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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#171

Post by gerardmurphy »

PStamatiou wrote: post #143
gerardmurphy wrote: post #113

I am the CEO/Co-Founder of Mosaic. We are a company that helps serious photographers backup their photographers. I am happy to share what we have learned in the past 2 years. www.mosaicarchive.com 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…

Thanks for replying Gerard. Do you ever see a version where I can store directly on my Amazon Glacier account? Especially given "However... we are not an online backup company." I'd feel tremendously safer and more trusting of your service. I haven't used Mosaic so maybe you already do this, I'll take a closer look this week. Also (in a nice way), your site could benefit from a redesign. Unfortunately I think quite a…

Hi PStamatiou,

We have certainly thought about giving direct access to customers Glacier accounts and behind the scenes each customer has their own glacier "vault" for potentially this reason. But for many customers they would prefer a set-it and forget it type of service. We didn't want a barrier of first create an glacier account then call us...

We also then didn't know what to do if a customer then changes their glacier files... if we are syncing with Lightroom and this gets out of whack... then it defeats the purpose of the automated sync with your local files. If it just "read only" access, we are already providing this with our App.

I think the difference in what we are providing in online backup is that we are not a pure cloud where we encourage you to delete your local file - We actually want to sync with your local files. Our philosophy on the workflow side is that changes that you make to your files on the App, should be reflected locally in your Lightroom catalog file. This way you always own your own data.

I agree with you on the site redesign... have had our head down on this. Good news is that the design is approved and being implemented as we speak (although won't be out for a couple weeks.)

Thanks again and happy to answer any other questions. Best, Gerard

Re: Storage for Photographers

#172

Post by gerardmurphy »

bambax wrote: post #168
callmeed wrote: post #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 mi…

My Lightroom catalog is backed up to a folder in Dropbox, and this works really well. You can't really have the current catalog in Dropbox because then each action and edit become really slow. But if you set up Lightroom to do a backup every time you quit the program, and that backup is in Dropbox, you get the best of both worlds (strong backups + snappy edits). Lightroom backups are really "backups", as they are nam…

Just to be clear here... Your Lightroom catalog is very important but is not backing you your Photos. (which I know you said at the end. I am just emphasizing)

Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#173

Post by rfnslyr »

icebraining wrote: post #70
rfnslyr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own cloud? It's not really hard to get your own service up and running. All my shits auto backed up to my dedicated which has terabytes and terabytes of storage.

Where do you store it?

Family network. We all run servers in our houses that are connected and each keep backups of eachothers backups. Backups at my parents, grandparents, cousins in colorado, family in Poland. All encrypted, all silently running in the basement of each house. All updated every week.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#174

Post by icebraining »

rfnslyr wrote: post #173
icebraining wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you store it?

Family network. We all run servers in our houses that are connected and each keep backups of eachothers backups. Backups at my parents, grandparents, cousins in colorado, family in Poland. All encrypted, all silently running in the basement of each house. All updated every week.

Who manages that hardware? I wouldn't mind getting a NAS on my grandmother's, but I can't do cross-country trips if a disk fails.

Regardless, that seems a nice setup. I'm not opposed to the cloud (as long as I treat it as a dumb storage system), but it's certainly more expensive than buying your own disks.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#175

Post by VikingCoder »

famousactress wrote: post #127
VikingCoder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would you be willing to pay to permanently archive that 40-60 GB, assuming the system provided adequate access? Do you want a one-time fee, or some yearly fee?

Good questions. So today, the way the math works out is we can maybe fit 25 weddings on a 1TB we pick up for 80 bucks.. so that's about three bucks, six to do it twice. We think of it as a part of the cost of a particular wedding. You could charge me 10 or 20 bucks to archive before I'd even do the math. We likely spend more in gas for most weddings. Hell, I think each wedding costs us four dollars in business cards…

Unfortunately, that math doesn't work out very well. If you were to implement it yourself, those numbers sound great. But to do it as a business, I think the math there is too cut-throat.

4 TB of usable space divided by 60 GB times $20 is $1,365. That's the kind of thing a consumer or prosumer could do on their own, but it would be pretty hard to make a real business out of it...

Re: Storage for Photographers

#176

Post by VikingCoder »

I just came across the Plug Kickstarter, which I think might be the basis of a viable back-up storage for professional photographers.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brai...

Specifically, the $129 level, where you get two plugs, which they claim, "to replicate your data in 2 different places." Talk two of your friends in remote parts of the country into letting you Plug in to their home networks, and this might be viable.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#177

Post by hnriot »

theflyingkiwi42 wrote: post #135
hnriot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except the sensor isn't a CCD, and your argument is complete nonsense. Of course a 5D mkIII is a better camera, of course it will produce better results, but my point was that if you're going to down sample, why not save yourself a boat load of cash and just use a Rebel. I guarantee you'd never see or know the difference. It's not until you make a large print that the difference would be apparent, and since you've st…

Actually, faster focusing, better lenses (and thus better bokeh) do make a difference. I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes. I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. Yo…

of course better cameras make better photos, that was never in question, and the 5D mkIII is one of the best out there.

My point was that shooting that wonderful camera in 5mp mode is stupid.

"The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality" - even when you down-sampled them to 5mp? And I think you're being ridiculous when you say "huge". There will be more intra-shot difference in quality than between any two modern DSLRs. The light will make far more difference to whatever it is you think is quality.

For weddings of course you don't need much. That was my point really.

You do realize right that you can put those same better lenses on the entry level canon right?

You, and everyone else, it seems, misunderstood. My point was that down-sampling to 5mp a canon 5dMkIII's images is a waste of that camera, and any entry level DSLR will produce indistinguishable images at that down-sampled level.

Also the standard for lab work is 300PPI, not 200, so I am not sure if I lend very much credibility to your comment.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#178

Post by [deleted] »

theflyingkiwi42 wrote: post #135
hnriot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except the sensor isn't a CCD, and your argument is complete nonsense. Of course a 5D mkIII is a better camera, of course it will produce better results, but my point was that if you're going to down sample, why not save yourself a boat load of cash and just use a Rebel. I guarantee you'd never see or know the difference. It's not until you make a large print that the difference would be apparent, and since you've st…

Actually, faster focusing, better lenses (and thus better bokeh) do make a difference. I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes. I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. Yo…

[deleted]

Re: Storage for Photographers

#179

Post by FireBeyond »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #120
PStamatiou wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go troll somewhere else. "Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera? Easy: when set to the same resolution, a higher-resolution camera set to a lower resolution always looks better than a camera with that native resolution. This is because digital cameras cheat and use Bayer Interpolation. They don't really have that many color pixels on their CCDs. CCDs are actually black-and-white and use c…

I still wouldn't shoot in anything but RAW, because that's like throwing away the negative. Not that this means I would dismiss anything else someone says who doesn't shoot in RAW, but that'd be my number #1 tip for them: get a good workflow set up and keep the negatives. Not even a 5D can guess as nicely as you can adjust the sliders. Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera? Depends on the…

Exactly, resample in Lightroom after post-processing, not early in the process.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#180

Post by PStamatiou »

hfanson1 wrote: post #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…

if I have 2TB stored and only want to retrieve a single 10GB photo shoot one month (or even just a single photo), it would not be anywhere close to 5% (.5% in fact) of my total amount stored. The key point here is that we are dealing with TBs of photos that are there for safe-keeping and they have already been tinkered with and all photo JPGs needed have been exported and put elsewhere. This is just for RAWs and you likely won't need to access them again, definitely not 5%+ of them like this.
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