Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year - you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug.
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)
"Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year)"
Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways:
1) Out of business
2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated
That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them.
Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.
Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for!
I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot.
This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account?
Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't!
Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added).
And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)
As a pretty serious hobbyist photo-taking-guy I'm a big fan of smugmug, my "sharing photos with friends and family" photo website (http://gmcbay.com) is hosted with them, but I don't think of them or use them as a good long-term file "storage"/backup solution.
All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO.
I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups.
For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.
I also use smugmug, and hope it's ok to mention my open-source command line tool for syncing with SmugMug, smugline[0].
That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates.
> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok).
Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website.
I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2].
> with a power account you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug
Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present.
I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries.
How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio?
Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.
smugmug.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. The certificate is only valid for secure.smugmug.com The certificate expired on 4/9/2015 16:24. The current time is 7/23/2015 17:43. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
Great article...lots of comments here about how you shouldn't keep that much data. I agree with that for hobbyists, but this is pretty relevant for professionals where the option to cull doesn't extend that far and there are business reasons for retaining terabytes of photos for an extended period. Additionally, next-gen cameras with 40-50MP RAWs are right around the corner.
I use a similar combination of home-built network storage (no RAID - just manual multiple backups) and glacier for offsite redundancy. Dealing with images as a business, I typically only work on a couple shoots at a time so syncing across devices is not a big concern, but long-term archiving and redundancy is.
I don't know, whenever I finish a shoot the first thing I do is go home and delete as many of the photos as I can. The ratio of "great photos"/"photos" is so ridiculously small (like < 1%) that you're realistically never going to use most of the photos you shoot anywhere.
Just a +1 for the Synology NAS products. I'm frequently amazed every time I use it how clean the UI is and how they basically implemented a full window manager for the underlying Linux system in a web app. It's exactly what a NAS should be: powerful and flexible, yet easy to set up and use, but rock solid even if it just sits there. Lots of great things to say about using it in nearly exactly this setup for about a year now.
> Where on earth do normal people store that much data?
They don't.
Normal people realize that keeping that many photos is a negative value proposition; it's a burden rather than an asset. Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like.
By all means, keep everything if you want to, but I find it troublesome that storage is considered the problem, rather than making no attempt to cull images. Clearly a great deal of effort has gone into these images to make his various travelogues, so the effort to see which ones make the cut has been done already.
That said, it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here. Any reasonable PC MoBo is going to have 6 SATA ports, so you can quite easily make a 4 drive RAID 5. Personally, I just RAID 1 a couple 3TB drives and call it good.
Do you have kids? I'm asking because I know we do, and it's really hard to cull photos of your children. If it's blurry or an otherwise crappy picture, then yes, we will delete it. Otherwise, we're holding on to it for the long run and nobody can persuade us otherwise.
I agree that it's a burden, and it's one that many parents likewise share. It is difficult to be as selective with the shutter as you suggest. Kids don't really sit still, and you have to burst during those precious seconds when everything is just right.
In our case a NAS would make a lot of sense. We've tried Arc (with Glacier/S3) and other storage solutions (Time Machine), but I've had my eye on a Synology unit for quite some time. Also, internal storage as you suggest obviously isn't an option for MacBook Pro users like us.
You're setting yourself up for data loss if you use RAID-5 with large consumer drives -- I wouldn't trust less than RAID-6 because the chance of a second failure while rebuilding the array after the first drive failed is too great. Especially since you likely don't have a cold spare on hand, so you have to wait a week to get the replacement drive. RAID-1 may be better since the rebuild is faster and doesn't stress the disks so much.
"Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like."
I know a lot of people who intend to take that route but few actually get around to it. Like filing photos into albums in the olden days, "sort, tag, and cull" is perpetually on the to-do list, so photos just pile up instead.
However, the regular people I know (i.e. people who aren't photography enthusiasts) shoot far less than the terabyte/year he mentions, by orders of magnitude. For one, regular people don't shoot RAW, and a typical consumer-level digital camera, shooting JPG, produces photos around 3-4MB each. Even if you shoot 2000-3000 photos a year, you're talking on the order of 10 gigs, not 1000 gigs.
I share the same sentiment. I have friends who would, on a trip, shoot everything they see, and shoot each scene a dozen times (literally) with little variation in angle, exposure, etc. They do this on maximum resolution, highest quality settings (Fine JPEG, even RAW). After a trip, they dump everything into their storage and hardly ever look at what they've taken again. And they would constantly complain about not having enough storage.
The NAS offers a nice, portable and independent system. I could run a RAID off my desktop, but that makes the desktop bigger and heavier and creates a migration headache when I change processors.
As a side note I think this brings up another interesting problem than just dealing with the storage, which is, how to enjoy so many photos in a lifetime.
Personally, I decided to severely restrict how many images I keep after a trip, so I'm more likely to actually view them years from now.
* Quickly scan pics and delete anything that is flat out bad. I try to get these on the spot, but some slip through.
* Go through again and rate.
* Go through again and adjust ratings further.
* Post process the 5 stars, and put them up to view.
* Everything else is saved through an offline backup service.
I find that the 5 star pics end up being great covers into an event. Often the 5 star pics are good enough, but sometimes they draw me in the look at the rest. The only downside is you have to be ruthless with your ratings.
My parents had some old biscuit tins full of photos from their early years. Work dos, holidays, photos of me and my family growing up, our pets, early memories (for them, rather than me.)
I can't count how many hours I spent sat sorting through those photos and asking my Mum questions about who was in this one, or where this one was taken, or what year this was.
There were probably a few hundred photos. And this was in a time when it was costly to both take and develop photos and a pain to physically store them. I would've gladly sat looking at thousands of photos if they were there.
So now that I'm married and we have a little girl, I think about what our daughter's equivalent to my tin of photos may be. Maybe we do keep too many photos, but maybe she will enjoy looking at our many thousands of photos. Maybe she'll enjoy the technical challenge of making sense of her life in photos and videos. Or maybe she will hate us for storing so much! Either way I think, if I were her, I'd rather have more than less.
I'm kinda up in the air about how to display the images I've sorted and edited the set down to something reasonable. I was a photo editor at my college paper and each event gets one photo you get practice cutting down the photo sets.
I send some to flickr, some google+ and so on. I need a more consistent strategy.
I uploaded to google plus a couple months back and it asked to create a "story". I really like the presentation of photos. Google makes it hard to link and share but the results for a group of photos are good.
Shrug. I've got about 1.5 TB from the last ten or twelve years, and I do often go back through the organized albums and events. Often it's to find something specific, often just looking for something good, often just for nostalgia.
I'm quite glad I have them, and rating and filtering is just as good as tossing them out in my experience.
I put them on my TV. I have a "TV" "playlist" or whatever you want to call it, and I move photos in and out every couple of weeks. I almost always have the TV on. I listen to streaming audio over the TV while it shows photos. When we're looking for something to watch, we often stop and talk about things and the screensaver kicks in, showing us our photos. And it's easy to change up! No picture frames to deal with or hanging anything.
I'm tending to keep all of my originals in case I ever want to flip through the full set, but I've been tagging a smaller portion into either a "good photography" or "good family/etc memory" categories. Then I can easily filter down to a smaller set of photos.
Then again, I haven't been taking a huge amount of photos lately. If I ramp it back up, maybe I'll need to reconsider.
Wow, that was an amazing article. So comprehensive!
A few things I'd like to add though:
- Mylio (http://mylio.com) is very helpful for syncing your collections across things. Not for everyone but it's worth a look to see if it works. Best thing for me is that it's peer to peer so I don't have to upload my collection to a cloud service to access it on all my devices. It does offer cloud but it's end to end encrypted (allegedly). Best thing is that it lets you configure whether you sync previews, thumbnails or originals to each device and even which photos to sync. Really handy if you want a new shoot on your phone to play with on the train or something.
- You can use Google Drive to get your photos into Google Photos. This lets you keep a bit exact backup in Drive while using your quota for Photos as well. Further, Google Apps for Work Unlimited, through a glitch or deliberately I don't know, offers unlimited Drive storage to accounts even with a single user in their organisation. I pay $10/month for unlimited Google Drive storage. It's advertised as being 1TB for single users so I'm not sure if this is a bug but thought it was worth mentioning.
- Google Photos will (quite helpfully) use the JPEG previews you embed in a DNG photo so if you tend to touch up things in Lightroom, embedding them will ensure that Google Photos displays things in the same way.
Really though, this was an amazingly comprehensive article. Thanks for posting!
Storage is cheap. Backup is easy (if you trust the cloud).
Keep as many TB local storage as you need (a non pro should probably be fine with a few TB for stills of you cull the imports of near-duplicates and OOF shots etc). Spinning disks cost next to nothing and are good enough.
Then, if you want, use one or more means of local protection, such as mirrored local disks or sync to a NAS, preferably at a remote location to protect against theft and fire but local is ok if you must. If you trust your backup service and you have a very good internet connection you could skip this step and just use a few TB of local storage.
Last and most importantly: have a proper backup. syncing to a copy isn't backup. A backup from which you can restore any file from history, after you corrupt it or accidentally delete it (you will do this, and it will happen many more times than you suffer from a disk malfunction or burglary). Even your own carefully crafted backup solution will fail. So plan for that too (by using a 3rd party service too).
There are several very cheap providers of unlimited backup of this kind, for example CrashPlan. Regardless of whether I used proper backup to a remote storage, I'd still make sure to also backup to a cloud service, or even backup both the PC and the NAS to the same service (at no extra cost if it's an unlimited service such as the CrashPlan 10 computer family plan).
Great article, I've had a similar setup for years now.
An 8 year old readynas that's still running, it's really slow but it works.
I do a sync with that and a local desktop with a big external drive.
And then I back up that local desktop to crashplan.
I have a comment about the drives, I generally like purchasing different manufacturer drives for my NAS when I'm buying them in bulk. I always worry about multiple drives from the same batch failing around the same time. It's happened to me before so now I'll buy similar capacity drives but from different models or mfrs.
> The bad news is that I have over 1TB of photos and the next pricing tier after 1TB ($9.99/mo) is 10TB and that costs a whopping $99.99 per month. So I use Google Photos with the free compressed setting. I don't actually mind since I have my own file backup solution and I use it more for that added layer of intelligence, convenience and utility.
I've tried doing as suggested here, but here's the problem: if it's too expensive to store your RAW images on the cloud (which it is for most people), then your cloud photo library is really just a proxy of your library. That's not to say it isn't useful, but unless it's synchronized both ways with the original files, you're just asking for disorganization - from my experience anyway. You have to be careful and basically only touch the originals to let changes propagate one-way to the cloud proxy.
If it isn't hosting your RAW files, then it doesn't fill the role of a backup, and if your edits or tagging on the cloud aren't applied back to your originals, then any time/effort you put into organizing and editing your library on the cloud is somewhat wasted.
To be honest, I do use Apple Photo Streams for something similar - but I just treat it as a convenience for low-quality output/viewing of recent photos, mostly from my phone. Even then, the Photo Stream part is still a mess. My main library resides on a NAS (as in the article), is backed up to 2 low-cost cloud backup providers (still much cheaper than hosting a single RAW copy on Google Photos), and I use Lightroom for all actual editing and tagging since it applies to the authoritative library.
My point is - I too look forward to the day where at least one copy of my full library can be hosted on something like Google Photos in the cloud, but we're still a ways off from that being practical. Google Photos can be a convenience in some ways, but at current prices it really doesn't fit what I'm looking for.
> My main library resides on a NAS (as in the article), is backed up to 2 low-cost cloud backup providers (still much cheaper than hosting a single RAW copy on Google Photos), and I use Lightroom for all actual editing and tagging since it applies to the authoritative library.
I'm doing something similar, but just backing up to CrashPlan (which has a flat fee for backing up). What cloud providers are you using?
Reading these comments it makes me think that what is being show here in many of these responses is one of core issues with the software world at large.
The issue is that of "It's not the way I do it therefore no-one should do it like that."
If a person wants to hold on to and horde masses of data then that is their prerogative. To give suggestions on how one would do it from their own view is acceptable but to outright dismiss another persons wants and needs is very myopic.
One could even view the building of the data storage systems as a hobby in itself and the act of doing so and documenting it will be of use to others, even in other industries.
I know of some professional photographers who have really poor data setups as they are very not that tech savvy so linking them to an article like this is very helpful.
"Well let's put aside the disk failure issue. Modern 4-drive NAS systems can tolerate a lost drive and alert you promptly to replace it. You'd have to have pretty bad luck to lose more than one drive at the exact same time."
Very interesting and well thought out posting, but the above quotation represents a very, very naive understanding of how these arrays work with large, multi-TB hard drives.
In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.
I am not anti-NAS - I use them myself for critical data - but with 3 and 4TB hard drive, I would only use raidz3 (or equivalent) at this point (and preferably with 12 or fewer drives in the array).
Is a RAID really necessary though? I know the RAID units today are pretty good, but I've had some failures in the past with older systems, and I just stay away from them, because I have less than 1TB of data that I can't afford to lose, and the mirroring doesn't really add a lot of value for my needs.
To keep things simple, I just make redundant copies by pointing Crashplan to multiple targets - the cloud, a single-drive NAS, and an internal hard drive in my desktop dedicated for backups.
I also burn periodic copies of my most critical data to Blu-Rays. Super critical data gets burned to M-Disc Blu-Rays.
> In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.
Are you talking about Unrecoverable Read Errors? [1]
I think the key point here is raidz3 -- exactly why I've been running a FreeNAS server for the past 4 years. That and backing it up to Crashplan in case of a multi-drive failure.
I considered a NAS, but I had a Linux server already, so I just upgraded it with 6 4TB drives and installed ZFS [0]. I'm using raidz2, which is doubly redundant like RAID-6. For long-term backup I just got a BD-R drive with M-Disc support [1]; haven't tried it yet.
This still makes more sense to me than trying to store it all in the cloud.
Slightly off topic, but since no one else had mentioned it, just wanted to say the rest of his blog is incredibly well done (at least on mobile.) Clicking through to his "Greece" link (http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/greece/two-weeks-in-greece/) was a great decision. Great photography, great layout/design, and good UX overall (I love how it tells a story, and keeps track of what you've seen)
The thing that kind of jumped out at me was the RAID5 configuration - I can't imagine doing that with 3TB drives unless he really does have everything on there also backed up to another location.
Culling is an important part of the photographic process. However, far be it from me to tell another photographer what they should and shouldn't keep. We all have our quirks. Good luck convincing me to delete even a blurry photo of my daughter :) Storage is still a huge problem for photographers. There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process. It's still outside the realm of a lot of photographers' skillsets.
For any photographers looking to self-host their collections, I strongly recommend taking a look at Koken. Paul mentions it in his article. Unfortunately, they're looking to sell the company - so I'm not sure how long their product will be around, but it's a great solution for self-hosted photos. http://koken.me/
If you're willing to pay for Amazon Prime, you get unlimited cloud storage for all your photos. RAW included. The only method to upload/download is via the clunky web UI, but if reliable storage is what you're after, it's a pretty hard bargain.
I love the detail in this article! Recently, my uncle passed away, and I started thinking about the legacy of my photos (27k). The system the author describes works for him and he understands it in detail, but I wonder if anyone else in his family does. If (when?) he passes away, his heirs will not have enough free time in rest of their lives to evaluate his stored media. Likewise, does he have enough free time left in his life to view each of his media objects at least once more? One reason why our generation will "go dark" historically, may be that our heirs, facing terabytes of our data to review, on top of their own data, will simply walk away from the task and delete our data.
I think it would really be great if services like Google Photos, Amazon Cloud Drive, Smugmug and others with unlimited paid plan for pictures and videos had self service stations on major tourist spots where people could easily transfer the data from SD cards and leave the place certain that all the content would be on their cloud account in less than 30 minutes. They could even receive a notification. This way people wouldn't need to worry about data storage while far from home. Too many backpackers have to carry a computer only because they have to unload their memory cards. And also Hotel connection are mostly very slow to upload hundreds of Gbs of pictures and videos.
[+] [-] NateDad|10 years ago|reply
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways:
1) Out of business
2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated
That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them.
Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|10 years ago|reply
Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for!
I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot.
This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account?
Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't!
Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added).
And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)
[+] [-] georgemcbay|10 years ago|reply
All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO.
I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups.
For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.
[+] [-] gingerlime|10 years ago|reply
That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates.
[0] https://github.com/gingerlime/smugline
[+] [-] ValentineC|10 years ago|reply
Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website.
I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2].
[1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-...
[2] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-...
[+] [-] samch|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324
[+] [-] bambax|10 years ago|reply
Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present.
I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries.
How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio?
Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.
[+] [-] acdha|10 years ago|reply
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-ni...
[+] [-] java-man|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jly|10 years ago|reply
I use a similar combination of home-built network storage (no RAID - just manual multiple backups) and glacier for offsite redundancy. Dealing with images as a business, I typically only work on a couple shoots at a time so syncing across devices is not a big concern, but long-term archiving and redundancy is.
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|10 years ago|reply
The future is here! Canon's 50.6 MP 5DS is shipping now.
[+] [-] calinet6|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|10 years ago|reply
They don't.
Normal people realize that keeping that many photos is a negative value proposition; it's a burden rather than an asset. Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like.
By all means, keep everything if you want to, but I find it troublesome that storage is considered the problem, rather than making no attempt to cull images. Clearly a great deal of effort has gone into these images to make his various travelogues, so the effort to see which ones make the cut has been done already.
That said, it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here. Any reasonable PC MoBo is going to have 6 SATA ports, so you can quite easily make a 4 drive RAID 5. Personally, I just RAID 1 a couple 3TB drives and call it good.
[+] [-] samch|10 years ago|reply
I agree that it's a burden, and it's one that many parents likewise share. It is difficult to be as selective with the shutter as you suggest. Kids don't really sit still, and you have to burst during those precious seconds when everything is just right.
In our case a NAS would make a lot of sense. We've tried Arc (with Glacier/S3) and other storage solutions (Time Machine), but I've had my eye on a Synology unit for quite some time. Also, internal storage as you suggest obviously isn't an option for MacBook Pro users like us.
[+] [-] Johnny555|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tertius|10 years ago|reply
This is the exception to the rule. Not normal.
[+] [-] _delirium|10 years ago|reply
However, the regular people I know (i.e. people who aren't photography enthusiasts) shoot far less than the terabyte/year he mentions, by orders of magnitude. For one, regular people don't shoot RAW, and a typical consumer-level digital camera, shooting JPG, produces photos around 3-4MB each. Even if you shoot 2000-3000 photos a year, you're talking on the order of 10 gigs, not 1000 gigs.
[+] [-] chinhodado|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|10 years ago|reply
The NAS offers a nice, portable and independent system. I could run a RAID off my desktop, but that makes the desktop bigger and heavier and creates a migration headache when I change processors.
[+] [-] magic5227|10 years ago|reply
Personally, I decided to severely restrict how many images I keep after a trip, so I'm more likely to actually view them years from now.
[+] [-] matwood|10 years ago|reply
* Quickly scan pics and delete anything that is flat out bad. I try to get these on the spot, but some slip through.
* Go through again and rate.
* Go through again and adjust ratings further.
* Post process the 5 stars, and put them up to view.
* Everything else is saved through an offline backup service.
I find that the 5 star pics end up being great covers into an event. Often the 5 star pics are good enough, but sometimes they draw me in the look at the rest. The only downside is you have to be ruthless with your ratings.
[+] [-] gpmcadam|10 years ago|reply
I can't count how many hours I spent sat sorting through those photos and asking my Mum questions about who was in this one, or where this one was taken, or what year this was.
There were probably a few hundred photos. And this was in a time when it was costly to both take and develop photos and a pain to physically store them. I would've gladly sat looking at thousands of photos if they were there.
So now that I'm married and we have a little girl, I think about what our daughter's equivalent to my tin of photos may be. Maybe we do keep too many photos, but maybe she will enjoy looking at our many thousands of photos. Maybe she'll enjoy the technical challenge of making sense of her life in photos and videos. Or maybe she will hate us for storing so much! Either way I think, if I were her, I'd rather have more than less.
[+] [-] acomjean|10 years ago|reply
I send some to flickr, some google+ and so on. I need a more consistent strategy.
I uploaded to google plus a couple months back and it asked to create a "story". I really like the presentation of photos. Google makes it hard to link and share but the results for a group of photos are good.
The example:
https://plus.google.com/115477748015409107850/stories/4b3ddf...
Same link, differnt url. (sigh... google)
https://plus.google.com/+AramComjean/posts/ig1cSZAvt9Q
[+] [-] calinet6|10 years ago|reply
I'm quite glad I have them, and rating and filtering is just as good as tossing them out in my experience.
[+] [-] vitd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlesieutre|10 years ago|reply
Then again, I haven't been taking a huge amount of photos lately. If I ramp it back up, maybe I'll need to reconsider.
[+] [-] Veratyr|10 years ago|reply
A few things I'd like to add though:
- Mylio (http://mylio.com) is very helpful for syncing your collections across things. Not for everyone but it's worth a look to see if it works. Best thing for me is that it's peer to peer so I don't have to upload my collection to a cloud service to access it on all my devices. It does offer cloud but it's end to end encrypted (allegedly). Best thing is that it lets you configure whether you sync previews, thumbnails or originals to each device and even which photos to sync. Really handy if you want a new shoot on your phone to play with on the train or something.
- You can use Google Drive to get your photos into Google Photos. This lets you keep a bit exact backup in Drive while using your quota for Photos as well. Further, Google Apps for Work Unlimited, through a glitch or deliberately I don't know, offers unlimited Drive storage to accounts even with a single user in their organisation. I pay $10/month for unlimited Google Drive storage. It's advertised as being 1TB for single users so I'm not sure if this is a bug but thought it was worth mentioning.
- Google Photos will (quite helpfully) use the JPEG previews you embed in a DNG photo so if you tend to touch up things in Lightroom, embedding them will ensure that Google Photos displays things in the same way.
Really though, this was an amazingly comprehensive article. Thanks for posting!
[+] [-] alkonaut|10 years ago|reply
Keep as many TB local storage as you need (a non pro should probably be fine with a few TB for stills of you cull the imports of near-duplicates and OOF shots etc). Spinning disks cost next to nothing and are good enough.
Then, if you want, use one or more means of local protection, such as mirrored local disks or sync to a NAS, preferably at a remote location to protect against theft and fire but local is ok if you must. If you trust your backup service and you have a very good internet connection you could skip this step and just use a few TB of local storage.
Last and most importantly: have a proper backup. syncing to a copy isn't backup. A backup from which you can restore any file from history, after you corrupt it or accidentally delete it (you will do this, and it will happen many more times than you suffer from a disk malfunction or burglary). Even your own carefully crafted backup solution will fail. So plan for that too (by using a 3rd party service too).
There are several very cheap providers of unlimited backup of this kind, for example CrashPlan. Regardless of whether I used proper backup to a remote storage, I'd still make sure to also backup to a cloud service, or even backup both the PC and the NAS to the same service (at no extra cost if it's an unlimited service such as the CrashPlan 10 computer family plan).
[+] [-] knurdle|10 years ago|reply
An 8 year old readynas that's still running, it's really slow but it works. I do a sync with that and a local desktop with a big external drive. And then I back up that local desktop to crashplan.
I have a comment about the drives, I generally like purchasing different manufacturer drives for my NAS when I'm buying them in bulk. I always worry about multiple drives from the same batch failing around the same time. It's happened to me before so now I'll buy similar capacity drives but from different models or mfrs.
[+] [-] dperfect|10 years ago|reply
I've tried doing as suggested here, but here's the problem: if it's too expensive to store your RAW images on the cloud (which it is for most people), then your cloud photo library is really just a proxy of your library. That's not to say it isn't useful, but unless it's synchronized both ways with the original files, you're just asking for disorganization - from my experience anyway. You have to be careful and basically only touch the originals to let changes propagate one-way to the cloud proxy.
If it isn't hosting your RAW files, then it doesn't fill the role of a backup, and if your edits or tagging on the cloud aren't applied back to your originals, then any time/effort you put into organizing and editing your library on the cloud is somewhat wasted.
To be honest, I do use Apple Photo Streams for something similar - but I just treat it as a convenience for low-quality output/viewing of recent photos, mostly from my phone. Even then, the Photo Stream part is still a mess. My main library resides on a NAS (as in the article), is backed up to 2 low-cost cloud backup providers (still much cheaper than hosting a single RAW copy on Google Photos), and I use Lightroom for all actual editing and tagging since it applies to the authoritative library.
My point is - I too look forward to the day where at least one copy of my full library can be hosted on something like Google Photos in the cloud, but we're still a ways off from that being practical. Google Photos can be a convenience in some ways, but at current prices it really doesn't fit what I'm looking for.
[+] [-] ValentineC|10 years ago|reply
I'm doing something similar, but just backing up to CrashPlan (which has a flat fee for backing up). What cloud providers are you using?
[+] [-] jupiter909|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
Very interesting and well thought out posting, but the above quotation represents a very, very naive understanding of how these arrays work with large, multi-TB hard drives.
In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.
I am not anti-NAS - I use them myself for critical data - but with 3 and 4TB hard drive, I would only use raidz3 (or equivalent) at this point (and preferably with 12 or fewer drives in the array).
[+] [-] slantyyz|10 years ago|reply
To keep things simple, I just make redundant copies by pointing Crashplan to multiple targets - the cloud, a single-drive NAS, and an internal hard drive in my desktop dedicated for backups.
I also burn periodic copies of my most critical data to Blu-Rays. Super critical data gets burned to M-Disc Blu-Rays.
[+] [-] ValentineC|10 years ago|reply
Are you talking about Unrecoverable Read Errors? [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8306499
[+] [-] lh7777|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|10 years ago|reply
This still makes more sense to me than trying to store it all in the cloud.
[0] http://zfsonlinux.org/ [1] http://www.mdisc.com/
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[+] [-] ishikawa|10 years ago|reply