I’m an exclusive contributor to iStock/Getty (link in bio), very active until 2010, but then my contributions slowed to

Google offers 15 GB of storage for free, so I had to look at paid options with Google One. The cheapest plan that offered enough to storage was the 10 TB plan at $99.99 per month. This was way more than I wanted to pay, and it didn’t seem to be available in the UK either.

Privacy is not an issue with Apple. They too can search photos using machine learning, but they do it on your device. Apple has no clue about what’s in your photos, and because they make their money selling hardware, they don’t care.

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— that technology often doesn’t serve those it should and that my connection with Jackson would remain insecure without a digital crutch. He could vanish into thin air the same way the people on the streets he was so keen to help seem to do night after night, off-the-grid in ways that require much more than a single app to address.

What problem was I trying to solve? I wanted to search all of my images with AI, but you don’t need full resolution images for that. I’d convert mainly RAW images into HD JPEG ‘snapshots’.

Read this if you want to know how I moved all those photos on to the cloud and designed a new workflow to resuscitate my photography. I’m excited about sharing my photos for the first time in years. I’m discovering new things about my photography every day.

I explored new ways of working and discovered the capabilities of services such as Apple and Google Photos. After a few bumps in the road, I have my images (more or less) online, and I’m rediscovering past adventures in Australia, New York, Beijing, Vancouver and more.

Everyone seems to have a cloud, but I only considered Google’s and Apple’s because I’ve used products and services from both for years. Here’s my shopping list of features:

Apple offers storage packages up to 2 TB, depending on where you live (bizarrely). Two terabytes costs £6.99 per month in the UK, and I was already subscribing. That clearly wasn’t going to be enough.

The downsides are a dependency on Internet access and a potential lack of privacy. Internet access is almost ubiquitous, even on aeroplanes, but privacy is a potential problem. I don’t want the original RAW files somehow ending up on the public Internet. That’s unlikely, but it only has to happen once.

What does have more impact is missing out on ever-evolving machine learning, honed constantly by a global AI mind. Apple does a major iOS update annually, so you have to wait to get the latest and greatest. AI is far from perfect, so the prospect of frequent timely improvements is almost a necessity.

My old, reliable workflow was not fit for purpose. I had over 105,000 images scattered over multiple disks, taking up 4 TB of storage. Searching through lists of images filed by date wasn’t going to get me anywhere fast.

A switch flipped in my head this year, and I once again felt the need to share my work. It was time to liberate my images from their dungeons on my desktop’s hard disks, and perhaps have more ambition.

Having the machine learning engine in the cloud also means that you benefit from the latest and best algorithms. You can forget about having to download new software versions since that just magically happens.

On the face of it, Google’s Al search seems better. Its AI lives in the cloud, so it benefits from global machine learning. Its algorithms learn from everyone’s (anonymised) content, not just mine.

The downside to a local device search is that it’s local. At the time of writing, Apple does not share its analysis of your photos between your devices. Every device has to reanalyse your photos, so there will be a short delay before you can search your photos on a new device. In practice, that doesn’t have much impact.