+
®
Take Control Of
Your Photos
Share, Store &
Access Your Photos
Anywhere On
Any Device
KEVIN
GILBERT
30-Year Global
Photojournalist &
Memory Evangelist
Manages His
Images
With Mylio
The Tech
Behind The
Amazing
Mylio
Engine
outdoorphotographer.com January/February 2014 3
Contents
6 A Passion For People
Mylio’s Memory Evangelist Kevin Gilbert reflects
on 30 years as a globe-trotting documentary
photographer and instructor
14 Take Control Of Your Photos!
All of your images accessible and editable on all
of your devices all of the time. Here’s how Mylio
will change your life.
24 What Makes Mylio Go
This “too good to be true” photo software works
in smart, innovative ways
4 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
outdoorphotographer.com January/February 2014 5
Mylio’s Memory Evangelist Kevin Gilbert
reflects on 30 years as a globe-trotting
documentary photographer and instructor
Early-morning photographers are
bathed in light shafts created by
sunrise streaming through the steam
vents at Volcanoes National Park on
the Big Island of Hawaii.
BY WILLIAM SAWALICH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN GILBERT
K
A Passion For People
6 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
© 2012 Kevin T Gilbert
evin Gilbert has a lot of great experiences to
remember from his three decades in photography. He can think back to the early
part of his career as a photojournalist in Washington D.C., when he
worked his way up to become president of the White
House News Photographers Association, covering
Presidents and world leaders on a daily basis. And
he can remember the fun and exciting middle years,
when he left the newspaper world to work for the
Discovery Channel and Mark Burnett Productions,
documenting programs and productions like the
Eco Challenge —an opportunity that took him around
the world to 17 different countries. He can recall
8 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
started working for Microsoft, doing educational content on how to use photography with computers, and we got hired by
Best Buy and we started training all their
employees, and we got hired by Sony....
“My role for the last 10 or 12 years,”
he explains, “has been primarily to shoot
pictures and teach people how to take
better pictures—not make them great
photographers, but just how to take a
better picture. Not a typical picture, a better picture. To make a great picture, that’s
inside your soul, and only you can do that.
It’s very intrinsic.”
One look at his portfolio and it’s clear
that Gilbert possesses the intrinsic skill
to make great pictures, as well as a fundamental passion for people. Not only
Above: A Berber man walks camels after
hauling photographers through the desert
in eastern Morrocco. Right, Top To Bottom:
A polar bear stands on its hind legs to get a
glimpse into a tundra buggy near Churchill,
Manitoba; A young girl sits idly in an overturned boat in a fishing village in Borneo.
© 2000 Kevin T Gilbert
made a lot of great connections. When
I became president of the White House
News Photographers Association in 1998,
I got to meet the industry. I got out of
being just a photographer because I had
to deal with the big corporations—the
Nikons and Canons and Kodaks and Fujis
of the world. And, at the same time, the
whole digital revolution was happening,
and a few of my friends and I had been
doing all the conversion consulting for
analog to digital for a bunch of newspapers and wire services. We formed Blue
Pixel, a training company, and that is still
going strong. We started out training
doing the Nikon School, which we’re still
doing 12 years later, and that’s in 40 cities a year and 15,000 people, roughly. We
© 2009 Kevin T Gilbert
© 2007 Kevin T Gilbert
creating Blue Pixel, an organization
designed to help teach people how to
take better pictures—which today can
lay claim to helping literally hundreds of
thousands of students improve their photography over the past decade. All of this
remembering is fundamental to Gilbert’s
newest role: For two years now, he has
been the “memory evangelist” at software startup Mylio, with the goal of helping photographers get a handle on all of
their transient digital images. His life in
photography has always been about taking pictures and helping others, and now,
in this newest phase of his career, it’s still
what he does every day.
“Being a photojournalist in D.C. was
great,” Gilbert says. “I learned a lot and
helping them through his educational
programs, but photographing the people
he encounters as he travels the globe.
“I’m not a static scene guy,” Gilbert
says. “Things need to be moving, which
usually means people, it usually means
culture. I kind of try to put culture into
landscapes somehow, whether it’s just
scale or silhouettes.”
Another difference between Gilbert’s
portfolio and most is the fact that he’s
seemingly been everywhere and done
everything, from excavating mummies in
Peru to riding camels into an Egyptian
sunset. He’s been around the world and
back many times; it’s just that he’s rather
quiet about it.
“My wife and I are both photographers,” he says. “We worked together
over about a five-year period where
we were in 13 countries, teaching in
Australia, teaching in St. Petersburg, on
a ship in the Adriatic, helping people to
take a better picture, take something they
wouldn’t have made without us. With
some guidance, this is how you can take
a great picture of the Coliseum or the
Kremlin or something.”
Rome and Moscow are certainly popular photo destinations, but it’s the off-thebeaten-path places that inspire Gilbert
the most. His three favorites, in no particular order, are Morocco, Vietnam and
South Island, New Zealand.
“I’ve been to Vietnam four times,”
Gilbert says, “Morocco three times, and
South Island, New Zealand, four times.
Those places are magical in both the culture and the impressiveness of the landscape. I’m not a landscape photographer;
as I say, I like to put people in landscapes
and tell the story of a person, just glimpses,
even for a couple of moments. As part
of a Morocco trip that I took a couple of
Microsoft executives on, we went to Mali—
which right now is kind of a dangerous place
to be. We went in to Mali to photograph
the Dogon tribe people who live up in the
walls of these cliffs where they’ve been living for centuries. Along the way, there’s a
picture of mine that speaks to me as the
kind of photographer I’ve always been, or
the way I live my photographic life. It’s a silhouette of a man on a boat at sunset. We
drove all day to get to this place, checked
into our hotel, sunset was in an hour, and
we couldn’t figure out how to get there,
so we were losing the light. We got to the
banks of the Niger River, it was an amazing
place, this little town, and the guys in the
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 9
10 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
wo years ago, when Kevin Gilbert
was asked to join Mylio by company
founder and former Microsoft
Chief Technology Officer David
Vaskevitch, it was perfect timing. Gilbert felt
the time was right for a personal change
and for a new approach to helping people
interact with their photographs. His new
position required a new job title, too.
“It’s a title I made up,” Gilbert says,
“and it fits for everything I do: memory
evangelist. Think of it this way: We are not
positioning our company long term as a
photography company. We are a memory
company. Photography is the most tangible,
easiest way to look back and rediscover and
remember what’s happened in our lives.
But so is music, so is video, so is journaling, so are ticket stubs and school papers
that your second-grader wrote. Those are
all very tangible memories that the digital
age allows us to catalog, but nobody’s out
there thinking how can we change the way
the world remembers. That’s our mission for
the company: changing the way the world
remembers. And if you start to think about
the almost one-trillion photographs that will
be taken next year, you realize that’s an awful lot of memories. And the thing that has
really kind of galvanized me to get out there
and really be an evangelist for memories, is
that because of technology, we’re taking an
incredible amount of new photographs on
camera phones and tablets and point-andshoots and DSLRs, and we are becoming
a very visual society. People would rather
send a picture than write a note. And,
with that, we are in danger of losing more
pictures than ever before because we don’t
understand technology. If you think about all
the people taking camera phone pictures,
and three to four million camera phones
were lost or stolen last year, and think of all
the photographs that were on them that
people just didn’t have backed up or organized in any way. Think about all the times
hard drives crashed, or all the times you’ve
spilled a Diet Coke on your keyboard, or a
lightning strike, or in extreme cases, fires,
floods, tornadoes....
“The other part,” Gilbert says, “that really
strikes most people’s hearts, is the ability
to rediscover. The serendipity of dumping a
whole hard drive into Mylio and then seeing
it visually—it’s no more file names, blah blah
blah Alaska jpeg—you start flipping through
these visuals and you go, ‘Oh, my god,
there’s that picture, and you drag it down
to the lightbox to put in an album, and you
find yourself engrossed in remembering your
life. Rediscovery happens every single time
I open Mylio because, whether I’ve taken it
with a camera phone or been on assignment
with a DSLR, you move pictures around. If
you look at what Mylio does for me every
day, it engages me in photography again. It
reminds me of why I got into photography.”
car with me were like, ‘Oh, man, we lost the
light,’ because the sun had just gone down.
And I was like, ‘But look at the reflection of
the red sky in that water; look at all these
shapes and patterns!’ It’s the unexpected.
“Every time I take a class to Santorini,”
Gilbert continues, bringing up the Greek
island that’s another popular photo destination, “we get there early and wait for sunset
because it can be an amazing picture. The
minute the sun hits the horizon, 99% of the
people turn around and walk away. And I
tell my class, ‘No, no, sit here for 30 minutes.
Just wait. You want to see magic happen?
Wait until the sun goes down. It’s unbelievable what happens.’ It’s this incredible palette of colors that just emerges, and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my god, I had no idea; I
would have already been back on the bus.’”
When Gilbert returns from one of his
photographic excursions, he’s unencumbered not only by Mylio doing the heavy
lifting of backing up and distributing his
images across devices, but by the fact that
he doesn’t spend a lot of time editing his
image files. Instead, he prefers to get it
right in the camera—and it’s a concept to
which he’s particularly committed.
“A lot of people just shoot RAW and fix
it later,” Gilbert says. “I’m all about doing
it right in the camera. That’s why I don’t
shoot RAW. I’m a JPEG man because I
believe I can get it right in the camera. All
those pictures you see of mine have very
little Photoshop done to them. They’re
pretty straight out of the camera.”
Gilbert attributes this aversion to postprocessing to his early years in the newspaper business, when he shot transarencies in literally every situation.
“You would walk into a hearing room,”
he says, “or outdoors in the middle of the
day, and we shot transparency film for
everything. You had to learn fill-flash and
© 2001 Kevin T Gilbert
© 2000 Kevin T Gilbert
© 2011 Kevin T Gilbert
© 2001 Kevin T Gilbert
T
The
Memory
Evangelist
Above: An adventure racing team glides through braided rivers created by glacial snow melt on
the South Island, New Zealand. Shot from a helicopter for the Eco Challenge adventure race.
Far Left, Top To Bottom: Masai Mara dancers photographed in Kenya; An African girl in the
northeastern section of Kruger National Park, with penetrating eyes and a wonderful soul; A
woman wheels an incredibly large cart through the streets of Hanoi. Next Page, Top: A village
elder in a remote mountain town in Mali. He is a member of the Dogon people, cliff dwellers
in this remote part of Mali. Next Page, Bottom: The bustling market in the medina, Marrakech,
Morocco, draws thousands every night in search of food and entertainment.
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 11
© 2007 Kevin T Gilbert
12 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
to, not because he has to. He’s already
planning some exciting travel opportunities for 2015 so that Mylio users can work
with incredible photographers who don’t
do many photo trips. Mostly, though, he’s
excited to finally get the application in the
hands of photographers everywhere, so
they, too, can remember why it is they take
pictures in the first place.
“To me,” he says, “Mylio will change
© 2010 Kevin T Gilbert
© 2007 Kevin T Gilbert
white balance, you had to learn gelling
strobes, you had to get it right in the camera. We had to carry color temperature
meters all the time just to check the color
temperatures; do I put this gel on or that
gel on? The more I got into digital—I was
one of the first guys in Washington to get
into digital—I was like, ‘Wow, this white
balancing in the camera is awesome!’ I
could start setting the white balance different ways to get the desired effect I wanted
right there, just like looking at slides.”
Gilbert continues, “Some people enjoy
working on their photographs for hours
in post. They enjoy massaging the levels
and colors and working in layers, and I get
that, that’s fine. But it’s not for me. I know
that when I take a picture, for the most
part, it’s either good or bad. I don’t try to
save the bad ones; I just throw them out
and I highlight the pictures I really like. If
I missed it, I missed it. I’m looking at my
photographs now on iPads or monitors or
email. I got into photography to have fun,
and then Adobe came along and put the
work into it. I want the fun back.”
With Mylio, Gilbert is having fun again,
and again focusing on helping people.
When he takes pictures, it’s not on assignment, it’s for himself—because he wants
people’s lives across the board, from
pros to the average consumer who loves
photography but doesn’t know anything
about it. It’s a whole new way of looking
at pictures, interacting with pictures, and
having fun with the stuff that used to be
a mess. In two years, we’ve developed a
product that is, to me, very revolutionary.
It’s the greatest thing I’ve seen in photography since digital came around.”
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 13
Take Control
Of Your Photos!
All of your images accessible and editable on all of your
devices all of the time. Here’s how Mylio will change your life.
A
picture is worthless if you can’t find it. That’s
the simple premise behind Mylio, the nextgeneration photo system. Mylio offers a
powerful, seamless way to share images
across devices so that those images can be
easily displayed and edited, anytime, anyplace, even in
remote destinations.
According to Memory Evangelist and photographer
Kevin Gilbert, Mylio’s power lies in its versatility. It helps
longtime professionals with massive archives, as well as
moms who just want to keep track of their snapshots. It’s
good for organizing, editing and protecting image files—
even RAW—and it can stand alone or integrate with
applications like Aperture and Lightroom. It can use the
Internet and the cloud, or generate its own local network.
14 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
“Most companies would say, ‘We’re going to do a
syncing product and that’s it,’” Gilbert says. “Or, ‘We’re
going to do a browser and a visual organizer.’ ‘We’re
going to do a cloud-based push to your devices.’
‘We’re going to…’—you name it. If you look at what Mylio
does, it does all of that. If you want to edit your RAW files
on your phone, or star-rate them, we can do that. As long
as you can push stuff while you’re on WiFi, everything
is syncing automatically. The minute you walk into your
house or office, everything starts to sync—any changes
you make on one changes everything. So imagine you’re
in a cab star-rating your pictures on the iPhone and your
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is sitting there running Mylio,
everything you’ve changed on your phone is changed on
your machine and in Lightroom.”
1
Adding Images
To Mylio
After installing the Mylio app on any
number of devices—currently including any Mac or Windows computer, as
well as iPhones and iPads, and very
soon Android devices, too—users set
up the application to monitor various
sources of image files. In practice, this
may mean adding folders to a list—say,
the parent folder of an image library
(like the one that houses a Lightroom
catalog) or any number of subfolders,
if desired. A smartphone’s photo catalog can be included, as can outside
sources like Facebook and Flickr. Mylio
can handle databases of up to 250,000
images, and users can choose to
rename and reorganize the photos with
their introduction to Mylio’s database,
or maintain the existing file naming
and organization already established
outside of the application. As Gilbert
says, once you get rolling, it takes care
of itself. “You set it up once and you’re
done with it,” he says. “So if you’ve
got 100,000 pictures in your collection,
let’s say, and you’ve got a computer
at home, a computer at the office, an
external hard drive backing things up,
a 128 GB iPad and a 128 GB iPhone
6, you can basically have 100,000
photos on every one of those devices
searchable, with the ability to look, the
ability to rate and crop and move them
between albums.”
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 15
Jump
2
The Images Come First
The graphical user interface really does put
your photos visually at your fingertips, rather than
text-based lists. Better still, whether Mylio is in use
on a laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone, the user
experience is identical thanks to a seamless interface that remains consistent across touch-screen
devices and traditional computers. One of the ways
in which Mylio’s interface remains comfortable and
convenient, whether you’re working with one finger
on an iPhone or a mouse and widescreen computer
monitor, is the way in which images are viewed
and folders previewed. Any folder of image files is
displayed with a top image, and the flutter feature
allows a finger flick or mouse wheel to instantly
page-turn through the folder to see what images are
inside, without ever leaving the parent folder. In the
folder view, images that are not organized into their
own subfolders are indicated in a sort of “stack” that
acknowledges, visually, that these images have not
yet been filed in their own folder. It’s little touches
like this that make working with Mylio easier for
visual thinkers like photographers.
16 Outdoor Photographer +outdoorphotographer.com
Mylio
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 17
3
Managing Metadata
Once added, folders full of image
files aren’t simply dumped into a massive
Mylio pool (although they can be viewed
that way). Any existing file structure is
retained and propagated across devices
or users can create their own. To make
the application truly smart, however,
Mylio’s developers also made it very
easy to search for images by keyword, or
browse a catalog by date, location or any
number of other intuitive methods. Don’t
forget, because Mylio stores all metadata
in an XML file, not only is keywording,
sorting and rating efficient within Mylio,
but those star ratings, flags, keywords
and other metadata are easily shared
with other RAW organizing software like
Lightroom and Aperture. Combined with
Mylio’s ability to simply monitor existing
folders, photographers need not abandon their current workflow—even when
it’s reliant on outside applications.
4
Calendar, People,
Location
18 Outdoor Photographer +outdoorphotographer.com
Mylio
File away your images by subject,
and Mylio will permit you to also
cross-reference them by date—a
simple, but powerful feature. The
Calendar view makes Mylio an even
more robust and intuitive organizational tool, and an easy and fun way
to rediscover files you’d forgotten
about, or to find files that had gone
missing. Along with searching the
database by date—drilling down
from decades to years, months,
weeks and days—photographers
can easily browse images by
people who have been tagged,
or by the location if they’ve been
geotagged. This cross-referencing
capability is particularly useful for
traveling photographers who may
want to quickly identify all of their
images from, say, the Eastern
Sierra, or from a trip made in the
summer of 2010.
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 19
6
Raw Image Editing
5
Lightbox
Users aren’t restricted to existing folders, or to Mylio’s comprehensive
Calendar, People or Location views. Images can be sorted, new folders created
and organized, and all those changes replicated instantly across devices. Mylio’s
Lightbox makes such reorganization simple as images can be moved drag-anddrop style to a virtual lightbox before being distributed to their newly organized
destinations. For any photographer familiar with sorting 4x5 transparencies or
35mm slides on an actual lightbox, the intuitive process makes perfect sense.
20 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
Within the Adjustment panel of
Mylio (activated by clicking the pen
icon atop the Details panel), users can
edit preview JPEGs and original RAW
files. (Thumbnail JPEGs, however,
are not editable.) Anyone familiar with
the sliders of Lightroom, Aperture or
Adobe Camera Raw will no doubt be
comfortable with the editing controls
of Mylio’s Adjustment Panel, which
includes a histogram (complete with
shadow and highlight clipping indicators), crop, redeye, auto enhance and
before/after comparison tools, as well
as color temperature sliders and tone
controls for everything from exposure
and contrast to highlights/shadows
and clarity. There are also color treatment controls for adjusting vibrance
and saturation, and even converting
to black-and-white and fine-tuning
the red/green/blue mix. A particularly
handy feature is the ability to easily
copy and paste adjustment settings
from one image to the next. And
because of the way the Adjustment
panel is laid out, it works the same
way on every device.
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 21
8
Mylio Device Network
The image protection Mylio brings
to the table is particularly appealing for
traveling photographers who relish the
ability to make duplicate files even in
the field. The Mylio Device Network, an
ad hoc wireless network that bypasses
the need for an actual WiFi Internet
connection to communicate between
devices, is a traveling photographer’s
best friend. Kevin Gilbert says it’s a
powerful way to bring connectivity even
to remote locations. “The idea that you
could be in a Jeep® in Kenya downloading your RAW files to your computer
and having them automatically back
up on your iPad and your iPhone,”
Gilbert explains, “and editing on those
devices in the middle of nowhere, and
the only issue you’re worried about is
power (maybe you’re plugged into the
cigarette lighter of a Land Rover® on
a power strip so at least you’ve got
devices charging), but the ability that
7
Backup Protection
Mylio uses the drives in various devices (phones, tablets and
computers) to make copies of all
the images you import into Mylio.
Your devices become part of a
smart backup plan by default. This
“side effect” is, in fact, one of the
most powerful features of Mylio.
Embracing the “3-3-2” method
of data backup—which suggests
creating three copies of every file,
distributed across three devices,
which are spread out in at least
two locations—Mylio’s Sync panel
uses a simple and straightforward
badge system to indicate how well
protected a given image file or
folder may be. If it’s not yet synced
across your network, you’ll know.
And once it has, illuminated badges
provide instant backup status
for peace of mind without any
extra work.
22 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
you’re editing in the field in real time,
and as soon as you get back to a hotel
or back to camp or someplace where
they’ve got some kind of WiFi, you can
start pushing pictures automatically to
a device in another part of the world,
like your office, or backing up in the
cloud if that’s what you choose—the
freedom! Most people edit on the plane
coming home or they wait until they get
home. With Mylio, you can have all your
pictures with you, including your last
five trips to Africa for comparison if you
want. The happy wanderer standing on
the Maasai Mara, with his phone and
his iPad sitting in his bag, but they’re
automatically connected and backing up and organizing—it’s incredibly
powerful. Of all the features in Mylio,
this idea of travel connectivity and this
instant ad hoc network so you don’t
have to worry about WiFi or the cloud
to connect devices together, is, to me,
an incredibly powerful feature.”
10
Mylio Cloud Drive
9
Travel Mode
According to Gilbert, there’s yet another impressive feature for
photographers on the go: Mylio’s Travel Mode. “It says, oh, these
are the devices you have in your system,” Gilbert says, “and you
can check the devices you have with you—like I’ve got my 128 GB
iPad and my phone. What happens is, when you flip that switch
and you’re not within a WiFi area, you’re in the middle of Yosemite, it says all those policies you set up about originals here and
previews there, it overrides those and says, wow, you’ve got 100
gigs available on that iPhone and 65 gigs available on that iPad. We
will automatically start pushing originals to the free memory space
on those devices as a second backup. And as soon as you walk
back into WiFi at your home or office or wherever, where your Mylio
network can connect devices to each other, it will pull those off
once it sees that there’s another set made on another device, and
clear your phone and clear your iPad. Automatically. You don’t have
to do a thing. We’ve said what kind of issues do photographers
have when they go out and shoot on location? You can carry a 2 TB
drive with you and do all that, but you know what, you’re probably
going to have your iPad and you’re probably going to have your
phone. And if you’ve got 100 gigs available on your phone, why not
use that to back up your RAW files? Memory is memory.”
Further flexibility and backup
protection may be had via Mylio’s Cloud
Drive, which is an option with every Mylio
subscription. It works like any other device on the network with respect to synchronization, and it simply offers another
way to store photos for access on the go
or for an added layer of backup protection. Once activated, the Mylio Cloud
Drive simply appears in the Synchronization panel just like every other device on
the network, and it provides yet another
layer of off-site storage and protection.
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 23
What Makes
Go
This “too good to be true” photo software
works in smart, innovative ways
W
hen you first hear
about a new technology that promises to
instantly synchronize all
of your digital photos
across all of your devices—from laptop
to tablet, smartphone to desktop computer—you may automatically react with
serious skepticism. For years now, photographers have been promised that the
24 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
cloud would free them from the limitations
of physical disk drives and the constant
challenges of ever-changing connectivity, not to mention the cumbersome and
sometimes confusing process of protecting their digital data—those precious digital image files. But as anyone who has ever
tried uploading gigabytes of RAW image
files over the Internet has learned, the
cloud isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The cloud may offer lots of storage
space at low cost, but the avenues in and
out are jammed. When it comes to shuttling high-resolution image files back and
forth to cloud servers, many of which may
be located across the state or across the
country, the sheer weight of high-resolution RAW image files makes uploading
impractical when compared to moving
files locally between devices. The cloud
simply doesn’t work for high-speed access
to large quantities of large image files.
This is the fundamental challenge that
Mylio has overcome. It’s not that the developers have figured out a faster way to
send image files to and from the cloud;
they’ve figured out how to bypass it completely. Mylio doesn’t synchronize image files across devices by sending them
across the Internet; it does it by creating
a hyperlocal peer-to-peer mesh network.
That “mesh network” means there’s no
central hub, no single “master device”
that distributes image files to satellite devices. Instead of a hub-and-spoke system
like Dropbox, Mylio makes each device an
autonomous equal. The Mylio app is exactly the same on every device. This method of replication is fast—way faster than
transmitting files to the cloud—because
instead of relying on an Internet connection, Mylio only needs a wireless network
to establish connections between devices
to share data.
Think of it like this: With Mylio installed
on your smartphone and your tablet,
when you walk into a space with an accessible wireless network—whether that’s
a coffee shop with free WiFi or your own
living room—any new image files from
your smartphone are replicated on your
tablet, and vice versa. To be clear, they’re
not relying on the network’s connection
to the wide world of the Internet; they’re
simply using the WiFi to connect each de-
vice directly to the other. This makes data
transfer fast. A typical high-speed Internet
connection might yield 20 Mbps transfer
rates, and while the specifics of every connection are different, Mylio can move data
across a local 1 Gbps network 50 times
faster than that.
“Let’s say you use a modern camera,”
says Deon Brewis, software engineer at
Mylio, “like a Nikon D800. And let’s say
you shoot 600 RAW photos in a day. You’ll
end up having around 45 GB of content.
You should be able to ingest this from a
high-speed flash drive and replicate to
a second laptop in Mylio on a wireless
network in around 6 hours. On the average U.S. Internet connection (3.7 Mbps,
according to Google), this would take 30
hours. And that assumes you can actually
have a 3.7 Mbps uplink. In a typical hotel
or cellular network, you are more likely to
encounter upload speeds of 1 Mbps at
most. So that now means your 600-picture
photo shoot takes five days to upload.
And, if you’re on cellular, even a generous
10 GB monthly cellular data cap will be
blown after the first 130 photos.”
Mylio is also exceptionally fast because
Outdoor Photographer + Mylio 25
it uses the processing power of the GPU
(the graphics processing unit) to speed
up editing and browsing, rather than relying solely on the CPU. Fast is great, but
the application isn’t just great because it’s
fast. The intuitive interface is also identical across devices. On the computer,
smartphone and tablet, users will have
the same experience with the same controls. Building an app that works equally
well on a touch-screen iOS device and a
mouse-pointing computer system is a serious challenge, and it’s a testament to the
developers at Mylio that they’ve done it
so well.
So how does Mylio know which image files you want to be accessible across
your devices? Simple: It monitors the
folders you tell it to keep an eye on. This
means you don’t have to abandon your
existing importing and organizing system,
whether it’s based on
Lightroom, iPhoto or
something else entirely.
Lightroom users, for
instance, might simply
set up Mylio to monitor
the folder containing
their Lightroom catalog, and as new image
files are imported, they
instantly begin replicating across devices via
Mylio. The same holds
true for images shot
with a smartphone, or
uploaded to Facebook,
or that come from an
unlimited number of
sources and appear in
any number of places.
Just set up Mylio to monitor those places,
and when photos appear, they replicate.
To protect your original images with
Mylio, simply set a folder’s preferences to
synchronize original files, or better still,
simply select specific images—favorites,
perhaps—and allow those to replicate as
RAW files across devices. You can choose
to sync originals to any device or folder,
which allows you to have backup copies of your photos. Or you can sync previews that are fully editable, while being
some 30x smaller than the original image
(compared to the RAW files). This lets
you keep an editable copy of your photo
library on a device with limited storage
such as an iPhone or iPad. Mylio is simple
enough to allow soccer dads to organize
their snapshots, and powerful enough to
26 Outdoor Photographer + Mylio
enable serious landscape photographers
to back up the most valuable RAW images
in their portfolios.
The ability to protect your photos, as
well as to show them on any of your devices, would make Mylio enough for most
photographers. But it’s the inclusion of
a third powerful tool that makes the app
even more valuable. Mylio gives photographers the ability to adjust their images
on any device. The editing controls, as
well as the types of adjustments that are
possible, should be familiar to any user of
Lightroom, Aperture or really any RAW
image-editing application. Changes such
as white balance and color correction,
sharpness, exposure, cropping and more
are all available in every Mylio install. Much
the way it happens with typical RAW imageediting programs, these changes are all
nondestructive and don’t affect the original
image files. That means edits are just changes to metadata. Metadata files are just little
text files, so they can be transmitted nearly
instantly across Mylio’s mesh network to
update instantly on every other device.
Better still, Mylio doesn’t force photographers to forsake existing workflows.
A Lightroom user, for instance, can set up
Lightroom to store image edits in XML
sidecar files. This is exactly how Mylio
works, and it means that all of those image edits, whether made in Mylio or
Lightroom, are shared between applications. Even more, star ratings and flags,
as well as keywords and descriptions, are
also seamlessly shared in and out of each
program. Mylio certainly can replace existing RAW organization and editing applications, but it was built to play nice with
that software, as well. The user experience
is more important than requiring users to
abandon what works for them, and that
philosophy makes the software infinitely
more useful.
Perhaps the most unique bit of technology behind Mylio’s ingenious functionality
is the Mylio Device Network. This simple
toggle switch allows users to create an ad
hoc network even when no outside WiFi is
available. (This setting is technically available in every modern laptop computer,
whether Mac or Windows, but it’s a real
bear for non-computer programmers to
figure out.) With the flip of a switch, the
ad hoc network uses a notebook’s built-in
wireless capability to establish a private
network and communicate with other devices—even when the user is on top of a
mountain or on an African safari with no
wireless Internet for miles. For a traveling
photographer making
instant backups, this
is invaluable. Turn on
Mylio’s Travel Mode,
and not only will the
application establish
a private network, it
will also override default image syncing
settings to send original RAW files across
the network, backing
up images as soon as
they’re downloaded,
by default. When the
traveling
photographer makes it back
to civilization and an
active WiFi network,
once Mylio detects
that a duplicate of the files is created elsewhere, it reverts to its normal mode and
clears the RAW files automatically to free
up space on the devices.
Though there are limitations to a
cloud-based image-file storage system,
there are also benefits—namely, the
aforementioned ubiquity of inexpensive
storage. To that end, Mylio users are also
afforded access to their own Mylio Cloud
Drive. For a small fee, space on a cloud
server is available to add another dimension of backup protection. The cloud drive
is treated just like any other device on a
user’s network, even though it lives on a
cloud server far away. It won’t be as fast as
Mylio’s local peer-to-peer mesh network,
but it’s another option for added storage
and protection.