I was really excited when I saw the iPhoto for iOS announcement, but quickly discovered that it’s not really what I was looking for. I was really hoping that it was going to be like iTunes Match is for music – an extension of the iPhoto Library on your Mac – allowing you to share and edit albums, photos and projects seamlessly on any device. This works seamlessly with iTunes Match and iTunes, in that playlists and music between computers and iOS devices is magically kept in sync via iCloud.

Of course, if this were to be that magical photography nirvana, that would have been the announcement all by itself. For years I’ve been looking for a proper solution to the problem of having two more more devices and people trying to edit the same library of photos. The ways I can think of this working:

1. Metadata, edits, albums and other groupings either have to be kept in sync manually between seperate libraries
2. The library itself is shared between computers on shared storage
3. The library lives in the cloud and everyone buffers images locally

The first option sucks, and it’s what most people wind up doing. Very quickly, edits and changes aren’t communicated, or photos are imported in one location and not others. So the libraries are somewhat in sync, but not really enough to be useable. The second option is a lot better than the first option, with the caveat that you MUST NEVER open the library in two places at once. The library files really are lots of little databases, and you will corrupt them so fast your head will spin. So this work, but extreme caution must be taken or you’ll be going to backups very frequently.

The last option doesn’t really exist anywhere at the moment. Parts of it are implemented in Photo Stream: the images themselves are uploaded to iCloud and shared between machines on the same account. This gets you the very basic “we have imported the same photos” bits solved, but it doesn’t handle metadata or non-destructive edits at all.

What I would like to see is the database side of iPhoto (or Aperture) to be stored in iCloud, just like Apple does for the iTunes Library in iTunes Match. Also like iTunes Match, there’s also a local copy of the data, so if you’re in a tunnel or your computer is off the ‘net, you can still make changes and see them show up on all the other devices when you rejoin the networked world. This applies to the images as well – they are uploaded to iCloud, though a local copy is kept on the device that uploaded the file for faster access. When another device needs access to the image, it’s pulled down on-demand. As we already have the library data in the cloud, all the edits come with the image. They could even be all fancy and save a history, to allow a different computer to undo/redo edits to an image.

The current iCloud storage pricing would have to be updated somewhat, as images from modern cameras are huge, and I would be paying $3,000/year for data storage with my current library. (1.5 TB of images * $¹⁰⁰⁄₅₀ GB of iCloud space) If the cost of iCloud space isn’t flexible, have the images live on the device that initially imported it, and have it set to share over the LAN if possible when another device requests it, much like the way AirDrop works.

Personally, I could justify paying $20/month or so for iPhoto Match – which is probably not enough to really get Apple’s attention – but professional photo houses could pay a lot more, and if it iPhoto Match works as well as iTunes Match has, it would quickly become a must-have for every serious photographer on the planet.