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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: Storage for Photographers

#41
My company serves thousands of professional photographers (wedding, commercial, fashion, etc.). What you're describing is definitely an issue for photographers but I think getting them to use a tool like you've described would be an uphill battle.

Right now, most of them use Drobos or similar devices. You'd be asking them to add steps to their workflow which is always tough to do.

Also, I think your estimate of 18 mins to upload 6+GB is an order of magnitude off. We have tools that allow people to upload JPEGs and most customers claim it takes longer than that just for 100s of MBs.

My (wild) guess is that Adobe is going to get in this space too. It only makes sense to have your Lightroom catalog in the cloud. Maybe they wont offer an affordable solution for terabytes of data, but I'm not sure photogs want their images in two different "clouds".

I think the key is to do customer development from full-time photographers who aren't hackers. I'd be happy to send out a survey to some clients if you want do more research.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#42
I'll jump in here and share our current problem and how we are addressing it today. Hopefully it proves useful for whomever tackles this project!

So we are an ecommerce company and we do our own photography for products -- and we do a lot of it. We average about 2-3 photoshoots per month, and each photoshoot can be upwards of 40GB before any processing. We shoot raw images and are starting to experiment more and more with video. After we do the post-processing work and start the video editing we can push 70GB a shoot easily.

Our current workflow is like this:

Shoot tethered to a laptop each day (typically each shoot lasts two days). At the end of the day, we upload the files up to our local NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS, just shy of 3TB) which is redundant.

At the end of the shoot, we load a copy of the entire shoot on the local computers that will be editing so that they don't have to work directly from the NAS. Over the next few weeks while they edit the files, they will push the new files up to the NAS into specific folders.

(This is where it gets hairy) We also have an offsite NAS that is located in the business owner's house (about 6TB, but this one is not redundant). We used to attempt to upload files each night from the local NAS to an offsite NAS via rsync, but the pipe was just way too small. It would take days to upload a photoshoot, and everyone in the office suffered from slow internet while that happened. Now what we do is bring the offsite NAS onsite every few weeks and do a manual sync! Locally the sync only takes a few hours and then that night it goes back home with the business owner.

Now since the local NAS is less than 3TB, we can't store all of our shoots on there forever. When we get close to full on the local NAS, we grab an external hard drive and archive old shoots (typically 2+ years old) to it, and then store that in our massive safe (on-site though). If we need access to just one or two files, we can retrieve them from the offsite NAS, but if we need access to quite a few of them, we can dig them out of the safe.

So that's our workflow. Probably not bullet proof, but it has been serving us well for the last few years. If someone came up with a better solution, we would be all over it!

Re: Storage for Photographers

#43

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this: - 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow. - Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress - Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need acce…

Your happens today is very similar to mine. I'd say that I need additional offload of the RAID array (drobo in your case), while little is needed to be changed on my processing laptop

Re: Storage for Photographers

#44
It is important to be careful with how you try to use Glacier. I have been looking its pricing; It costs $0.01 per GB per month only if you want to upload your data.

Downloads add significant cost if you want to retrieve more than 0.17% of your data in a day.

Downloading 5% of your data increases your monthly rate to $0.097 per GB. 10% increases to $0.187 per GB 50% increases to $0.907 per GB 100% increases to $1.807 per GB

Downloads are also delayed by 4 hours after you make a request.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#45

I've been looking into Glacier, but the pricing in the case where I might want to retrieve a substantial portion of my data is quite complex. As far as I can tell, the headline $0.01/GB rate for overages they quote is misleading. They don't, as you might expect from that language, calculate ([GB retrieved] - [5% of GB stored]) x $0.01 and bill you that. Rather, they charge you on a monthly basis, according to your hi…

This should be mitigated if you're running a service, though. It averages out.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#46
Has anyone used Lightroom 5's new Smart Preview feature? It generates lossy DNGs from your full-sized files that you can still work with while your original sits on an external drive. Once you plug your external drive back in it, it syncs the non-destructive changes back to the RAW file.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#47
"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III"

Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane.

What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5

Re: Storage for Photographers

#48

I'll jump in here and share our current problem and how we are addressing it today. Hopefully it proves useful for whomever tackles this project! So we are an ecommerce company and we do our own photography for products -- and we do a lot of it. We average about 2-3 photoshoots per month, and each photoshoot can be upwards of 40GB before any processing. We shoot raw images and are starting to experiment more and more…

Out of curiosity, how big is the pipe at the office? The one holding the local NAS?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#49

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this: - 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow. - Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress - Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need acce…

This thread is becoming great customer research for people to build this app. :)

You can all go home. I've already started.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#50
post #47

"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III" Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane. What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5

Because cloud this and cloud that! I feel like I'm the only person firmly against cloud storage. I'd constantly feel paranoid about my data randomly disappearing at the hands of a company I don't know run by people I don't know on hardware I don't trust.

I want everything local.

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