Hi, Guys
I'm new to this forum but I wanted to share with you what I just discovered yesterday
I was looking for posts\videos\tips etc. regarding Lightroom in the cloud, especially in Azure (Microsoft cloud) and found just only this group...
Hi, I have signed up specifically for this thread. This is something I have considered and pondered about a lot recently and found myself here searching for others who have tried.
Ah, I guess I had a different paradigm in mind, if I was going to edit in the cloud I would use it instead of a local computer, essentially turning my laptop and local computers into dumb terminals just for access.
My point is the sae as yours
@Ferguson I am a photographer and world cycle tourer so for my photo editing I have been backed into using a laptop. My budget isn't the biggest and with all that in mind I have bought the Dell XPS 15 2 years ago. It works alright, does the job. It often get's hot to touch and many steps are slow enough to go beyond frustration and actually slow down my workflow more than just the amount of time lost due to slower performance, because it can often cause me to lose "my flow."
So my thinking is a cloud VM could possibly be quicker than a mid-range priced laptop. Of course bandwidth is a problem when on the road, good quality internet speeds is
not something I can pretend to have at any sort of regular intervals, but I guess I was hoping that screen refresh over mediocre internet is less of a bottle neck than pushing my local CPU to the max whilst simultaneously keeping my lap warm.
So work on it a little bit, see how it is in the long run with the comfort of work. I know for a long time that file transfer is a problem - uploading 50 GB of RAWs is tough...
As for storage and file transfer, something I have been extremely happy with is my Google Drive private domain account. The second tier now provides unlimited storage and their Google Drive File Streamer allows all content to be visible as a locally mounted drive, but using the "always available" vs. "online only" functionality seen in modern cloud storage clients. This would allow me to keep my storage capacity costs low, although constantly switching different photo sets could rack up plenty of read/writes. Although this doesn't fix your initial upload issue once it's uplaoded from your local device, it's visible instantly from all cloud locations, including your cloud VM which is mapped to show those files instantly, at least as "online only." if you were to want to edit that batch in bulk and make lots of changes, set it to "Available Offline" for the duration of that edit. This, by the way, is how I already work on my laptop. I only have 512GB so no room for my ~900GB raw files, so I upload to the cloud, remain offline while I edit and once done set to online only and they're safe online, not consuming my local storage, but instantly accesible on-demand for the occasional update, edit, export and so on. I'm fortunate to have spankingly good internet at home, but this is something else that becomes a problem on the bike. Storing a second off-laptop backup until I find good wifi where I probably have an entire days worth of uploading to catch up on.
Another perspective only really relevant in my "living on a bike" scenario, is that some larger compute operations can be left to run while I remain offline, out of any internet range and using no power. These are great benefits.
But all-in-all, are the tradeoffs really worth it. And, what is the cost implication. For me, the cost benefit doesn't stack up specifically
because I don't have a large budget so only have a mid-priced device. Stacked up against. Frustratingly, as it is still really an unpaid hobby, the cost is all my own, and so such a cloud solution (or even editing cave, which is obviously making me weak at the knees) is out of my own pocket, so running my Dell and rebooting every few hours to full clear the memory and give it 15 minutes cooldown time, is probably my only real solution. If I were to invest in more money, it would probably just be on a £4k laptop. All that being said, I'm a bit of tech geek, and I like the idea of the cloud solution, because I can jump on my LRaaS from any computer, technically tablets, if I lose a computer, and it's always there.
Sorry it's so long..