Cloud storage for photographers: the whole workflow, kept safe

A backup keeps a second copy of a file in case the first one dies. Useful, and not nothing, but it is a long way short of a working home. What a shooting studio actually reaches for through the week is different in kind:

• A place the selects land in from the editor, at full resolution, without a second upload.
• A way to settle the cullwithout a meeting — the team’s eyes on a set, honestly.
• A way to show a client the workthat doesn’t expose your whole library and doesn’t make them create an account.
• The notes coming back to the file, not scattered across email and expiring transfers.
• Getting an old shoot back by what was in it, not by a filename typed in haste two years ago.

A pure backup service does none of that. It sits there, dutiful and silent, while you keep doing the delivery and the chasing by hand.

Large files are the default in this work, not the exception, so the plumbing has to assume them. In Spaces, uploads are chunked and resumable — a multi-gigabyte shoot survives a flaky connection without starting over, and it uploads in the background while you carry on working, even on another page. You can drag a whole nested folder tree straight in from the desktop and the structure is kept exactly as it was. And RAW files are first-class citizens rather than tolerated guests: a CR3 or an ARW previews in the browser like any JPEG, instead of sitting as a blank icon nobody can identify.

The bit that matters most to a photographer, though, is that the work rarely begins in a browser. It begins at the end of a long cull, in Lightroom or Capture One, when the selects are finally chosen. Connect either editor once, and Export in Lightroom Classic — or Publish in Capture One — sends your selects at full resolution straight into an Area, subfolders and all, with nothing to drag and nothing to re-upload. By the time the export dialog has closed, the shoot is already in Spaces, catalogued and ready to share.

On the desktop, the native Mac app puts the whole library in Finder, the way a drive used to, except it doesn’t fill the disk: files are there to open the instant you want them and quietly absent until then, so a laptop can hold a terabyte of work without holding a terabyte of bytes. And if the archive currently lives in Dropbox, the importer copies it across cloud-to-cloud, folder by folder — nothing downloads to your machine on the way.

Before anything is delivered, somebody has to choose — and a cull by committee is where an afternoon goes to die. Spaces has a quieter way: drop a set in front of the team and everyone votes on their own screen, anonymously, so the junior’s eye counts the same as the founder’s and nobody is voting for the frame the room already likes. Close the round and the winners are tagged, ready to become the delivery.

A share is a clean, branded page a client can browse and download from with a link — no login, no sign-up, none of the constant prompts to make an account that you can’t stand either. Just the work and a Download button. Because you’re sharing a link rather than opening your whole library, the client sees what they were sent and nothing else; permissions follow how studios actually delegate, so freelancers see what they were brought on for and an Area can be sealed to its owner alone when the work isn’t for the room. And when the work is confidential — the campaign under embargo, the faces that aren’t public yet — the share can be locked to named people who prove their email once; we wrote up how that works on the client-portal page.

The link keeps its own record: how many times it was opened, whether the files were taken, and a gentle nudge the first time someone reaches it — so the worst feeling in the work, the silence of not knowing whether the email even arrived, is answered before you have to ask.

When it’s working, the shape of the day changes. The selects go from Lightroom into an Area and you send the link before the kettle boils; the client draws a pin straight onto the frame they mean; you fix it, mark it resolved, and there’s one place to look for where the sign-off got to — no thread to reconstruct, no folder to hunt, no wondering whether they saw it.

Every frame a camera makes carries a small cargo of fact — when it was taken, the lens and the settings, and more often than not exactly where in the world the shutter fell — and Spaces reads all of it. It understands what the picture shows, too, so the frame itself is searchable even when nobody ever tagged it. You search the way a photographer actually thinks: wide shots from the coast near St Ives, portraits from the summer before last, a place and a season resolved into the handful of images that fall inside both. It reads what’s inside documents as well, so the contract that mentions the agreed day rate turns up by its contents rather than a filename nobody remembers. We wrote more about how that works in teaching the search to see.

The wedge for a small shooting team is the pricing model, not a single number. Per-seat tools charge for every person who touches the account, so adding a second shooter, an editor and a freelancer for a fortnight all push the bill up. Spaces charges for storage only — invite as many teammates as you like at no extra cost. On the pricing page the tiers run from a solo studio finding its feet up to heavy multi-team volume, and moving up a tier when you need the room is the only thing that ever changes.

Your files sit on Backblaze B2, in a data centre in Amsterdam — in the EU, where a European studio’s work belongs, and where it stays. Nothing you upload ever trains a model, ours or anyone else’s; the AI that powers search runs on open models we operate ourselves, in Europe, and its output serves only your own search. Anything deleted — file or folder, on the web or the Mac — is recoverable from a per-workspace trash for thirty days, and if you ever leave, your files export cleanly, in formats other tools can read. The full detail is on the security page.