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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#71

Post by bigbento »

Over the past few years, I worked on a few versions of this as a side project. The last iteration didn't do the backup itself--it connected with your Dropbox, sync'd the raw images, and processed them at a preset +-2 EV, and 3 color temperatures. The image results were good, but honestly I never found it particularly compelling.

In any case, building this sort of thing is a pain. The most obvious problem is the size of the images. Glacier is an interesting backup solution, and had just come out around the time I decided to stop working on my app. A less obvious problem is raw conversion. All the best converters are proprietary, meaning that I had to piggy back off the Mac OS converter engines. Again, I never got to the point where I felt the product was worth the trouble of buying racking up a Mac Mini to run a little market test. Maybe I'm wrong.

I had a (frankly somewhat scattered) draft of a post mortem written, and since it seems like there's some interest in this subject, I posted it: http://scraps.bigbento.com/2013/05/30/hiatus.html

Re: Storage for Photographers

#72

Post by icebraining »

rfnslyr wrote: post #50
hnriot wrote: 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.

Local data can randomly disappear too - hard drives don't always fail in a predictable fashion.

Personally, I prefer to use both local and cloud storage (encrypted, bien sûr).

Re: Storage for Photographers

#73

Post by famousactress »

xxpor wrote: post #52
famousactress wrote: post #13

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…

Would http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ work?

Yeah, probly. But I want a company to wrap all of it up in a nice predictable package. Dealing with understanding AWS pricing complexity alone is enough of a service to spawn healthy-margin companies.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#74

Post by stevesearer »

PStamatiou wrote: post #17
danso wrote: post #15

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…

Your last few sentences are exactly why I wrote this post. I want everything stored in the cloud but ALSO have a decent way of browsing them locally. The idea is to just store tiny jpegs (you can set how big they are, but something like 500-1000px wide likely, just for you to get a sense of which photo this is and allow you to remotely delete, retreive, etc)

This is basically what I need for Office Snapshots. I keep all of the original photos submitted so that I can use the full images in the future (if need be) and would love to store them somewhere other than my laptop.

If I could browse locally with smaller images (as you describe) like I currently do with Picasa (galleries, tags, etc) and then have the ability to download the original images when and if I need them, I'd be in heaven.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#75

Post by MrSourz »

Terretta wrote: post #51
famousactress wrote: post #13

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…

> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up t…

If you're using a newer MacBook Pro I've seen some people swap out the disk drive bay for a 2nd SSD. This doesn't sound like much but that allows them to run a RAID 1 setup on their laptop (1 drive with a mirrored second drive).

These guys talk about doing that with a RAID 0 setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaXZVHcdGM

Re: Storage for Photographers

#76

Post by roc »

short_circut wrote: post #40

This idea is great, but it ignores on very real problem. Namely that you still have not addressed the issue of bandwidth. Take for example your 4th of july example. If I were to do that upload the way you describe, I would already be over my monthly bandwidth allotment with my ISP as would many hobbyists.

The US bandwidth situation is the elephant in the room.

There really is no good solution to automated offsite backup when it takes several days of uploading to handle a single day's worth of data capture. To make any internet-backup service work, you'd first have to pitch the photog on switching from their residential broadband package to something more expensive -- if that's even available short of their leasing office space somewhere.

I guess you could try to build out a reverse-CDN sort of network, with local relay nodes scattered across the various ISP networks, that might achieve faster uploads from the user (and maybe not get counted against bandwidth caps) which then use a fat pipe to send that data to larger regional storage nodes.

Neither seems particularly plausible at scale.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#77

Post by hamburglar »

Hovertruck wrote: post #69
hamburglar wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope your business model doesn't rely too heavily on the "monetizing" aspect. I know there are lots of photo hosting services with a "sell prints" option, but I get the impression not very many people actually use those in enough volume to cover the hosting costs. I'm imagining a non-pro track that's targeted at the enthusiast who just wants backup and sharing, but won't actually sell any prints. I'll be watching.

We don't make any money off of prints, only the photographers do. The business model is subscriptions.

This is good to hear. BTW, it might help if you had a little more info on your landing page about the service. For example, I can't tell if this is going to be aimed at true pros who are willing to shell out a decent amount of money, or if I'm going to be able to afford it for my own pro-sumer needs. Having to sign up for a mailing list and wait in order to potentially find out that I'm nowhere near the target audience is frustrating.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#79

Post by tnorthcutt »

_delirium wrote: post #39

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…

Holy crap. I started mulling over the idea of using Glacier as a cloud backup to my Synology NAS, but this makes me extremely hesitant.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#80

Post by superuser2 »

famousactress wrote: post #54
Terretta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up t…

The idea of partnering w/ someone using the same ISP is interesting. It's really offsite that's the whole challenge. If it takes three days to get 60g uploaded (setting aside the nuisance of saturating our bandwidth for doing things like making Skype calls), then I effectively have close to no solution.. because during a busy season I have at least one job exposed for half of most weeks. House burns down, and I lose…

Sounds like you need something based on mailing drives.
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