PictureGo!

Version 7.0 - February/April 2015

About a year ago, I purchased a Synology NAS (a Network Area Storage device). At first I was very happy with it because it came with lots of interesting options. The most important one to me: Synology photo station. After I had copied all my pictures to it and having installed the DSPhoto app on my android device, I carried my entire photo collection with me in the pocket of my jeans. Cool!

At least, when it worked.. which it did for about 50% of the time; it was never flawless though. When it didn't work, I worried about until it was time to go home just to find out everything seemed to be in order. On day 2 of our summer holidays, as we learned afterwards, there was a power failure at home. The NAS did not restart itself (fair enough, this turned out to be a feature in the form of a setting that I had overlooked). For 3 weeks I wondered from time to time..why on earth couldn't I connect to my NAS??

After the summer holidays things got worse, a lot worse. Some hackers discovered a vulnerability in the Synology software and managed to encrypt document and image files (Synolocker). A great number (?) of Synology NAS owners were duped and I was one of them.There was a way out though: pay 0.6 bitcoin (around 400 US dollars) to these criminals to have your files decrypted.

Fortunately I keep many backups! I formatted the drives on my NAS and reinstalled the updated Synology software (of course Synology was not to blame, they already had fixed this problem in December, 2 months before I bought my NAS! The thing is I was never made aware of this major security issue. Sorry for the inconvenience! I received a nice box of chocolate.) Ever since then I keep my NAS separated from the cloud, I just don't trust it anymore.

Maybe I had seen it coming.. Months before I started developing a new major feature for PictureGo!: backup your jpeg photo collection to Flickr (in the cloud, 1 Terabyte(!) of free space). It was a hell of a job (the authencication process alone costed me at least a month) and pretty soon it became clear I had to upgrade from Delphi 7 to Delphi XE5. To make the program work under this new version was a chapter on itself. It also created new possibilities: I finally managed to show pictures in the correct orientation without the need of physical rotating the pictures. All in all it kept me occupied for months, in a nice way, that is.

After having finished programming on the backup process I felt the need to continue and develop a 'recover process from Flickr'. And finally I added the 'automatic creating of albums' to it. At last I was satisfied and started uploading my own photo collection. It took about 9 days and nights for it to upload 46,000 pictures, just under 150 GB (still 850 GB of free space!). Now it has become fun to use: just select the main photo folder and select Backup to Flickr. PictureGo! keeps track of already uploaded pictures so only new and changed pictures are selected for upload.

I am back where I was months ago: I installed the Flickr app on my android device and once again I carry my entire photo collection with me in the pocket of my jeans. Cool!