Loom: A Superior Photo Stream for Photo Storage and Syncing Across All Devices
Apple’s Photo Stream can be a useful feature if you use multiple devices to do your photo bidding. Take a photo on your phone, and it shows up on your iPad and computer instantly — not too shabby.
But Photo Stream has limitations, most notably the ability to sync only your most recent thousand photos. That’s why Jan Senderek decided to go out and create the Mac and iOS application Loom: an ‘infinite camera roll’ in the cloud that allows you to share and sync photos across all your devices easily.
Here’s a quick look at how the interface works:
Senderek was inspired to create Loom out of sheer necessity. Every week, “I would take my DSLR, compact camera, and iPhone, then connect them to my computer, sync everything up, manually delete photos from my Camera Roll, create albums on my computer, and then if I still had space would sync them through iTunes to my iPad,” he tells The Verge.
Loom eliminates all of those steps, making the process as simple and easy as possible, while freeing up space on your phone in the bargain. Once you have it installed, it’ll have to upload all of your photos first — a process that can take a few hours — but the app’s “Nonstop Upload” feature makes sure that you can set it and forget it overnight (it’ll keep your phone from locking and the upload from stopping).
Basically, the app lets you create albums, upload photos and make edits that, like an improved Photo Stream, will then push to the rest of your Loom-equipped devices.
And in order to make sure that the high-resolution photos you upload from your computer don’t end up draining both your data and your Loom storage space: any photos uploaded on your computer will be compressed down for viewing on mobile devices (the originals, obviously, will remain unchanged).
The app itself is free, and you can find native versions for both iPad and iPhone on the iTunes app store. The somewhat standard 5GB of cloud storage is given to you for free, while upgrades to 50GB or 250GB will run you $40 per year (or $4 per month) and $100 per year (or $10 per month), respectively.
To find out more about Loom and how it might be able to help you keep track of all your photos and albums in one place, head over to the app’s website or download your own copy on the iTunes and Mac App Stores. (Note: The company is currently activating accounts on a rolling basis “to ensure the best possible experience for new users,” so you might not get to start using it right away).
(via The Verge)
