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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#81

Post by scarecrowbob »

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…

Would it be feasible to simply dupe the drive and find a secure off-site place within driving distance to store it or a storage machine, and then mail drives to glacier (Amazon will import a HDD via mail for around 100USD) as the storage machine fills?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#82

Post by hadem »

sreitshamer wrote: post #62

I'm not convinced that retrieval time doesn't matter. If you decide you want several photos, wait 4 hours to retrieve them from Glacier, then realize you wanted a few more and have to wait an additional 4 hours, I think that would get old pretty quickly.

I was wondering something similar. Does Glacier have any way to see a preview of the images you are downloading? If I upload 100 images with serialized file names (001.jpg, 002.jpg) how do I know which images to download?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#84

Post by Hovertruck »

hamburglar wrote: post #77
Hovertruck wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 audien…

Heh, it is unfortunate that there's very little info there. We put it up a while ago and have been so focused on actually building the app that updating the website seemed unimportant. :)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#85

Post by throwaway420 »

I wish I could trust the cloud because it would be a lot more convenient to not have to worry about storing photos, which involves a lot of effort once you advance beyond a casual hobby and you get into storing Terrabytes of large RAW files and maintaining adequate backups.

But the idea of storing any files in the cloud is very distasteful to me ever since the NSA Snowden story broke. Even something as innocent as a photographer taking pictures of a skyline or some beautiful architecture could land him in hot water if the government is looking at metadata and figuring out that he took lots of photos of a government building or a bridge or a power plant and randomly throwing him on some watch lists or no-fly lists. People have been hassled by the feds for a lot less.

My preference would be for all of these cloud storage providers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Amazon, etc to unambiguously and fiercely challenge the government on this and somehow unambiguously prove to people that they're respecting peoples' privacy and not complying with this stuff. Their denials so far have been obvious non-denials that are very carefully worded around "no direct access" when that's enough wiggle room to do just about anything.

Using some kind of cloud photo storage is a bad idea IMO until this gets sorted out.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#87

Post by ThomPete »

Hovertruck wrote: post #84
hamburglar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 audien…

Heh, it is unfortunate that there's very little info there. We put it up a while ago and have been so focused on actually building the app that updating the website seemed unimportant. :)

Look at it this way. Improving your website (which is already nice btw) means more people signing up to be notified when you are ready to launch.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#88

Post by mark_l_watson »

I only have a 128GB SSD on my MacBook Air, which is my primary computer. I used to run out of space until I read somewhere that you can use DropBox advanced settings to not keep specific directories on specific devices. So, I am not likely to have directories like, for example, videos2012, pictures2012 synced on my Air but they are on my old Linux and MacBook Pro laptops which have lots of disk space.

With high network speeds, I can quickly re sync directories, or just power on one of my old laptops.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#89

Post by _delirium »

wmf wrote: post #60
jychang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Glacier retrieval pricing has a strange and un-Amazony economy of scale. If you're just backing up your own data you'll be charged a ZOMG huge amount to ever download it. But if you're backing up 100 people you pay nothing to get data back.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting to find it here. This style of pricing isn't entirely unreasonable, and you do find charges based on peak monthly usage elsewhere (it's reminiscent of 95th-percentile bandwidth pricing, for example). But AWS otherwise has pretty straightforward pricing based on micro-accounting of usage, so this seems atypical for them.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#90

Post by digitalsushi »

mfenniak wrote: post #66
tghw wrote: post #34

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…

Professional photographers know they need to backup their photos. It looks like your product targeted consumers, but professionals seem like they'd be a better market. And it should have been priced way, way higher; the more it cost, the more secure it looks. I'd have a hard time trusting my money-making business assets to a $9/month service. Of course, I'm not a professional photographer nor do I have your experienc…

The problem with the term 'professional' is that the word is ambiguous - do we mean 'people that live off this' or 'people that know what they're doing'? I have two professional photographer friends, and neither have the slightest clue how to protect their data. They live off it, but never grow out because word of mouth is karma and you can't lose someone's wedding photos. These are people that have a duty to protect other people's memories, and are leaving it to chance. They are everywhere.
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