Customers are impressed with the Smart Photo Manager's storage capacity, ease of setup, and sharing features. They appreciate the 2 TB of storage, find the device easy to set up and use, and enjoy the ability to share photos with others. However, some customers have expressed concerns about the lack of organization options, such as the inability to easily create albums or select multiple photos at once.
This summary was generated by AI based on customer reviews.
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Page 1 Showing 1-20 of 39 reviews
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Storage
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Great way to easily back up photos!
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Initial impression and unboxing:
Wasn't sure what to expect from ibi. Looking at it, there's not a lot on the box to help you understand 100% what ibi is. The key missing word is 'storage'. That is essentially what this is, is a 2TB storage device for your photos, without the need to hook up to a PC to archive photos from your phone or social media networks.
ibi is made by SanDisk, so it is a trusted brand in the marketplace for what it's going to be doing (data storage) but they are trying to brand it as something new. The SanDisk logo is small and on the back!
There is a small label on the outside of the box, on the back that says 'Device capacity 2TB'.That to me is important info, as the box otherwise has a photo of a family, a white cylinder, a phone, and a checklist of features.
So, that aside, opening up the box (which is actually nicely designed, just lacking in pertinent information), gives a higher end feel, matching the $180 price point. Inside, you are faced with a little simple get started card, and then eggcrate packaging. While this is obviously eco friendly, it starts to diminish the 'quality' feel of the product. Next up is the ibi cylinder itself. It's very light, well vented, with matte and shiny white finish. It manages to look classy, but feel cheap at the same time.
Inside, through the vents, there's not a lot to it at all... and being able to see so much, makes you wonder again about the price point. Underneath ibi is a nice, simple, and unobtrusive, white power supply.
Setup:
ibi was very easy to set up, plug it in, look for the blue light on the front, download the app using the QR code on the quick start guide that you took out of the top of the box, and then you are up and running, once paired to your network and logged in. When plugged in, with the hard drive not being SSD, you can hear the drive spinning, and there is some heat generated by it, hence the cylindrical shape and large vented area around the drive.
I set up an ibi account and every time that I log in, I get a 'Hello' welcome screen, which is very Apple-esque. From there, you can manage your account, upload photos, setup files and folders and create albums.
Using ibi:
I set about creating an album for my car, directly downloaded from my phone. Selected about 25 photos and hit 'upload'. Didn't take all that long to import the photos to ibi. I then had the opportunity to set up a folder structure or an album, that made most sense to me, so I labeled it 'Camaro'. Selected all the photos to go in that album.
Now... this is basically part of the 'sorting' dynamic in the app. On one tab, you see all of the photos uploaded to ibi, on the albums tab, you are just essentially narrowing down your search results. From there, in order to make the searching function work optimally, you have to go in and label every single photo with a name/description which is relevant to what you want to search for. While for 25 photos, this wasn't an issue, if you are importing 100's or 1000's of photos, that is a lot of time and effort to go through to make that happen. Also, the app is a little clunky in this department, requiring several steps for each photo to rename them. I ended up copy and pasting, and changing the end number to make it quicker/easier! Again, this is the nature of creating a usable searching structure, so I don't see a quick and easy way around it at all.
So for a lot of people, that will leave you with a date search. That works well, the photos are imported with their original name from your phone, and the date metadata is captured, so you can search for photos chronologically. I was able to access my ibi remotely from work, and continue to rename and create albums from there.
Adding more and more albums to my ibi, saving the albums by date of concerts, the search functionality worked well, and it was fairly quick to update the results. But without going in and renaming every single photo, I couldn't search specifically for an image I knew was there. Again, the nature of file structures, you can only search for the data that you put in. It isn't a smart app that can trawl through your images with facial recognition, or object dynamics.
ibi also has what is called the 'Inner Circle' which allows you to partition the drive so that family members can upload their photos to their own area of the drive. As part of the inner circle, you can also share your photos with the ones you love most, sharing the content of individual photos or albums to your friends and family, securely.
Overall, it is an unobtrusive, image storage device, that can sit anywhere in your house, not just connected to a PC. That is a nice option, so it can be somewhat hidden away and not left out on a desk next to your computer.
The 2TB size will hold approximately 500,000 photos or 200 hours of video. Not sure at this time if there will be larger capacities available.
ibi works. It does what it says it will do, but the functionality of the app is a little clunky, and it does take a little while to transfer files over.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Storage, Usb
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
Storage file with nothing to set it apart
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
The IbI storage file is a place where you can store all your family photos and most sensitive documents with piece of mind. The big question here is does its functionality really serve a purpose for are most prized possessions? I'll try to break down its basic functions and hopefully this will help to determine if this is the right fit for you.
First off lets talk about what you can expect to receive and basic set up. Out of the box your going to get the main IbI unit which is basically a 2TB hard drive and power cord. The unit needs to have power at all times in order for it to be of any use. IbI provides a free easy to use app to help with set up. Once you create an account you can then go ahead and proceed to back up photos or files. With the that out of the way lets now dive in and talk about how this unit functions exactly. When i first got this unit i was actually kind of excited to see what it could do as i was looking for a safe reliable place to store my family photos of my kids. The biggest problem i have run in to the past was that i would store all my photos on my phones hard drive. This is a big problem as one day my phone crashed and took out my sd card with it. I had lost all my family photos that i did not back up. Well much to my disappointment this unit is basically one big stationary hard drive with no added security to help remedy this problem i have. What i mean by that is this unit will safely store all photos automatically from your phone, facebook, or cloud storage. The only problem is at least as of writing this review there is no fail safe to back your documents up to a separate cloud storage. What this breaks down to is you better hope that your IbI unit doesn't crash or if you have kids you better hope they do not spill anything on the unit or else there goes all your photos and documents with no way yet to retrieve them. Now if your the kind of person that doesn't trust cloud storage than this may be the right fit for you. I however want to protect all my memories from loss, seeing as how i can never get back those photos of my kids when they were young. Now lets talk about some of the features this unit has to offer. You can set it to automatically back up photos or documents. You can import files from a usb drive on to this unit and vice versa. You can also invite select members to join your account where you can choose to share with them select photos via a section called "inner circle." Now this feature is a cool concept as it allows you to share intimate family photos with only the people you want to and keeps them away from prying eyes of strangers on facebook. The one big problem i had with this feature is i felt it was a little too intrusive. What i mean by that is in order to invite someone to your circle that individual has to download the app (which i understand is a given) but they also need to sign up for an account and provide an email, password, and minor information. When i tried to invite family members to join so i could share photos i found that most were hesitant due to the fact that they did not want to give out their email address and sign up for an account only to view a few photos that i allowed them view. I honestly agreed with their hesitation as i would not want to do the same either. Once photos are stored they are time stamped and dated according to when you took the photos. IbI also provides there own photo service which allows you to customize your photos a bit by adding stickers, borders, contrast, etc. One thing i forget to mention is that you can also stream your saved photos and videos from your unit to a smart tv or Roku. Well that's pretty much it as of writing this review. Until they provided some added enhancements this unit is pretty much basic in all its functions. Even the app service is basic.
Here's the bottom line. If your the kind of individual that finds cloud storage unsafe and makes you uncomfortable then this unit is perfect for you as it provides an alternate means of storage to your phone with ample storage. However if your similar to me and like a back up plan in case your unit fails than you may want to pass on this lack luster unit. Overall beside the fact that it provides 2tb of storage space this unit really is not that much different from storing your photos on a smartphone. As for me i think i would rather stick to my provided cloud storage rather than spend money on this unit. If this device would provide cloud storage as a optional service then i would be 100% sold.
Pros:
-Ample storage space
-Ability to invite friends and family
Cons:
-No cloud storage
-Too intrusive for guest
-Must be powered all the time
No, I would not recommend this to a friend
Cons mentioned:
Transfer speed
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
Has lots of potential but not quite there yet
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Canon ibi
Unboxing:
The box tries to tell a story of what this product is. This is a good because walking past the device in an aisle of a store, I would have no idea what this thing is unless there was a lot of marketing or I did some research. There are lots of photos with bold letters trying to explain its purpose. The box has the device inside which is rather small, an AC adaptor and getting started guide.
My first impressions of the device were 1: that it is very small, and 2: there is a lot of wasted space in the plastic housing. There are vents in the top and bottom, looking into it there is a 2.5” laptop hard drive inside with a tiny mainboard which also interfaces to the power plug and USB plug. The device looks nice externally but I find it confusing why they decided to make a cylinder with a tiny hard drive inside when it could have taken many more space saving shapes to match the hard drive. I am assuming it is mainly so it looks nice but who knows. It just looks like a lot of wasted space to me. The build of the body is well put together. The plastic feels cheap but it feels sturdy. I do not see any points to open it up with screws (might be hidden under rubber feet) or they glued it shut in the middle, either way it wont fall apart. The vents on the top and bottom would not block any fluid so do not spill anything on it.
Set up:
It is very easy. Download the app to your phone, create an account and let the app do the rest. Import your photos from your phone with auto import and I recommend turning on cloud services. I usually keep my photos backed up on a portable hard drive so I plugged it into the app and imported everything which brings me on to practical use…
Use:
Importing is slow, especially from another hard drive. As stated earlier, the Ibi uses a 2.5” laptop hard drive inside and I am pretty sure it is 5400 rpm. I was unimpressed by this decision from the company as they could have used a higher quality hard drive. An SSD would have been great but it is 2TB which would be costly so I understand the use of a mechanical hard drive. I would have preferred a higher end laptop hard drive or a larger product to accommodate a 7200 RPM desktop hard drive. It took quite a few hours to transfer 200GB of photos over. I expected a decent amount of time to transfer that much, but it was painfully slow compared to moving it between hard drives on a computer. Luckily this is not an everyday occurrence and is likely to only be done during setup and a few occasions.
The app is pretty good! You can essentially “partition” the users that are part of your household as they upload photos and by default it will only show the photos of that user regardless of how they uploaded it. But, if you wish you can display “all” photos which will merge the libraries.
One big feature is the “inner circle” which allows you to invite anyone important to you to see only photos that you want to share. They other users do not need to have an ibi or even have access to your ibi to see these, they only need to download the app and make an account. It is great for sharing between family. In the past I would use shared photos in Google Photos or family libraries in Amazon Photos but the feature is ibi gives you l a lot more control of what you want to get out to your friend so I highly recommend it. I would like to see the ability to set up different “circles” of friends so I can share things to my household and maybe have a different group for my larger family.
The app takes security seriously and allows you to use a PIN and biometrics to log in. I highly recommend you go to the website and download the desktop app. This is the best way to use the device as it creates more seamless upload ability from your desktop if uploading from an SD card and allows you to access all files via the computer’s file explorer.
Dislikes:
I am not sure if the device is still indexing but after a week, it is still slow to pull up a date like “March 2019” and see all the photos from that time frame. It works but you have to wait a long time for it to show you the thumb nails. It could be the app too but the website seems be a little faster with accessing items on the hard drive. Each time I log in I see different photos on top. I am not sure if this is a bug or part of the slow indexing process.
I love how you can integrate photos so many different sources… but… it seems like this results in a lot of duplicates if you import originals and add cloud sources and I haven’t quite figured out how to best organize it. If you are starting fresh with photography, this might be great but if you have a complication photo library from multiple sources, the device might not be ready for prime time yet as cloud services do a much better job of filtering duplicates.
The device is loud! I put it next to my TV since it looks pretty cool and high tech but at night time if I am on my computer or doing homework in a quiet room, I can hear the hard drive whirring! Put it somewhere where you might not hear it.
Moving it around while it is energized cause some strange whirring sounds so I wonder if this would survive a bump or fall while powered on. It does not seem like a hard drive with any kind of shock protection.
Summary:
The device is cool and has a lot of potential, but… it has a lot of issues that are not worked out yet. I think most of these issues can be hammered out in software on the server side or in the app but until they are fixed, it will feel somewhat half baked. If the library organization issues and speed were fixed, I would have zero issues the hard drive noise and hard drive speed, but this is not the case. I say buy it, but wait a few months until it is more polished.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Sharing, Size, Storage
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Many Possibilities, Great Sharing Capabilities
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I was searching for an easy way to share pictures and videos that included an option to share outside my LAN. I was very impressed with the capabilities this little device has along with the large amount of storage. This not only allows for sharing multimedia within my network, I can also share the link to others outside.
Pros:
Size
Sharing both Inside/Outside LAN
Multiple Account Setup
Privacy between Accounts
Accounts not have to be within LAN
UI easy to Navigate
5GHz Band
Direct USB Connection
Cons:
Start Up / Load Times
Software Randomly Not Seeing device
Limited Stream Options (Roku / Dropbox)
:: Setup / Install ::
The setup was very easy, once downloaded the ibi software, there was an easy walk through with connecting the device to the WLAN. Upon connection it provided a quick and easy way to back up all photo's and videos from the phone. The device uses the WLAN however is not enabled for sharing. The only way to communicate with the device is by app or using USB plug directly.
:: Software ::
The software allows for setting up individual accounts with privacy to prevent one account from seeing the others pictures and videos. You are able to share the pictures and videos by using the share option. You can share within the WLAN or outside the network via URL through IBI company. There are so many possible usages for this, if you are wanting to provide a share of a video or picture slideshow outside the network. If you are wanting to share videos from within the network without having to turn on the computer you can stream this to your Roku. The only concern is the application at times takes a while to load the pictures and videos as well as sometimes disconnect from the drive. The drive itself remains connected via WLAN so I end up having to close out and relaunch the application.
Overall this is a great little device that does the job of storing, sharing and streaming pictures / videos. I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys sharing pictures and videos without the hassle of having to keep turning on your PC.
I would recommend this to a friend
Cons mentioned:
Transfer speed
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
Not Sure
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Posted . Owned for 2 weeks when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Not sure if I like this or not. It's taking me forever to load all my pics and videos maybe due to my internet. Once I switch internet companies hopefully it'll go faster. One thing I had hoped for was uploading all my pics and videos straight from my Mac and it doesn't do that.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Size, Storage
Cons mentioned:
Transfer speed
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
A great idea, almost perfect...
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I waited some time to write this review because I had a bit of concern when I first set this up. The initial setup was amazingly simple for this kind of device and within minutes, I was uploading and backing up my phone.
My primary concern was that every time I started the app, it backed up the newest pictures... something I thought it was supposed to do automatically, all the time. After a few times of seeing this behavior, I haven't noticed it for a week or more. I am not sure if it was something with my phone or something that has been fixed in an update.
My other nit-picky thing is that it seems to keep two copies of pictures that are saved to an Ibi album or shared folder. Not sure why it would keep two copies, and then show both in the "All Photos" section. I'm sure there is a perfectly logical reason, it just gets annoying having to scroll through twice as many pictures as I really have to find anything.
The storage space is great, the setup is amazing and the device itself is small and only requires a power connection. I have it sitting behind my Google Home, and both are pretty invisible to us already. I really like the space and knowing our pictures are backed up. I will have to play around with it a little more to see if there is a way to only show one copy of each picture.
So far, the slow upload speed reported by others has not been an issue, it seems to be about what I would expect for a device to copy several hundred pictures over WiFi. It is certainly not an NAS, but you would never connect an NAS over WiFi either! It looks to be a bit faster than the external hard drive I have connected to a USB port on my router, but slower than the NAS I have connected to the wired network port.
Overall, I would probably rate it at a 4.5 if that were an option. My problems have nothing to do with how it works now, just my perception of what could be better. The software on both a desktop and an Android phone are pretty decent, the speed is to be expected and the device is unintrusive.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Sharing, Storage
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Nice device
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I’m always looking for easy and safe ways to save my photos. The IBI is compact and I love that it stores my photos without having to rely on the “cloud”. It was very easy to set up. My iPad connected via blue tooth quickly. You do have to download their app and set up an account with IBI to move forward. Once that was done, it backed up my full “camera roll” (Apple’s native photo album”) fairly quickly. I have several thousand photos. We have traveled across the country multiple times in our motorhome since 2006. My photos are in files arranged by destination with sub folders from various attractions visited on each trip. Now every device/software/app initially uses date to sort photos. Unfortunately the IBI is the same. Once my photos loaded to IBI, there is an option to create albums, but so far I’ve found this has to be done manually moving individual photos. With thousands of photos, this is too daunting to attempt. There are nice options with IBI. The device comes with 2 TB of storage. My husband can view my my photos from his tablet. I sent him an invitation from IBI to join my “inner circle”. He can also backup his photos to my IBI so I can view them. It is easy to invite others to see albums you create of a special event, like a baby shower. It’s very nice that any new photos I add are automatically backed up so I don't need to worry about losing them due to a failure of my tablet/computer. There are many things I have to learn about this device but the best part is I know my photos are safe for now. Wish I could just organize my older photos easily. 13 years and thousands of photos are a lot of albums to create. By the way, there is a desktop app that I haven’t downloaded yet. That will be interesting to try on my Mac. Don’t know yet how that will work. I like the IBI. Wish it had been available 4000 pictures ago!
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Storage
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
privately share individual photos
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
This device is like having icloud setting on my desk. I don't have to keep paying a feed ever month. Best part I can use it like a hard drive. I can send out my photos to friends and family to just see. It was easy to set up and use.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Storage, Usb
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Good now, could be great
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
This is an interesting device with lots of potential. However, the still-evolving software is currently preventing it from totally reaching its full potential.
Physically this is a 2 TB hard drive with a WIFI connection to your network and a USB 3 port built in. The drive is always on which makes me wonder about its expected life (always backup any device). It’s housed in a 3.5” x 5” white plastic cylinder and powered by a 1.5” square AC wall power supply. Build quality is decent, and my unit created minimal noise. Just the whirring of the drive.
The ibi mobile app is used to set things up, and that process was simple and straight forward. The idea behind the software is for the ibi to become your personal cloud storage. You can set it to automatically backup all the photos on your devices and give it access to backup other online sites such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook, etc. It has the unique additional feature of allowing you to invite others to use it. They can even be allowed to have their own private storage space. Additionally, they can have read access to what you wish, or they can “collaborate” and have read/write access to some or all. You get to invite others into the “inner circle” as you see fit and share what you wish. The default organization is by date and searchable only by month. You also have the ability to create folders and albums. Additionally, there is a desktop app which can be used in browser mode which emulates the mobile app, or in file explorer mode which accesses it basically as a network drive. Chromecast and ROKU are supported, and all this works pretty well.
However, I had some issues. First, considering the 2TB drive can hold around 500,000+ photos or 200+ hours of video, the app just doesn’t have the tools to manage a really large collection. There is no way to easily make group selections, moves or establish albums. Some areas allow sort by name or date, others are just date, and albums are sorted by date created. There is a search function which can find folders but not albums. The desktop apps do give more ability to organize, but the mobile app is the one you’re most likely to use looking at pictures. Secondly, I’ve had some erratic results such as random pictures and thumbnails showing in low resolution. Also, capturing pictures directly worked on my IOS device but not with my Android phone. To their credit, ibi support was responsive and reached out to help and document these issues. They took these issues seriously, and I believe the app will be evolving and improving quickly.
My conclusion is that ibi is a good piece of hardware which has a lot of potential … some realized and some yet to be. If backing up your phone or tablet as well as sharing things instantly with friends is your thing, it’s already there. It’s much simpler to set up and use than typical network and cloud drives … especially the sharing and continual backup aspect. If you want to use it for organizing and backing up thousands of pictures, it’s getting still there.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Storage
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Manage all of your photos and videos in 1 place
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
ibi
Also included- Guide and AC adapter, 2 TB of storage
This smart photo manager, ibi, came just at the right time for my household. I wanted something that would back up my photos so I would have easy access to them. To save room on my laptop, my husband had moved them all to somewhere that's nearly impossible for me to get to them. With the ibi, I can easily access my photos and videos online or through their mobile app and desktop app. They look and work pretty much identical, which is nice for users to manage.
Once you unpack it and plug it in, download the apps and create an account. Once that's setup it will immediately start to back up all of your photos and videos. It didn't take very long for all our entire collection and each of our phones to back up onto the ibi. One recommendation I would make, is have the person who is going to more actively manage the photos be the main owner of the account. From there you can share photos or entire albums with anyone you want.
The ibi automatically saves your photos and videos. If you delete something off a device, it will still be in the ibi gallery. You can choose to keep it there or delete it too. It will give you a piece of mind that your photos and videos are safely stored. I like that it syncs from all my devices, cloud and even social media accounts. You have the ability to upload what you need from a USB or directly from the ibi desktop app. You can control who sees your photos and who you give them to. They have set up a special private space called the Inner Circle so it's not public to anyone.
Organizing the last 20 years of photos will take some time. It pulled our photos and organized them into years, but the years don't match the year the photo was taken. It's off 1 year for some reason. So I will have to go back and fix all of them as I continue to make albums and organize everything. Even if you make different albums, it will keep the photos in the original folders as well. And those can all be renamed too for easy organizing.
I like the easy access from my laptop or phone. The setup is easy. It's great to manage an entire household of photos in one place and never worry that a photo or video is lost forever.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Storage
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
We love our IBI!
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Posted . Owned for 1.5 years when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
We love our IBI! Great way to store memories in one place. I love how I don't have to remember to upload our phone photos. Set it and forget it.
I would recommend this to a friend
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
Not what I expected
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Posted . Owned for 1 week when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I returned this item before install. It should be noted that I wanted to use it for family memories only from my desktop. You have to install it from the mobile app, there is no other option. Since I use different logins I prefer not to have my devices connected, so could not use it.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Sharing, Storage
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Robust and Large Capacity - Bit Light on Features
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
The Ibis Smart Photo Manager has 2TB of storage which is a lot for all but the most prolific photo-takers.
It is simple to set up and took me about 2 minutes from unboxing, to plugging in and then pairing it with my wireless network. Surprisingly it was comfortable connecting to my 5Ghz, network so in theory should be faster for accessing photos and videos.
I set up accounts for myself and my wife and within a short time, we were both in what is called the "Inner Circle". We have our own spaces to save photos, both manually and automatically from our mobile devices but can only see each others photos if we choose to share albums with each other.
Making albums is fairly painless but adding photos from several years worth of camera roll can take a while. I found this way better than when I tried to pick photos out of my DropBox storage though - this was somewhat painful and only seemed to allow you to do it one photo at a time, rather than clicking the photos and then adding them all together.
Importing images from Drobbox was clumsy in that it brought over every folder in my account. I would have liked to have just picked the folders to bring over, rather than store other things like PDFs. This however could be regarded as a feature and not a bug if you wanted a physical backup of your cloud files and folders.
You can access the photos through the Ibi app which is available on mobile devices and as a computer app. We installed it on our Apple iPhones and iPads as well as Windows 10 machines without any issues.
I do like having a physical storage for all our photos and videos but wonder about backing it up. We use Dropbox extensively so at least the raw images are still backed up there, in case the IBI ever has any issues.
The ability to access the photos and albums from anywhere in the world, as well as be able to share albums with close friends and family and cast to a TV are nice features.
I wish that the photo manager had some more features. For example, some images I wanted to use in an album from Dropbox needed to be rotated 90 degrees but there was no way to do this simple procedure.
I also would have liked something for facial recognition like Apple's iPhoto does to categorize photos by person but there is nothing like this here.
That said, the 2TBs are welcome and I thought I would fill it with all my camera roll and Dropbox files but so far, we have only filled about a quarter of it. We will use it extensively this summer both during and after our vacation and it will be a nice way to share photos without having to resort to bombarding everyone through social media.
I hope the Ibi continues to have software updates and feature improvements but the hardware seems very stable, with lots of space and I will enjoy using it over the coming months.
I would recommend this to a friend
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
we use it for photos
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Posted . Owned for 1 year when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
wife used this to store her photos of our kids on them. Says it was a bit confusing for a bit but after she got the hang of it, she says it was a snap.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Storage
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Photo manager
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Posted . Owned for 1 year when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Great product, use phone camera quite a bit, so need a lot of storage
I would recommend this to a friend
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
This is a gift
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Posted . Owned for 1 week when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
This is a gift and I don't know how well it performs yet. The receiver was happy to get it and anxious to get it setup and use it.
I would recommend this to a friend
Pros mentioned:
Setup, Storage
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
Perfect for what I needed
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This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I will start off by saying that I got this for one reason, and that was for photo storage. I have 3 old phones I've been saving because I didn't want to lose the photos, and have already put them on a now retired laptop. I realized putting all my photos on my laptops was a bad idea after the last one died and I couldn't recover anything. Thankfully I still have the phones and digital camera. Now I can take the photos from all my devices and put them into one place again. Setup was super easy, you have to download their app and set up an account, no biggie. It also has a desktop app, though I haven't checked that out yet. Uploading the photos was easy as well. There is plenty of storage space at 2TB, so we wont run out anytime soon. You can also share your photos with friends and family if you choose. I took off one star because they unit needs to stay plugged in constantly or it is useless. Other than that I am very happy with this product and cant wait to finish getting all my pics/vids transferred over to it. I can finally free up some memory on my iPad!
I would recommend this to a friend
Cons mentioned:
Transfer speed
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
OK, but needs a lot of work
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Posted .
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I plugged in the ibi Photo Manager and installed the app on my smart phone as well as my laptop. First it asked me if I wanted to backup the photos from my phone. It did that rather quickly but only from my “Camera” album folder. I had arranged my phone photos in various albums and it ignored all of the other albums. So in order to get this working, I had to create a “Temp” folder on my phone and copied all of my “Camera” photos to my “Temp” folder. Then I copied every other photo on my phone from their respective albums into my “Camera” folder so that ibi could find them and back them up. Then I deleted my “Camera” folder and renamed my “Temp” folder to “Camera”. If ibi could have foreseen that since smart phones let you create album folders, people might use that feature, then maybe ibi would let you backup those folders too. Now the only problem is that those photos will not show up in folders on ibi unless I go in and make tons of albums. Also, when I take new photos on my phone, I will have to make sure they are backed up before I moved them to any of my categorized album folders.
Next I set it to start downloading my laptop photos. I was able to make it download photos from specific albums (vacations, family, friends, etc.) so that I wouldn’t waste time on miscellaneous images that I didn’t need backed up. It took about 3 days and nights to complete that task because there were 113,400 files at 650 GB.
It created a Drive Z which I could access from my laptop and looking at that drive, it had one folder for my smart phone photos and all of my folders that I had asked it to download from my laptop. To ensure that all of the photos had been downloaded, I clicked on Properties for each folder and compared it to the Properties of the corresponding folder on my laptop. All of the folders were the same except for two. Since some of the folders had over 20k photos in them, I opened those folders and started comparing subfolders. It didn’t take long to figure out which ones to recopy. One folder was missing 10 photos and one was missing 47 photos. So out of 113,400 that is pretty good, but not good enough.
Next I added the ibi app to my Roku because while exploring the app, I had clicked on “Do More” and had read that I could cast any of the photos or albums to my Roku device. I opened the photos in Roku and found that I could view all of the photos (including shared photos), just the shared photos, just my own photos, videos, or albums. I could also search for a photo by name. I thought it would be nice to see my vacation photos on Roku without have to cast them from my tablet or phone, so I decided to try the Albums feature.
I hadn’t created an album yet so I decided to create one with photos from a 2018 vacation. First I clicked on “Create Album” but it wouldn’t let me select photos to put in the album, so I went back to “Photos” and selected a few and was able to click on “Create an Album” from that point. However, searching for photos to include in the album when I had 113,400 photos to choose from was daunting, so I decided to try another method. I went to Files and Folders on the ibi app on my laptop and browsed to the folder containing the files I wanted to use and was able to either select them one by one or press Ctrl-A to select them all and add them to the album. However, once added, I was not able to sort the album. The default sort appears to be by date and I needed them to be sorted by name since I had added numbered prefixes (001, 002, 003, etc.) to each photo in order to get them in the order I wanted them. The only way to fix this would be to use a bulk attribute changer and change the date and times so that they would be in date order (albeit with edited dates and times) and thereby would show up in the correct order for a slideshow in an album. If showing your photos in date order works for you, then this should not be an issue.
After creating an album, I tried adding someone to my inner circle and sharing some photos and having that person share photos with me. It was not very user friendly, but I figured it out after some trial and error. I was able to share photos using links via email without too much trouble but when I invited someone to join the Inner Circle and shared photos with them, they thought the process on their end was difficult and frustrating. Once you receive shared photos, if you click on the “Photos” tab at the top of the page, it lets you show either your own photos or all photos. If you choose All Photos, they are sorted by date, so the shared photos are all mixed in with yours. So I will probably keep it set on only my own photos. Clicking on the tab showing and icon with two head brings you to your “inner circle” and you can see only the shared photos there. Why this wasn’t put in with the “Photos” tab makes no sense to me. It seems like the “photos” tab should have “My photos only”, “Shared photos only”, or “All” instead of having to switch to another tab to get that shared photos only option. Until I found the Inner Circle tab, I thought I wouldn’t be able to even see the shared photos separately. By the way, clicking on the “Shared” button from the main menu showed that nothing had been shared to me although I had 6 shared folders showing up in my Inner Circle. (See attached photo after sharing was complete.)
Summary: I definitely won’t use this to make albums where I want to show the photos out of date order. (For example, I made title screens and date screens to put in-between my photo slides but since I made them after I returned from vacation, they all showed up at the end of the album.) However, it should be fine to make albums that need to be in chronological order. I would suggest making the albums as you go along. You can add all of the photos (like from a vacation) at once and then go into the album and delete ones that you don’t need in the album. In fact, if you have a program for changing attributes, you could add title screens to your album by first changing the date and time on the title screen files before backing them up so that they show up where you want them to in your slideshow.
The problem with the app is that it is too simple. It doesn’t realize that people may sort their phone photos into albums. Or that people may want to show their photos in a different order. It doesn’t give you any options for sorting and the search options are poor. When searching for a photo that was named “005 DSC_1082”, I typed that in and it only wanted to look at the characters before the space. So then I type just “005” and it treated “005” as just “5” so my results were enormous.
Automatic backup: I had to go into the app and refresh it in order for my phone backup to begin again. Nothing backed up automatically until I did that. Maybe I didn't give it time, though, so I'm not sure how often it checks.
They really need to work out the bugs in the app, otherwise, it is just a high-priced backup device with usable, but frustrating sharing capability, and not really usable slideshow viewing from created albums unless the predetermined sort order is OK. I will continue to try workarounds for some of the problems, but since I can already cast slideshows to my TV, I doubt that I will use that feature.
No, I would not recommend this to a friend
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Easy to use
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Posted .
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I copied over 11,000+ photos and videos from my iPhone quickly!
I would recommend this to a friend
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Is the use
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Posted . Owned for 1 month when reviewed.
This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Great product works great he’s installed can easily use