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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

61–70 of 186 posts

Re: Storage for Photographers

#61
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

The point of the mark III isn't megapixels. It's image quality, less noise, higher iso, better highlights/shadows, more images per second, better autofocusing, movies, etc.

how do you think it comes by that image quality? It's a total waste of money to use a 5Dmkiii in 5MP mode. You'd never notice the difference between nouse, shadow detail, highlight clipping, autofocus if you used an entry level canon. The 5D MKiii is for pro's, not weekend amateurs. You did your part for the Economy, but you wasted your money.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#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.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#63
post #55

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…

As a photographer with a couple of terabytes of old raws (I back up to Time Machine locally, and offsite at a friend's house occasionally), I'm very curious as to what Adobe will offer in this regard with LR5.

They may not offer anything at the TB-level, who knows. But something is coming: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage...

and I still think it will be hard to convince people to "put these files on Adobe's cloud and these files on this other cloud using X software"

Re: Storage for Photographers

#64
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…

Would you be willing to open source your code? I am running out of hard disk space as well for my photos and have been thinking of writing coding up something very similar to this idea _when I get time_. But I would be willing to contribute to an open source project that does this for self-hosting my photos etc. Contact me if interested, email's in my profile.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#65
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…

> For this experience, we spent less than $1,000. Compared to an entrepreneurship class at any college, that's quite cheap!

My undergrad was in USC's entrepreneurship program. One of the points they always hyped on was whether or not you were "selling vitamins or vicodin", so to speak. As you learned through Snaposit, most people when making chit-chat will be supportive of your venture, but you won't know how they really feel until they vote with their wallets.

Most of the professors were older guys who didn't get online startup culture, but one of their favorite tricks was to put up a landing page detailing a concept they were interested in, with a buy button. They'd spend some AdWords to get people to the landing page and measure the conversion rate. If enough people tried to buy to justify the service, they'd go out and build it.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#66
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 experience in trying to build this business, so who knows what my opinion is worth. :-)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the mark III isn't megapixels. It's image quality, less noise, higher iso, better highlights/shadows, more images per second, better autofocusing, movies, etc.

how do you think it comes by that image quality? It's a total waste of money to use a 5Dmkiii in 5MP mode. You'd never notice the difference between nouse, shadow detail, highlight clipping, autofocus if you used an entry level canon. The 5D MKiii is for pro's, not weekend amateurs. You did your part for the Economy, but you wasted your money.

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 colored stripes to see color. Bayer Interpolation spreads the data around to fill in each pixel as if it could could see color. Because of this the images of all digital cameras at their native resolutions are more blurred than they could be.

If you halve the size of the image, the pixel-to-pixel sharpness will increase because there is now enough data for each and every pixel. See my Bayer Interpolation page for examples.

Therefore it's always better to use a higher resolution camera set down to a lower resolution than a camera with only that much resolution."

Re: Storage for Photographers

#68
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

Offsite backup, man. What if you're running a business? Do you want every scrap of data your business runs on in the same building? What if it burns down?

It's all about the importance you place on the data, and your level of technical skill.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#69

I'm actually working on this idea right now! https://plover.co/ We want to take backing up, sharing, and monetizing and make them very simple and enjoyable to do. We've started rolling out slowly already, our goal is to be open to the public within a month or so.

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.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there's an earthquake? Or theft? Or fire?

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?
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