It still requires manual labor. We used to have external usb drives per computer, with a script in udev that started rsync as soon as you plug in a usb drive with a certain id. So essentially, plug in a usb drive to take backups. Plug it out when it says it's done. But even that was too much to remember to do.

We've moved to doing nightly rsyncs. Laptops rtc_wake at 4am, but of course suspend again before the backup starts if they're not plugged in. Backups are done over the local network from the "home server" to a big encrypted btrfs usb drive (so we get snapshots). And keep the offsite copy freshly rotated by visiting my parents :)

But we still some times forget to plug in the laptop at night.

Speaking from experience - This isn't nearly as foolproof as one would hope. I used that process to back up my music collection in the early days and have discovered that optical media/drives aren't nearly as durable or compatible as one would hope. Years later, I'd found a large portion of my collection was unreadable by all but the original drive that wrote them. And several of the disks have suffered aging failures.

From our research at Everpix, most photos taken today are on mobile phones, and most people very rarely connect their phones to their computers. So you really need a solution that starts on the mobile device, and cloud services work the best for that.

Yep. My old phone used to plug in on USB, show up as a disk, I can use standard tools to copy the pics and vids. New phone, no of course not. Progress. Feh.

Clue: Everyone is not itunes compliant! Grr!

I usually select and dump my photos/videos to a shared drive on my laptop over wifi, so cloud is still an ancillary feature for me. After all, what if I'm in an area with no reception? I can still use Bluetooth to transfer files.

Edit: Here's what I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mori.andro...

Thanks, I'll have to try that out. So far, I haven't had great experiences accessing my Android devices from my Linux laptop.

That said, your workflow isn't representative of most users, if only for the fact that most users don't really have a workflow per se, they just do whatever's easiest at the moment. People have photos all over the place (mobile devices, multiple computers/drives, social networks, email, etc.), and Everpix pulls them together into one unified collection.