. You don’t need to be at your studio or office to access images stored on the server. With the cloud you can access it from anywhere you are. You can be in a different country and still work with or share your images. Access just requires an Internet connection.

More storage space. This is definitely a plus for any photographer. Need more space for backups or sharing, then add more space by upgrading to a suitable plan from a cloud provider. 3 TB of storage is no longer hard to get and rates are becoming more cost saving.

Backup solution. If you want to archive images online for backup and recovery purposes, the cloud is the way to go. Even if you have a portable HDD, NAS or SAN solution, it is still a good idea to make backups to other locations so your storage doesn’t have a single point of failure. In other words you have a fail safe measure or redundancy in the event of catastrophe.

On another note, you don’t actually want to work directly with large bitmaps or uncompressed files that take up more than 50 MB of memory over a public data network. For one thing, if your link gets hijacked or compromised by hackers, you could lose data. Such connections are more practical for GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) connections on a LAN than over a WAN (the cloud). While you can store and make minor edits over the cloud, it still doesn’t seem practical to do full retouching or editing unless you have a really fast Internet connection.

Note: This article is not a paid endorsement of any of the products discussed. These are based on the author’s own opinions and experience. Please do your own due diligence before using a product.