Hands-on: Loom makes it increasingly tempting to ditch iPhoto and Photo Stream
There are many services bidding for the chance to store and share our digital memories. Apple’s Photo Stream, Flickr, Instagram, 500px, Everpix, and many more all pitch various ways to hold and showcase your photographs, but all do so slightly differently—and not always successfully.
The new Loom service aims to do many of the same things as the above-named platforms, but it has an edge: excellent apps, a clean design, and a speedy backend. I took it for a spin over the past few days, uploading photographs and video from all manner of sources. Here’s how Loom shakes out.
The look and feel
From the start, it’s easy to see why Loom is drawing comparisons to Dropbox. It shares the same clean, crisp design that the cloud storage giant is known for, though without some of its more-cartoonish flair. Currently, the photo service offers three ways to upload (and then view) your images: on an iOS device, via the Web, or on your Mac. Activate Loom on your computer, and you get another Dropbox-like feature: local copies of all your photographs and video, synced to a designated Loom folder on your hard drive. Also similar is Loom’s storage limit: Users get 5GB free, and can pay $4 a month to upgrade to 50GB or $10 a month for 500GB.
Loom offers larger storage options if you plan to keep more photos on its service.
If you have the space, however, the photo service can sync with an unlimited number of iOS devices and computers. It’s currently missing sync support for some of the big services and programs, like iPhoto, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr; that said, I was told by Loom founder Jan Senderek that such a feature is currently in the works and should arrive in the coming months.
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