Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 186 posts

Re: Storage for Photographers

#91

Post by 13b9f227ecf0 »

icebraining wrote: post #72
rfnslyr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I periodically mail a DVD of important stuff to my parents and ask them to toss it in the basement. You could do the same thing with backup tapes, or whatever.

Drives/tape/flash/dvd is pretty damn cheap and easy. These S3 type solutions would have to be much cheaper to be interesting.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#92

Post by hnriot »

PStamatiou wrote: post #67
hnriot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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 stupidly downsampled you've lost that advantage.

You might want to read this, it will help you understand how sensors work.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-sensors.ht...

Re: Storage for Photographers

#93

Post by tghw »

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…

Actually, once we started getting into the market, we found that most do not know they need to do regular, offsite backups.

Consider the some examples:

* An older photographer who grew up in the days of film who has just transitioned over to digital.

* A homemaker who is trying to add some much needed income for her family, with a passion but no formal training.

* A well-off software developer who moonlights as a photographer for fun and a little extra money.

Of those, only the third has been exposed, formally, to correct data backup procedures. The others are likely to keep their photos in folders on the desktop of their laptop.

Furthermore, photography is not a very lucrative profession for most photographers. That limits the amount you can charge. Our original pricing was much higher, but we realized that would be problematic, considering the average photographer brings in around $30k per year.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#95

Post by tghw »

tsycho wrote: post #64
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…

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.

Let me consult with my cofounder. I've considered it in passing, but haven't put any time into it.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#96

Post by Brandon0 »

josh2600 wrote: post #48
Brandon0 wrote: post #42

I'll jump in here and share our current problem and how we are addressing it today. Hopefully it proves useful for whomever tackles this project! So we are an ecommerce company and we do our own photography for products -- and we do a lot of it. We average about 2-3 photoshoots per month, and each photoshoot can be upwards of 40GB before any processing. We shoot raw images and are starting to experiment more and more…

Out of curiosity, how big is the pipe at the office? The one holding the local NAS?

I thought it was a 50/5, but the speed test I ran just showed 65/5.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#97

Post by famousactress »

superuser2 wrote: post #80
famousactress wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Google Fiber!!

Really, I think it makes sense for someone to prepare for the future and assume this will be feasible for upload in the not-crazy future.. unless more hobbyists keep deciding we need exponentially larger RAW files.. It's a crazy race :|

Re: Storage for Photographers

#98

Post by famousactress »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #81
famousactress wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

effectively this is already what I do, except that you added a step of sending the data to AZN which doesn't help me any if the data is already offsite. Once I've driven somewhere, we're done.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#99

Post by dtauzell »

azov wrote: post #8

Backup is about having several copies. If you delete files after you uploaded them to the cloud, you don't have a backup - with all the problems that come with it (say, if you delete a file by accident there will probably be no way to restore it). If your files are important to you - you need a back up. If not - just get rid of them in the name of simplicity :) PS. Also, uploading many gigabytes over a typical ADSL c…

I backup offsite via CrashPlan which keeps files even after I delete them. I sent them a hard drive for my initial upload. Now, I've got about 800M backed up. I haven't yet had to get it all back :)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#100

Post by fsckin »

I'm the SO of a professional newborn photographer who generated somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30TB of RAW photos, backups, LR xmp sidecars, etc in the last year. JPEGs don't even register. High end DSLR RAWs are gigantic!

I'm the technical support for overall workflow, storage & backup engineer, etc, etc. I wear many hats.

Right now I've got a backup on import to a FreeNAS (BSD) filer running on a HP Micro Server. Lightroom backups go to the same filer and are synced as well. My local server rsyncs the delta every night to an identical machine at a friends' house.

This isn't perfect. The one place that isn't 100% backed up is current projects in post-production. That's an acceptable trade off for now.

The most important thing to note is that there are two kinds of photographers: Those who never lost data, and those who care about backups. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, converting members of Group A into Group B is a tough sell. Video testimonials might be a good option.

A storage service for photographers MUST be invisible to their workflow. Make it as easy to use as an egg timer. At the MOST, an addition of a single screen with sensible defaults (just click next) on photo import.

Ignoring error messages that get in their way is to be expected. Care more about their backups than they do. Send me (tech support guy) an email to notify if there haven't been backups added in X days, along with weekly reports of data usage per day -- how many photos, how large, what root folders, usage trends, etc.

An ideal installation would be automatic detection of what program they're using, what places files are stored (hint: It's not just on a local drive). Detect new file locations and back those up too.

An inexpensive (<$25) option of "only backup current projects I'm working on and anything I shot in the last month", that actually works... I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Post reply on HN