REVIEWED: MiMedia personal cloud
Great for backing-up photos and videos on the go, and for accessing your entire music collection while traveling, this cloud app is a must-have for long trips
You take all of your travel photos on your phone. We all do. At least, we all do until about the third week of a trip, when your phone is full and you spend precious travel time sitting down with your smartphone to delete photos in a desperate attempt to free-up some room. Cue MiMedia, a photo-centric cloud that you can push everything to. And we mean EVERYTHING.
Media-savvy
Available on both iOS and Android devices, and working on desktop computers too, MiMedia lives in the shadows behind the mega-clouds out there, Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud. But while all of these focus on storing documents, MiMedia is focused on media. You can upload your entire music collection to MiMedia, for example, and have your phone spit every single photo you take into MiMedia. It will even fish for photos you’ve uploaded to Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr and the like. Now that’s comprehensive.
Social side
At some pint most of us have experimented with a platform for sharing photos with loved ones and friends on social media, but since when was Facebook private? MiMedia has a feature called MiDrive, which makes it possible to create a private social network on which to share photos, videos and even chat. However, what we liked best is that MiMedia allows you to choose exactly which albums to upload from – this is not a ‘warts ’n’ all’ approach, as per iCloud and Dropbox.
Costly cloud
Sign-up MiMedia and you get 10GB of capacity, which isn’t bad. However, if you’re struggling with the capacity on a smartphone, 10GB isn’t going to go very far. Not if your trip extends beyond a week in the sun. Is MiMedia expensive? It is – all cloud storage is – but the good news is that it’s at the forefront of the price-cuts of late. At the time of writing, MiMedia, Apple and Dropbox all charge the same flat rate for a terabyte of cloud storage (US$10 per month). We’ve chosen to tell you about the terabyte prices because that is about what you need if you’re to approach the worry-free level of storage. Use anything less and MiMedia becomes ‘just one more app’ destined to be ignored.
What MiMedia cannot do
It’s also not possible to upload any files over 5GB in size, which may be an issue if you’re shooting video projects, and nor can MiMedia offers any photo editing. That’s a shame, but since it fishes for photos you post to Instagram, it’s perhaps no biggie.
Ultimate personal cloud?
Forget about your photos and just travel. That’s what we’re after when we’re looking for a personal cloud, and for the most part MiMedia delivers on that. ‘The personal cloud you always wanted’ is how MiMedia (10GB free, www.mimedia.com) advertises itself, and while is is more nuanced than that, a slick design and easy operation make it both better-looking, and easier to use, than either iCloud or Dropbox.