As part of my switch away from Aperture, I’m losing one of the best features of iCloud: Photo Stream sync. When using iPhoto or Aperture, you can have all the photos taken with all iOS devices automatically backed up to your computer’s hard drive, seamlessly, and in the background. If you aren’t using either of these apps, you have to do it all by hand.

What I’ve done now is to set Lightroom up to “watch” the Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox. I’ve also downloaded the Dropbox app to my phone and turned on automatic photo sync, and set up my Mac’s to automatically sync SD cards and whatnot over to the Camera Uploads folder. As long as Lightroom is running, the contents of the folder get pulled into Lightroom – copied over to the fileserver and removed from Dropbox. So I can always see what’s left to import, and I can restore images from Dropbox (if needed).

This also lets me sync images from multiple Macs or even Linux boxes that I have, which means I don’t always have to go to the Shed Office to start the photo import.

The failings of this setup:

1. Dropbox doesn’t handle shared photostreams
2. You can’t publish to a photostream (shared or not) from Lightroom.
3. The dropbox iOS app needs manual intervention

To be fair to Dropbox and Lightroom – as far as I know, there are no API’s for 3rd party apps to reciveve the contents of a Photo Stream, outside of Apple’s apps. This means that unless an iCloud API is released, this will never happen. The other annoyance is that the Dropbox app can only upload photos when it’s active, and the background process rules in iOS limit this to 5 minutes. So, if you are uploading a lot of images, you’ll need to either keep the dropbox app open (and the phone awake) or re-wake the app every 5 minutes.

However, it all works, and with the exception of the above caveats, it’s pretty smooth. Smooth enough for me to publish here.