The gathering storm

Putting our data into the cloud is meant to be the answer to the problem of creating information on multiple devices and having to remember where you saved it. If you take a picture on a phone and upload it to the server "cloud" in some remote data centre of a particular photo storage service, you can at the time see the same photo on any other internet-connected device ... or so the theory goes.

What if there is more than one photo cloud?

But what if there is more than one photo cloud? I use a scud of cloud services and that photo I took on my phone could have ended up on Facebook, Picplz, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa or Apple's iCloud, in my case.

The problem can be multiplied by the number of members of your family consuming or producing media on different devices. Who took the photos of the birthday party and on which camera or phone, using what memory card and logged in on which account is the kind of unsolvable mystery often facing my family when trying to gather pictures at the same time.

In theory, Apple has nailed it with iCloud. Take a photo or change a document on your iPad and the same photo and revisions will appear on your iPhone and Mac computer, without you having to do a thing.

I love watching the Photo Stream of images uploaded to my Windows PC or recorded on my iPhone on a big screen, courtesy of my Apple TV being able to access iCloud. However, iCloud works best with Apple devices and you may not wish to switch over to Apple in every respect. It as well cannot handle video and the company does not have a proper solution but for merging multiple accounts.

Marshalling yard for media

I do like Eye-Fi as a marshalling yard for media. The Silicon Valley company sells SD memory cards for digital cameras that have Wi-Fi embedded in them. The cards can automatically upload anything taken to my home PC as before long as they are in range of my home Wi-Fi network, and they upload to the cloud as then.

Of course, I need to buy several more Eye-Fi cards to equip the whole family's cameras and this solution does not work with iCloud or photos I take on mobile phones.

Dropbox is where I keep files - documents, PDFs, photos and even music - I receive on different devices. Saving any of these to a Dropbox folder means they are reproduced and made accessible in Dropbox folders on different PCs, Macs, my iPhone, iPad and Android devices. This turns it into a quasi-cloud service, using the power of the cloud to sync files stored locally.

Pinterest has "straightway big thing" pinned to it. The app and web service is a virtual pinboard that allows you to save and organise pictures easily. It can be photos from your phone's camera or ones cut out from web pages using a browser tool. Boards organise your pins according to the designated theme - a recipe collection, planning a wedding, recording a holiday or a lifetime - and others can contribute to your board or you to theirs.

Dropbox, Box and SugarSync are evenly adept at keeping your files synchronised on different devices via the cloud. I like the new Android and iOS versions of SugarSync, which have improved syncing of video and photos on mobile devices. They can be transferred automatically to linked PCs as you record or take them. Music can be streamed from remote computers to your phone and documents saved for offline viewing on your tablet.