You might want to buy your dad and/or mom one of these. Your dad deserves a gift anytime. Mother’s Day is around the corner.
You might want to buy one for yourselves for no other reason than to avoid the hassle of photo space management on your phone. It supports three separate accounts.
Do not think of it as a digital picture frame. That is just a minor side feature.
The main feature is that it’s a 2 TB hard drive photo and video aggregator. It automatically collects all photos and videos from all your devices, completely in the background.
The only thing stored on the cloud is a digital index to them.
It allows you to view any and all of your photos from any device.
Best of all, it leaves behind on your iPhone or android phone or any compatible device all the same photos optimized in size for the screen size of the device. The space required to leave the optimized photos behind is minimal.
It places all the photos in chronological order automatically plus it allows you to access them via a tag and find system.
Seagate has been upgrading the software with more features, indicating (to me) they are not abandoning the product.
Amazon has a lot of Comments. Many of them are from people who did not understand the device. If you go to the manufacture’s website it explains that it uses extremely small amounts of data whenever it accesses the Internet–NONE IF you turn off cellular data.
Also, some people find that there would be no backup so that if it failed you would lose all your photos and videos. Not true. All you have to do is backup to another connected or wireless hard drive or to the cloud.
Although there is a lot of misinformation in the Comments section of the Amazon.com offering webpage, there is also a lot of good information.
This device allows you to continuously take as many photos and videos as you like without endangering the capacity of your phone. And yet, it’s still allows you to see the videos and photos on your phone. Seamlessly.
Well worth the 115 bucks. Best price I saw for the 2 TB model was $250.
It is a NEW, not refurbished. I assume they have a new model in the works, possibly with USB 3.0, larger screen, or a SSD (although now that I think about it a SSD in that size is unlikely).
Given that it works in the background wirelessly I cannot imagine why the USB would be important. Possibly for those people who download their photos to USB while on vacation and then want to upload them directly? Simple solution: End run by downloading to desktop or tablet and having them automatically copied to the Lyve HD.
It comes with a one-year Seagate warranty.
Oh, and by the way. Vizio has an app for it. Plus you can view photos from it wirelessly via wifi on almost any Wi-Fi enabled TV.
Did I mention it supports three separate accounts?
Oh, and one more thing. You can also add a time display to the screen of the Digital picture frame.
MUST READ:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/007622en?language=en_US
BUY IT HERE:
Seagate Lyve Home 2TB Photo & Video Manager - $99.99 + $5 standard shipping
CNet review:
The preceeding sure makes me suspect someone is getting a cut for each one sold. Reputable sellers on ebay have it new for same price and free shipping.
So what does this do if I an using -gasp!- a real digital camera?
This would be perfect for me if it had PLEX installed, or it worked with my Roku. I would use it as a super simple media server for my movies and music. From what I can see, it is not going to work that way…maybe if you have a Vizio TV, but probably not. Correct me if I am wrong…
The 2 biggest modern photo storage providers for mobile phones already allow UNLIMITED storage on their servers. You don’t need to store ANY photos on your device anymore.
Hah, well…ok, sure. By that logic everything is safe because all you have to do is …um, back it up again.
The beauty of real “Cloud” storage is not having a SINGLE point of failure. So, I guess you could by 2 of these and get a limited variation of that…and maybe a backup for the backup…
Anyhow, it seems like a neat, niche product without all the silliness.
To be fair, data backup specialists recommend having at least 1 local back up (such as this) and 1 remote…such as if the house were to burn down. And although I DO trust cloud back ups, if something were to happen to their servers (not terribly likely, but still possible) you would be up a certain creek without a paddle.
I don’t have the $ to set up local back-up currently, but this would be a reasonable idea for many less tech savvy people. Currently I am only using cloud services, but if WOOT wants to put some NAS with raid drives on the site, I’d appreciate it!