ibi - The Smart Photo Manager with Wi-Fi - White

Canon ibi Unboxing: The box tries to tell a story of what this product is. This is a good because walking past the device in an aisle of a store, I would have no idea what this thing is unless there was a lot of marketing or I did some research. There are lots of photos with bold letters trying to explain its purpose. The box has the device inside which is rather small, an AC adaptor and getting started guide. My first impressions of the device were 1: that it is very small, and 2: there is a lot of wasted space in the plastic housing. There are vents in the top and bottom, looking into it there is a 2.5” laptop hard drive inside with a tiny mainboard which also interfaces to the power plug and USB plug. The device looks nice externally but I find it confusing why they decided to make a cylinder with a tiny hard drive inside when it could have taken many more space saving shapes to match the hard drive. I am assuming it is mainly so it looks nice but who knows. It just looks like a lot of wasted space to me. The build of the body is well put together. The plastic feels cheap but it feels sturdy. I do not see any points to open it up with screws (might be hidden under rubber feet) or they glued it shut in the middle, either way it wont fall apart. The vents on the top and bottom would not block any fluid so do not spill anything on it. Set up: It is very easy. Download the app to your phone, create an account and let the app do the rest. Import your photos from your phone with auto import and I recommend turning on cloud services. I usually keep my photos backed up on a portable hard drive so I plugged it into the app and imported everything which brings me on to practical use… Use: Importing is slow, especially from another hard drive. As stated earlier, the Ibi uses a 2.5” laptop hard drive inside and I am pretty sure it is 5400 rpm. I was unimpressed by this decision from the company as they could have used a higher quality hard drive. An SSD would have been great but it is 2TB which would be costly so I understand the use of a mechanical hard drive. I would have preferred a higher end laptop hard drive or a larger product to accommodate a 7200 RPM desktop hard drive. It took quite a few hours to transfer 200GB of photos over. I expected a decent amount of time to transfer that much, but it was painfully slow compared to moving it between hard drives on a computer. Luckily this is not an everyday occurrence and is likely to only be done during setup and a few occasions. The app is pretty good! You can essentially “partition” the users that are part of your household as they upload photos and by default it will only show the photos of that user regardless of how they uploaded it. But, if you wish you can display “all” photos which will merge the libraries. One big feature is the “inner circle” which allows you to invite anyone important to you to see only photos that you want to share. They other users do not need to have an ibi or even have access to your ibi to see these, they only need to download the app and make an account. It is great for sharing between family. In the past I would use shared photos in Google Photos or family libraries in Amazon Photos but the feature is ibi gives you l a lot more control of what you want to get out to your friend so I highly recommend it. I would like to see the ability to set up different “circles” of friends so I can share things to my household and maybe have a different group for my larger family. The app takes security seriously and allows you to use a PIN and biometrics to log in. I highly recommend you go to the website and download the desktop app. This is the best way to use the device as it creates more seamless upload ability from your desktop if uploading from an SD card and allows you to access all files via the computer’s file explorer. Dislikes: I am not sure if the device is still indexing but after a week, it is still slow to pull up a date like “March 2019” and see all the photos from that time frame. It works but you have to wait a long time for it to show you the thumb nails. It could be the app too but the website seems be a little faster with accessing items on the hard drive. Each time I log in I see different photos on top. I am not sure if this is a bug or part of the slow indexing process. I love how you can integrate photos so many different sources… but… it seems like this results in a lot of duplicates if you import originals and add cloud sources and I haven’t quite figured out how to best organize it. If you are starting fresh with photography, this might be great but if you have a complication photo library from multiple sources, the device might not be ready for prime time yet as cloud services do a much better job of filtering duplicates. The device is loud! I put it next to my TV since it looks pretty cool and high tech but at night time if I am on my computer or doing homework in a quiet room, I can hear the hard drive whirring! Put it somewhere where you might not hear it. Moving it around while it is energized cause some strange whirring sounds so I wonder if this would survive a bump or fall while powered on. It does not seem like a hard drive with any kind of shock protection. Summary: The device is cool and has a lot of potential, but… it has a lot of issues that are not worked out yet. I think most of these issues can be hammered out in software on the server side or in the app but until they are fixed, it will feel somewhat half baked. If the library organization issues and speed were fixed, I would have zero issues the hard drive noise and hard drive speed, but this is not the case. I say buy it, but wait a few months until it is more polished.

Initial impression and unboxing: Wasn't sure what to expect from ibi. Looking at it, there's not a lot on the box to help you understand 100% what ibi is. The key missing word is 'storage'. That is essentially what this is, is a 2TB storage device for your photos, without the need to hook up to a PC to archive photos from your phone or social media networks. ibi is made by SanDisk, so it is a trusted brand in the marketplace for what it's going to be doing (data storage) but they are trying to brand it as something new. The SanDisk logo is small and on the back! There is a small label on the outside of the box, on the back that says 'Device capacity 2TB'.That to me is important info, as the box otherwise has a photo of a family, a white cylinder, a phone, and a checklist of features. So, that aside, opening up the box (which is actually nicely designed, just lacking in pertinent information), gives a higher end feel, matching the $180 price point. Inside, you are faced with a little simple get started card, and then eggcrate packaging. While this is obviously eco friendly, it starts to diminish the 'quality' feel of the product. Next up is the ibi cylinder itself. It's very light, well vented, with matte and shiny white finish. It manages to look classy, but feel cheap at the same time. Inside, through the vents, there's not a lot to it at all... and being able to see so much, makes you wonder again about the price point. Underneath ibi is a nice, simple, and unobtrusive, white power supply. Setup: ibi was very easy to set up, plug it in, look for the blue light on the front, download the app using the QR code on the quick start guide that you took out of the top of the box, and then you are up and running, once paired to your network and logged in. When plugged in, with the hard drive not being SSD, you can hear the drive spinning, and there is some heat generated by it, hence the cylindrical shape and large vented area around the drive. I set up an ibi account and every time that I log in, I get a 'Hello' welcome screen, which is very Apple-esque. From there, you can manage your account, upload photos, setup files and folders and create albums. Using ibi: I set about creating an album for my car, directly downloaded from my phone. Selected about 25 photos and hit 'upload'. Didn't take all that long to import the photos to ibi. I then had the opportunity to set up a folder structure or an album, that made most sense to me, so I labeled it 'Camaro'. Selected all the photos to go in that album. Now... this is basically part of the 'sorting' dynamic in the app. On one tab, you see all of the photos uploaded to ibi, on the albums tab, you are just essentially narrowing down your search results. From there, in order to make the searching function work optimally, you have to go in and label every single photo with a name/description which is relevant to what you want to search for. While for 25 photos, this wasn't an issue, if you are importing 100's or 1000's of photos, that is a lot of time and effort to go through to make that happen. Also, the app is a little clunky in this department, requiring several steps for each photo to rename them. I ended up copy and pasting, and changing the end number to make it quicker/easier! Again, this is the nature of creating a usable searching structure, so I don't see a quick and easy way around it at all. So for a lot of people, that will leave you with a date search. That works well, the photos are imported with their original name from your phone, and the date metadata is captured, so you can search for photos chronologically. I was able to access my ibi remotely from work, and continue to rename and create albums from there. Adding more and more albums to my ibi, saving the albums by date of concerts, the search functionality worked well, and it was fairly quick to update the results. But without going in and renaming every single photo, I couldn't search specifically for an image I knew was there. Again, the nature of file structures, you can only search for the data that you put in. It isn't a smart app that can trawl through your images with facial recognition, or object dynamics. ibi also has what is called the 'Inner Circle' which allows you to partition the drive so that family members can upload their photos to their own area of the drive. As part of the inner circle, you can also share your photos with the ones you love most, sharing the content of individual photos or albums to your friends and family, securely. Overall, it is an unobtrusive, image storage device, that can sit anywhere in your house, not just connected to a PC. That is a nice option, so it can be somewhat hidden away and not left out on a desk next to your computer. The 2TB size will hold approximately 500,000 photos or 200 hours of video. Not sure at this time if there will be larger capacities available. ibi works. It does what it says it will do, but the functionality of the app is a little clunky, and it does take a little while to transfer files over.

The IbI storage file is a place where you can store all your family photos and most sensitive documents with piece of mind. The big question here is does its functionality really serve a purpose for are most prized possessions? I'll try to break down its basic functions and hopefully this will help to determine if this is the right fit for you. First off lets talk about what you can expect to receive and basic set up. Out of the box your going to get the main IbI unit which is basically a 2TB hard drive and power cord. The unit needs to have power at all times in order for it to be of any use. IbI provides a free easy to use app to help with set up. Once you create an account you can then go ahead and proceed to back up photos or files. With the that out of the way lets now dive in and talk about how this unit functions exactly. When i first got this unit i was actually kind of excited to see what it could do as i was looking for a safe reliable place to store my family photos of my kids. The biggest problem i have run in to the past was that i would store all my photos on my phones hard drive. This is a big problem as one day my phone crashed and took out my sd card with it. I had lost all my family photos that i did not back up. Well much to my disappointment this unit is basically one big stationary hard drive with no added security to help remedy this problem i have. What i mean by that is this unit will safely store all photos automatically from your phone, facebook, or cloud storage. The only problem is at least as of writing this review there is no fail safe to back your documents up to a separate cloud storage. What this breaks down to is you better hope that your IbI unit doesn't crash or if you have kids you better hope they do not spill anything on the unit or else there goes all your photos and documents with no way yet to retrieve them. Now if your the kind of person that doesn't trust cloud storage than this may be the right fit for you. I however want to protect all my memories from loss, seeing as how i can never get back those photos of my kids when they were young. Now lets talk about some of the features this unit has to offer. You can set it to automatically back up photos or documents. You can import files from a usb drive on to this unit and vice versa. You can also invite select members to join your account where you can choose to share with them select photos via a section called "inner circle." Now this feature is a cool concept as it allows you to share intimate family photos with only the people you want to and keeps them away from prying eyes of strangers on facebook. The one big problem i had with this feature is i felt it was a little too intrusive. What i mean by that is in order to invite someone to your circle that individual has to download the app (which i understand is a given) but they also need to sign up for an account and provide an email, password, and minor information. When i tried to invite family members to join so i could share photos i found that most were hesitant due to the fact that they did not want to give out their email address and sign up for an account only to view a few photos that i allowed them view. I honestly agreed with their hesitation as i would not want to do the same either. Once photos are stored they are time stamped and dated according to when you took the photos. IbI also provides there own photo service which allows you to customize your photos a bit by adding stickers, borders, contrast, etc. One thing i forget to mention is that you can also stream your saved photos and videos from your unit to a smart tv or Roku. Well that's pretty much it as of writing this review. Until they provided some added enhancements this unit is pretty much basic in all its functions. Even the app service is basic. Here's the bottom line. If your the kind of individual that finds cloud storage unsafe and makes you uncomfortable then this unit is perfect for you as it provides an alternate means of storage to your phone with ample storage. However if your similar to me and like a back up plan in case your unit fails than you may want to pass on this lack luster unit. Overall beside the fact that it provides 2tb of storage space this unit really is not that much different from storing your photos on a smartphone. As for me i think i would rather stick to my provided cloud storage rather than spend money on this unit. If this device would provide cloud storage as a optional service then i would be 100% sold. Pros: -Ample storage space -Ability to invite friends and family Cons: -No cloud storage -Too intrusive for guest -Must be powered all the time

I was searching for an easy way to share pictures and videos that included an option to share outside my LAN. I was very impressed with the capabilities this little device has along with the large amount of storage. This not only allows for sharing multimedia within my network, I can also share the link to others outside. Pros: Size Sharing both Inside/Outside LAN Multiple Account Setup Privacy between Accounts Accounts not have to be within LAN UI easy to Navigate 5GHz Band Direct USB Connection Cons: Start Up / Load Times Software Randomly Not Seeing device Limited Stream Options (Roku / Dropbox) :: Setup / Install :: The setup was very easy, once downloaded the ibi software, there was an easy walk through with connecting the device to the WLAN. Upon connection it provided a quick and easy way to back up all photo's and videos from the phone. The device uses the WLAN however is not enabled for sharing. The only way to communicate with the device is by app or using USB plug directly. :: Software :: The software allows for setting up individual accounts with privacy to prevent one account from seeing the others pictures and videos. You are able to share the pictures and videos by using the share option. You can share within the WLAN or outside the network via URL through IBI company. There are so many possible usages for this, if you are wanting to provide a share of a video or picture slideshow outside the network. If you are wanting to share videos from within the network without having to turn on the computer you can stream this to your Roku. The only concern is the application at times takes a while to load the pictures and videos as well as sometimes disconnect from the drive. The drive itself remains connected via WLAN so I end up having to close out and relaunch the application. Overall this is a great little device that does the job of storing, sharing and streaming pictures / videos. I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys sharing pictures and videos without the hassle of having to keep turning on your PC.

I returned this item before install. It should be noted that I wanted to use it for family memories only from my desktop. You have to install it from the mobile app, there is no other option. Since I use different logins I prefer not to have my devices connected, so could not use it.

wife used this to store her photos of our kids on them. Says it was a bit confusing for a bit but after she got the hang of it, she says it was a snap.

Not sure if I like this or not. It's taking me forever to load all my pics and videos maybe due to my internet. Once I switch internet companies hopefully it'll go faster. One thing I had hoped for was uploading all my pics and videos straight from my Mac and it doesn't do that.

This is a gift and I don't know how well it performs yet. The receiver was happy to get it and anxious to get it setup and use it.