31–40 of 186 posts
We want to take backing up, sharing, and monetizing and make them very simple and enjoyable to do. We've started rolling out slowly already, our goal is to be open to the public within a month or so.
I'm in a similar situation as the OP...an amateur but avid photographer with terabytes of RAW image files. Currently, I have several multi-terabyte drives that I erratically back up to...I just got a 4TB drive that I'm going to try to backup everything I've ever shot in the last 3 years... But I do want to move it to online storage...and I think this requires triage. For nearly every photoset, I've quickly gone throu…
1.) Personal: This doesn't mean I don't delete, but I generally tend to keep photos even though they might not be really good photos, especially if I only have a few of that day or person. I know I might enjoy looking at them decades later anyway, a blurry photo is better than nothing.
2.) Archival: like taking a photo of a flat before moving in. These aren't very many, so I tend to keep them no questions asked.
3.) Siblings of Keepers: You could call these "proof I really made the keeper photo" photos. Let's say I come across an animal I never photographed before, and like one of the photos enough to publish; then I'll still keep the others around. Or keeping a wider crop in case you change your mind later, etc.
4.) Keepers: here I try to be as harsh as I can. Photography is about painting with light for the pros, for me it's mostly about selection, that's the part of it I enjoy most. I walk around, and from the thousands of things I see each day, only a few make me take out the camera. Then I select keepers (partly before the images even leave the camera), and even years after I might revisit some keepers again, decide that my standards improved, and delete them.
I don't want to tell others how to pursue their hobby, but I think the web is full of galleries not even the owners look at, and that generally, a lot of people need to learn how to delete. The same goes for blogs and whatnot, the idea that everything has to be written on this indelible roll of toilet paper seems silly.
On one extreme, there is being OCD and deliberating endlessly what to keep and how to rank it, on the other there is just making more stuff to throw behind yourself on a pile you never investigate, because it's too awkward to wade around in. Productivity lies somewhere in the middle I think.
We pulled our bootstraps hard and tried to get it going, but soon realized that there's a pretty big flaw with the idea: most photographers have no idea that they should backup their photos. They know hard drives crash, but they never expect it to happen to them.
This meant that we'd essentially have to become insurance salesmen, convincing people that bad things will happen to them.
Eventually, we decided to shut it down, which I also wrote about: http://tghw.com/blog/well-that-sucks-what-else-you-got
The old homepage is still up at http://www.snaposit.com/.
With that in mind we've started to look more on how photographers with larger photo volumes could benefit from our service. From the feedback from few photographers we've already included some features (RAW photos with smaller JPG thumbnails, workspaces and personal sharing for example) that will make the day to day workflow a bit easier. Currently our goal is to build something that would fit better for professional photographers (public for clients, ordering prints and possibly integrated payment flows, win/mac client + plugins for your favorite photo software).
Pricing wise we are currently not the cheapest but we have thoughts on how to make this better for high volume photographers. If you're one of them then please send me an email (martin at photry.com) and I would love to talk a bit further what we plan to do and if we would fit your storage needs.
I believe that https://www.mediacloud.cc/ is trying to solve that right now. However, their website is sparse on details.
Definitely quite a few companies are attempting something in this space. I think the one that will win will be the one that actually has photographers as founders and understand the need. Unfortunately it is quite a niche and most photographers are gadget hounds and don't mind having 2-3 drobos (including an off-site one).
I'd love to hear more about this service from some users. I am bumping up against Dropbox limits with my photos as well.
While the post mentions avoiding externals I think a handy feature would be to push to both an external drive, glacier, and then remove the RAWs locally. That way you have two copies, so the data is actually backed up. Trusting all of your photography to amazon not losing data doesn't sound ideal.
We applied to YC with exactly this idea. We made it to the interview, but were turned down. I wrote about that experience: http://tghw.com/blog/pull-hard We pulled our bootstraps hard and tried to get it going, but soon realized that there's a pretty big flaw with the idea: most photographers have no idea that they should backup their photos. They know hard drives crash, but they never expect it to happen to them. Th…
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Also note that OP wasn't really just pitching "backup". He wants you to reduce the footprint his images take up locally. I think the messaging to casual and hobbyist users probably ought to play on this. Note Loom's taglines "more room to play". Backup is probably boring for people not under the pressure of liability like pros are.
Rather, they charge you on a monthly basis, according to your highest hourly retrieval rate from any single hour applied to the whole month (standardized at 720 hours). So if your peak hourly retrieval in a month was 10 GB/hr above your pro-rated free quota for that hour, you're charged for 7200 GB of retrieval overage, or $72, even if you retrieved nowhere near 7 TB of data. For companies with relatively constant retrieval this doesn't matter, but for small users, someone who has a large overage one day will be charged as if they were incurring the same overage continually all month.
To put it concretely, if you store 200GB of photos and then do a bulk retrieval, you aren't charged $1.90 ((200-10) x 0.01). Rather, the xfer is counted as 4 hours, so you have a peak transfer of 50 GB/hr. Your free daily retrieval is allocated to the hours in the day you retrieved data, so in this case 10/4 = 2.5 GB/hr free. So your overage is 47.5 GB/hr. Multiply by 720 and $0.01, and the fee for retrieving 200GB of photos is $342. Plus $22.88 in outgoing AWS bandwidth.
Or at least, I think that's what their pricing page says. Maybe someone else can better interpret this explanation: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...