Your last few sentences are exactly why I wrote this post. I want everything stored in the cloud but ALSO have a decent way of browsing them locally. The idea is to just store tiny jpegs (you can set how big they are, but something like 500-1000px wide likely, just for you to get a sense of which photo this is and allow you to remotely delete, retreive, etc)
This is basically what I need for Office Snapshots. I keep all of the original photos submitted so that I can use the full images in the future (if need be) and would love to store them somewhere other than my laptop.
If I could browse locally with smaller images (as you describe) like I currently do with Picasa (galleries, tags, etc) and then have the ability to download the original images when and if I need them, I'd be in heaven.
All of this would be trivial for Apple (or someone creating a plugin) to implement. Apple's flagship photography software aperture already allows the user to work with previews while keeping the mega-huge raws on an external device. Instead of an external device, Aperture should just allow the user to point to a service in the cloud.
Of course, Apple's iCloud is very little like an actual usable cloud for most pro users.
Exactly. What I really want is something that Aperture is aware of. I want to be able to click "Archive" with a Project and have the local copy deleted. Yet, it's still in the catalog/library offsite, so if I want it, I click "Retrieve" and can pull down the set and start fudging the RAWs. Or, if I want to work on just one, I can browse through and work on it as well.
