Photosmith 2 Getting Closer, Losing GoFlex Temporarily

The developers of Photosmith 2, which I feature heavily in Chapter 3 of the book, can see the light at the end of the tunnel. In a blog post today, they reveal that Photosmith has reached Final Candidate status and will soon be submitted to the App Store.

Software development is hard work, and Photosmith is a deep app. So it’s disappointing but not surprising that one cool feature won’t be available at launch: backing up photos to a Seagate GoFlex Satellite drive. The feature works from the Photosmith side (I’ve gotten it to work in an earlier beta), but a bug was discovered in the drive’s firmware that compromised the data integrity—and if a backup isn’t reliable, then it’s not really a backup, is it? It’s a really great feature, and I’m looking forward to Seagate squashing the bug and seeing the feature return to Photosmith.

Category: hardware, Organizing Photos

Published by Jeff Carlson

Author, photographer, and late-nighter Jeff Carlson writes for outlets such as Popular Photography, DPReview, Creative Pro, and others, and is a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Take Control of Your Digital Photos; The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Apple Watch, and Take Control of Your Digital Storage, among many other titles. View all posts by Jeff Carlson

Ricky Tan August 12, 2012 at 11:48 pm

I read your book, bought the go flex drive and then finally last week decided to purchase photo smith for backup purpose . Now it doesn’t come with this feature, It’s quite a disappointment . How to get refund for photosmith?

Reply
1. jefflcarlson August 13, 2012 at 12:31 am
  
  Hi Ricky,
  
  Go to photosmithapp.com, where you’ll find the contact info for the developers. I’m sure they can help. Unfortunately, it sounds like the problem is in the GoFlex firmware, which is why the devs pulled the feature at the last minute. I got it to work when I was using early pre-release versions as I wrote the book, but of course that didn’t account for all situations. Better to hold the feature than risk your data.
  
  Jeff
  
  Reply
John Pooler August 30, 2012 at 6:38 pm

I too have the same problem; I bought the Goflex Sat right as Photosmith 2 was released; I would really like to use this feature; the developers will give no hint as to resolution of this problem and it has been 4 months thus far; any kind of realistic estimate would be appreciated.

Reply
1. jefflcarlson August 30, 2012 at 9:57 pm
  
  The developers wrote about this earlier this month. It sounds like a fix needs to come from the Seagate side. See:
  
  http://www.photosmithapp.com/index.php/2012/08/breaking-the-coding-of-silence/
  
  Reply