Storage for Photographers

As a background, we now have thousands of users and customers. We also finished raising a series A in February. (Not that raising money proves anything) http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2013/02/mo...

We are now growing at about 5%-7% a week. We recently peaked in the top 100 grossing US iPad Photo/Video Apps in iOS - although most of our revenue comes outside of iOS. (As they take a 30% cut.)

We target serious photographers (pro's and prosumers) who use Adobe Lightroom. For pure backup customers our sweet spot are those who have outgrown BackBlaze and Crashplan. (Both great services but geared at consumers.)

On the backup side, we help photographers manage their backups by using Adobe Lightroom metadata. Customers can choose to backup everything in Lightroom automatically. However, many photographers use metadata like stars or flags to designate their best photos. We allow users to automatically backup these "best" photos. This provides the automation of the best backup tools with more precision for larger customers.

We use Amazon Glacier behind the scenes to store the original photos. (Yes, WMF the restoration costs even out for us over all of our users.) (Sidebar - we actually ran our data center for months before switching to Glacier...very glad to have made the switch.)

However... we are not an online backup company. Online backup is a feature is our service... but not the entirety of it.

Once we have have photographers photos, we also want to help photographers better use, manage, share, and enjoy those photos. At one point I would have said we are a backup company, now I call us a workflow company.

We also offer a web and iOS App to privately view and share your Lightroom photos. (We take JPG snapshots of the RAW files so they load quickly and have the Lightroom edits. This part of the service runs in Amazon S3 not Glacier) This gives you access to your photos in the same way you are used to experiencing them in Lightroom. (Lightroom users try this for free - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mosaic-archive/id627973694?l...)

The next step which we are working on now is adding two-way sync where you can manage your photos in the App and it populates back to your desktop files and Lightroom. We are also working on more collaborative features so photographers can share this culling and editing process with their clients or family members.

The bigger problem we are solving is that photographers have loads of large files... backing them up is painful yes... but managing them all is more painful. Sifting through 000s of images to find your best stuff frankly stinks. This problem is only getting bigger as we shoot more and more.

For those interested in this idea, please consider joining us. We are hiring a couple more software developers this year. http://www.mosaicarchive.com/about-mosaic-photo-storage/care...

Thanks for the discussion and happy to answer all questions.

Best, Gerard www.mosaicarchive.com

The Joplin, Missouri tornado, Moore, Oklahoma tornado, Hurricane Sandy and Katrina.

I don't think you should rely on someone who MERELY uses the same ISP. I think you need to be a thousand miles away from each other.

If we care about decades, storing the raw NEF or CR2 file is almost certainly the wrong approach. Those files could easily be as difficult to open in fifteen years as a ClarisWorks document is today (just to choose one example - proprietary formats for professional software from the late 90's are all pretty hard to open today). Also, important metadata is kept in the lrcat file. Unless we expect to always be able to open our copies of Lightroom, we need to migrate that data too.

We used to think of "archiving" as putting something on a shelf and forgetting about it, sometimes taking environmental factors like humidity into account. With our digital data, we need a plan for periodically checking it, both for fixity and to make sure at risk file formats are migrated to current best practices. This will require greater awareness for the complexities involved (and the need for open file formats) from everyone from creatives to storage and service providers.

By the way, every creative industry is struggling with this right now. Recording studios have session files created in ProTools 4. Designers have really old Quark files, even though they've been working in InDesign for the past five years. Composers have Finale files. A lot of these file formats depend on plugins to be able to display properly. I don't mean to sound discouraging, I think there's plenty of opportunities for viable businesses here. We just need to start using the right terms.