Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat? | Hacker News Reader

Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat?

bigballi.com

23 pointsBigBalli29 comments

At current prices of approximately $20/terabyte I don't really care about storage space any more. I take an average of 500 pictures a month and store a lot of other data, and though I am running out of space on my storage drive right now it took years to fill those terabytes and adding another drive doesn't feel like a big deal. Do I need most of this data? Unlikely, but there are times I find myself going back to images or other data from years ago because of something I overlooked at the time. If I downsize pictures, there's no way to get that information back, whereas space is cheap. I wonder if the author might not be better off with a good vector converter, which would save plenty of space but still provide beautiful image quality at any scale, now or in the future.

What do you take photos of and with what? I think that my lack of a storage strategy is part of what has held me back from really pushing myself to produce more data/art/music. I imagine a sort of life logging habit with photos of things I want to document. The issue then becomes discoverability and organization...

A mix of journalistic, nature, and sentimental photographs - sometimes with my phone, but mostly with DSLR cameras. I don't spent time tagging or cataloguing, I just put things in folders by date, and sometimes copy them into a second folder by subject if they're particularly important to me. I have a very memory for images and context so it's not much effort for me to go back and look things up, though I am excited by the possibilities of AI image tagging.

Yes, this sounds short-sighted. They seem to be a mac user so I can only guess it might have to do with lack of expandability of the used hardware? I have two 12tb drives in my home server and 2tb offsite backup for important stuff (=photos and some documents). Scaling down photos never even crossed my mind.

> They seem to be a mac user so I can only guess it might have to do with lack of expandability of the used hardware?

More enthusiastic Mac-using photographers would probably invest in a consumer NAS like a Synology for expandable storage. It's also great for offloading videos and other large, infrequently-accessed files.

Some Apple users these days also opt into paying for more storage for iCloud Photo Library. I personally think it's a great deal, since I can also get away with buying an iPhone with the lowest amount of built-in storage (saving ~$100 over the life of the phone), in exchange for paying $0.99/$2.99 more a month.

Yes, on a Mac and have multiple external hard drives for backup. It's not merely about saving space, I dislike the principle of "wasting".

If it's a choice between wasting disk space or wasting your time?

I grew up taking photos in 35mm film camera. But I remember going through the photos many many times after taking them. The digital data overload is not just about money or storage. The more clutter you have, the harder it will become to discover and cherish what matters. How many of your photos do your remember and can recall fondly? The photos widget on the iPhone somewhat helps here.

I'm actually trying to help add a bit of serendipity to browsing digital photo and video libraries with my self-hosted app, PhotoStructure: when you browse hierarchies, it picks out random samples of the assets that match that hierarchy.

I've got a pretty large library (>500k assets), and never recreationally browse with apple photos or Google Photos, but can get lost for an hour at a time with PhotoStructure.

https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/#fast-and-...

Personally I enjoy having "more photos" along the way, they help bring me back in the memory. It's nice to remember details that our mind lost.

Agreed, but I like to avoid Cloud storage for personal data as much a possible... More than for privacy, for one day losing access to it for some reason.

Definitely. It's simply not worth my time to sort out what's actually needs to be kept for anything less than video files.

And, yes, I don't need 10mb worth of goat. Sometimes I want to blow up one part of a picture, though, and then you need all those pixels.

I must confess I did something similar a long time ago, when hard drive space was expensive. I converted all my 4MP photos to 1024x768 - that was the biggest screen resolution imaginable at the time on the "huge" 17" monitors. Everything bigger was just megapixel race.

Fast forward 10 years and I still have all the resized photos in my phone (cloud), but even the small phone screen is so good that you can easily see the difference.

I've also noticed that people's habits change, I see more and more people flipping trough pictures on their phones and zooming in on the ones they like.

Who knows what picture viewing habits we will have in 10 years. Maybe with some VR implants we will want to enjoy our old photos in all glorious 12 megapixels.

Not for nothing, 35mm film contains 87 megapixels of data. So even printed small in a 4 X 6 Photo you could make it large and have a really good image.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.html

The storage is worth it. Especially if i can just dump it somewhere in the cloud.

Theoretically, under ideal conditions.

I scanned my childhood photos shot on a Minolta at 5000dpi and in the end this was overkill for 99% of photos. Remember the time before autofocus? Yes, 99% of photos were more or less just quick shots of people/kids in motion so there was never time to perfectly adjust focus. There are a couple of steady portrait shots that look just amazing though. Maybe those ai upscalers will save the day in another decade or so.

That's a good point, didn't think of it... Might go back to keep highnres lol

I got a funny thought reading your post. We have these deep fakes based on data from a still photo.

Some day that 12MP goat picture will be the data for a pet-based deep fake of your dog or cat. :)

Seeing the title, I was anticipating something more exciting than a run-of-the-mill resize script...

Namely I thought, did someone make a clever tool that recognises "boring" pictures and would reduce their size? You'd want high res for a group photo of say 100 employees (not that we'll have that in 2020-2021...) or a panorama with interesting details if you zoom in. For the goat, of course zooming in you'd just see its fur, or individual leaves of grass, so reducing its resolution wouldn't matter much.

> Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat?

DVDs are only 720 and 26 frames or something. What is 'quality' changes.

When your tv is your wall maybe you will need that 10 meg.

You probably won't care about the goat though. Kinda needs a person in it to keep its value. But whatever's some people like random goats and suns doing things.

Possible to use a better codec? H266 out yet?

Yes! Show me the hi-res goat!

What a disappointing article. I was all excited...

Do you really need a photo of a goat? I'm not the author so I wouldn't really know, but if you have aa picture of the back of a goat in shade and you're considering destructively resizing it to save space, maybe it's the fact that it's a mediocre photo of the back of a goat that's the issue, and not the size.

If you really want to come back in the future and reflect on your fond memories of seeing the back of a goat, keep the original size and store it in cheap cold storage. If not, maybe get rid of it?

I cropped the part I care about before posting.

>Not only did I need to batch resize all images, I also wanted to preserve all image metadata and EXIF data (date, time, location, etc). I was unable to find a tool to perform such a basic but crucial task so I set out to build it myself.

It looks like the author is using a Mac, so XnConvert would be just fine for this task:

https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/

Why not use Imagemagick? It's by far the simplest and most practical tool for image manipulation.

Some people may prefer a GUI workflow.

not preinstalled. Wanted something anyone could run out of the box.

not free.

I take your point about pre-installed applications/libraries, but XnConvert is free for non-commercial use according to their site. It appears to be freeware rather than open source.

That's a b-a-a-a-a-a-d request.

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