What do you like best about the product?

Seemless integration into my OS providing reliable cloud storage for my business needs

What do you dislike about the product?

I dislike that I need multiple cloud storage services, using dropbox, google drive, icloud, lucidlink, frame.io, backblaze and more. Would be great if lucid provided the same functionality of all of the above so I could stop using them

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use lucidlink to power Postlab.io e

What do you like best about the product?

I switched to Lucid Link around April 2024, and it has been a GAME CHANGER for my team and I. Between editing photos and videos and managing social media, it's so lovely to have access to all the files from any of our computers and to have changes almost instantly on every end. I recommend it to all my friends. Their customer service is incredible, too. I once had a few questions, and they got on a Zoom call with me and walked me through everything in real time together, which was very appreciated and helpful because I am more of a visual learner.

What do you dislike about the product?

It felt a little daunting and scary to set up. In the end, it wasn't bad, but I remember that being something that at the time felt annoying.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It is wayyy better and faster than google drive. It gives my team the ability to work from the same files seamlessly and make changes that can be updated quickly.

What do you like best about the product?

I haven't had to worry about what is cached on my computer at any given time. When we used Google Drive befoore this, I was constantly struggling to have the right things cached on my local drive. I spent a lot of time trying to manage that storage, but there were a lot of things that it wouldn't allow me to manually adust. I wouldn't have the files I needed, so I would have to re-download them, which was a huge waste of time. And then my cache would get overloaded with things that I didn't actually need, which would cause trouble for other things I was trying to do with my computer. LucidLink makes it easy to have the right things available on my computer at all times.

What do you dislike about the product?

It took us a little while to get our filespace up and running. We took a couple missteps, which created some confusion. So it was hard to be confident in our setup for a little while.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have a small team of video producers, and LucidLink allows us to all have quick access to the files that we need. We work in a variety of locations, with a mix of in-office and at-home. Wherever we are, it's quick and easy to upload files so that they're available to everyone. And we don't have to worry about caching or downloading things ahead of time. It allows us to work quickly and flexibly. And we avoid big stretches of downtime from downloading or uploading.

What do you like best about the product?

The original premise of LucidLink was very promising. A CloudNAS that was easy to use and reasonably affordable with powerful features. There wasn't anything like it in the market.

A good sign of a good product idea, is that it didn't take long for copy cats to emerge.

It was a great solution for easily sharing working files between remote team members, usable enough for non-IT specialists both in setup and everyday use. No storage limits, good speeds, pricing reasonable for cloud infrastructure.

Also built a great community and engaged considerably, you felt like a valued customer.

What do you dislike about the product?

Unfortunately it didn't last long. This is an infrastructure product, and it needs to be stable and reliable. When you build post production workflows around it, you want it to just work for quite some time.

Before too long there were impactful pricing changes and constant software upgrades. Then there was a massive unprecdented 3 day outage that had global impact on the whole industry. While they worked fast on rebuilding their infrastructure, questions remain on what went wrong.

And recently yet antoher massive software upgrade, this one even more disruptive. New version doesn't have feature parity and pricing became unfavorable. The legacy version was hard to find and felt abandoned, some part of it was disabled under questionable circumstances. Communication was hap-hazard and left the sense of lacking true transparency.

As a longer term customer, it became obvious I was no longer in the market segment they were focusing on, and moved on.

Not an infrastructure provider I would trust. Which is unfortuante. Itstarted well, but went downhill most of the time I used it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Easy and fast sharing of files between remote uses at the file granularity level, at high performance, secure, and multi-user change consistency.

What do you like best about the product?

LucidLink enables our production company to embrace a distributed workflow during production (dailies and general edit assist workflows) and post in a way we have not been able to before. We've been working somewhat remotely for many years, but Lucidlink removes a huge amount of friction around drive clones and keeping files an projects up-to-date between the editorial team. The convenience, transparency to workflow and cost savings are significant.

What do you dislike about the product?

We lost a day's work when our internet connection went down and we couldn't access the server. All media was of course backed up and we could restore the proejct happily, but our short outage meant that by the time the project was up and running from our backups, we were back online with LucidLink. Some forwawrd planning to avoid these shorter outages to the LucidLink sever (and be able to switch to local drivs quickly) has become a part of our backup regime and workflow.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

LucidLink lets us have a disitbuted team across editorial from Day 1. During longer productions, it means that dailes can be accessed instantly by whoever needs to without worrying about drive duplicates and so on. The Director can be reviewing file sat the end of the day without delay, while editorial are working from the same files. It has saved us a ton of drive purchase, tracking, and shipping costs, and sped up the workflow considerably.

What do you like best about the product?

It is easy to use, with just one click of a button.

What do you dislike about the product?

Personally, I do not see any downsides of using LucidLink.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It is nice to have all out files under one main folder within the Cloud, which makes things pretty quick to locate files and items.

What do you like best about the product?

LucidLink continues to be our go-to collaboration tool for our project folders. With editors working remotely, and contract editors coming and going, it's so nice to not have to shuttle giant project folders around or share links to various files.

We haven't had to use it yet (knock on wood), but the snapshot feature seems like our files are safely stored in the event of some data loss (accidentally deleting a file or a corrupt file type, etc).

I've also found their support documentation to be helpful and clear. We had a contractor wanting to set up LL on his M4 machine. Apple doesn't make it easy, but the documentation clearly walked through the process, and they were up and running.

What do you dislike about the product?

Since my last review, the top items I dislike about LL have remained unaddressed, so they continue to be the top items (plus two additional ones).

- file management transparency is the biggest weakness of this system. We have an ingest computer for all of our footage. It doesn't have the storage capacity of our editing machines, but it's enough to get the job done. Let's say I have a 15GB folder of footage I need added to a project folder on LL. I copy that 15GBs of footage locally to the folder and let it upload to the cloud for other editors to access. Now, how do I manage that local 15GBs of storage? I can't delete the footage because that would delete across the entire LL pool. If I "unpin" that project folder, I have no idea if LL is actually freeing up that 15GBs on my local hard drive or not. If the cache system needs to be a blob of storage; fine, but there should be some kind of method for me to choose whether or not files are stored locally or just "on line only". OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive - they all have this feature. It needs to be clearer with LL because right now it's a file management nightmare.

- bandwidth management: there are times when I'm fine with LL having unlimited access to my bandwidth. There are also times when that creates performance issues and I want to either pause or throttle the speed. While these settings exist, it would be nice if there was access within the system tray icon. Right click on the icon and select one of 3 bandwidth settings: unlimited, preset and pause. Preset could be parameters that I've established in the app for upload/download. Dropbox has a great feature where I can quickly pause syncing for "1 hour", "2 hours", "until tomorrow", etc. I know that when it kicks back in, all files will be synced.

- the app shows how much data is pending upload, but there's no (a) indication of what files it's working on - a queue of sorts and (b) no indication on whether or not the app is downloading. I have to go into the task manager performance window to see if it's the LL app that's taking up bandwidth or not. I should be able to see that in the app itself.

- classic vs new: this has been a convoluted mess when they introduced a new version alongside the classic one. It will be nice when it's just LL. It's still unclear to me what the real benefits are of the new version, though. We don't need as many of the enterprise user management features I think it covers. I can only hope the new version addresses some of the above, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that.

- Accounts: for the life of me, I can't find a way to log out of LL so I can log in with another account. We changed our account structure and I want to be able to sign out of an account and log in with a different one. I've had to resort to uninstalling and re-installing the app just to do that.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Remote video editors needing access to a shared pool of project folders.

Also, the pricing model is reasonable, which is a real draw.

What do you like best about the product?

I love that you can work in almost real time to collaborate with video editors across the world in different time zones.

What do you dislike about the product?

It would be great if they offered more server locations.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before LucidLink I found it very difficult to share and collaborate with large files with freelancers across the world but it is so much more easier now.

What do you like best about the product?

Speed of data transfer and robust client, support has been spot on with any questions that were asked.

What do you dislike about the product?

Need to work in IT to understand installation and setup for clients.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed a solution for international remote workers to work on Adobe InDesign files that could be colleborated on and have the speed for these large documents to be uploaded/downloaded quickly. We use both Macs and PC's, so that was another factor also. LucidLink was able to solve these issues easily and the system worked very quickly by having multiple locations (CDN's) for our data so the remote workers always had the quickest palce to get to the files. If the client was not used for awhile, it would re-assess the files and folders to make sure anything that was used was the latest versions for them.

What do you like best about the product?

After creating an account and setting up the filespace, the on-ramp for our team was simple and easy.

What do you dislike about the product?

The information around transitioning from Classic to the new app could bear some improvements.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Multi-user editing collaboration with Postlab.