Is there software to integrate photos stored in different cloud solutions with my local collection?

Question

I'm looking for a photo management solution for windows or linux which is capable of managing my local collection and integrate the photos wich are stored on different cloud services (picasaweb/google, onedrive, flickr etc.) seamlessly.

I currently use picasa on my machine for my local collection and I'm qute happy with it, but there is no way to integrate the files stored on onedrive, there is only an upload functionality for facebook and google.

It would be nice to have a management software that can arrange picture in folders/albums, tag them and arrange them by date and location no matter where they are stored.

Is there such a solution?

Answer 1

In my experience, Lightroom comes closest to this ideal. It is not exactly the use case you mention, as the different services all have different capabilities and different methods.

Lightroom allows you to manage your local collection with ease; in fact I would argue that it is among the best tools around for managing your local collection. In its recent versions, Lightroom provides the capability to Export and a slightly different capability to Publish. Export is familiar, as this is the ability to convert from native RAW to JPEG, with automation to 'Export to' a location, such as your hard drive, email, or even a few online services like Flickr. In this case, Lightroom is essentially creating a JPEG, uploading it to the service, then deleting the JPEG locally.

However, the newer Publish feature is closer to what you are needing: Publish allows you to create and manage 3rd party cloud services like Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa and others, creating folders, and 'publishing' images to those folders. Lightroom then remembers what photos are in what folders, and displays them, just like it displays local images. (these are not duplicate, but essentially fancy 'smart folders'). Arranging the images in these Publish folders will arrange them on the associated service, once you 'Publish' those changes.

For more extensive capabilities in this area, I strongly encourage you to investigate Jeffery Friedl's Lightroom plugins that extend Lightroom's capability to several other cloud services, and are essentially required add-ons for Lightroom.

For more on how to use Publish Services in Lightroom, see:

Adobe's Help section

Jeffery Friedl's excellent explanation of Flickr Publish Service

Adobe's Julieanne Kost's video sessions

Answer 2

... but there is no way to integrate the files ...

You've hit on an ugly truth about photo management software. They all want you to stay walled off in their own solution with not much by way of integration other than an upload or download, as you have found out.

The closest solution, if you can call that, is to use the basic Mac OS features to catalog and index image files. Some of these remote file services provide native Mac drivers so these remote folders look like they are local to your machine, which enables Spotlight to discover and index. Then using the normal search feature, you can look for vacation pictures 2015 and the like.

This approach gives you maximum flexibility in terms of managing all your image files and are not constrained by just those provided by the software, such as Lightroom, to upload and download from popular image posting locales like flickr, instagram, etc.