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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Nice, looks like you've been annoyed at some of the same things I have for a while. A couple of questions:

1) Unlimited. So you will keep a copy my 1000s of 10-20mb RAW files for 8 USD/Month ?

2) Unlimited part two: How about a x/dollars/month > NxGB of storage (Where N is magic:)? IE: Some transparency towards your margins? And accounts for those that don't need quite 100USD/Year worth of service? I absolutely see that having a treshhold makes sense, but to me 8/Month seems high.

3) Since you're probably not* actually unlimited -- who are your target users? Someone with 1000s of high quality jpegs? Someone fed up with picasa/flickr/etc ? Do you have an actual roof on bandwidth?

4) The scaling: Do you do it browser side (ie: most of the pictures are rather shoddy quality compared to custom scaled/cropped images?)? Some of it server side, some browser side?

5) Which formats do you support? (Jpeg2000, other high quality formats?)

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Hi,

1) At the moment we only support jpg and png. So a copy of your 1000s of avg 10MB (max worst case global image size average, probably lower). Which is fine.

2+3) Our motivation with single tier was simplicity. Simplicity of the homepage, simplicity of thinking while you read something before you hit that 'Try' button..

I am not sure if a general user thinks about our margins and I can be wrong, but I think we should try to match the value he gets + position ourselves regarding to competition. If somebody cares about margins the S3 prices are a pretty good general storage reference point ;-)

To be completely transparent, we currently think that with an unlimited account we shouldn't get much more than ~40GB of jpegs from a user over his lifetime ON AVERAGE. Once this is amortized across big enough number of users I doubt it will get much more than that. zenfolio.com has been around for many many years and they have an unlimited account for $50/year and cater to professionals with huge files (think a wedding photographer who uploads couple GBs each other weekend).

Our average target user is not a pro (we are not aspiring to be a portfolio website at the moment) but has photography as a hobby and wants a clean no-bulshit way to upload and share his photos across online and offline personas.

4) All server side, with aggressive caching and on-the-fly scaling. No scaling on the client.

5) Just a jpeg and png to simplify the pipeline in MVP, if we see an interest in other formats we will investigate. Would you like to see a support for jpeg2000? For upload or also for serving? At the moment, the browser support seems still weak.

Thanks for your clear answers :-)

I absolutely see the simplicity argument. Personally I'm not sure if 8/month is too high though. I'll have to think about it -- with the (very swift) scaling on the server, I see more what you offer -- not sure if you really fit my use case though. But you're much nicer IMNHO than flickr/picasa.

I recently priced some storage and found that Amazon/Rackspace are at around 10 cents/GB/Month (without transfer...) and a cheap dedicated server would end up around 3 cents/GB/Month (with limited transfer -- free in, 5000GB/Month out) -- but this is for ~2TB of usable storage.

With overhead (all kinds, people, hosting, transfer) -- I suspect it's not very realistic (or rather, attractive) to compete with Amazon on price. I certainly don't need 2TB "in the cloud" right now... and can't quite justify paying for it... yet ;-)

As for formats, I see a use for jpeg2000/webp (yeah, looks like jpeg2000 is pretty much dead for web...) - and for DNG. But DNG would (for now) be for archival storage. Which may or may not be a use case you want to cover.

Thanks for the compliment :) The focus of the service has to do with the focus of the interface, that is why community based services (500px, flickr, social networks as such) will always have a polluted interface (comment widgets, buttons etc) because they need to generate engagement around user content. I could be wrong here about the extent to which this pollution actually matters for users.

With dofsome we are trying to separate the photo presentation into a stand-alone service and allow the user to use their social services as distribution channels for their content.

Yeah, no point in competing with S3, better focus on a product built on top of it ;-)

At the moment I am thinking about just doing imports from online backup solutions and really focus on the presentation. For a viable storage MVP you definitely need device specific uploaders..

The reason I mention DNG is because it can be used as "superset" archiving format. It should be feasible to accept pretty much any kind of RAW in, archive a copy of the raw in the DNG (or just trust the conversion) -- and so let the users have an original on your servers. Again, not sure if you want to be a backup/archive for images, or just a point of publication (for me that is all that jpeg/png will ever be -- and it's not really something I am interested in paying for -- I would still have to deal with the headache of "publishing" from my Digital Negatives -- and maintaining that collection).

As camera technology continue to improve and storage continue dropping in price (at least on the camera end, flash cards etc) I suspect more and more low end cameras will support some form of DNG-format.

Good questions and great answers !

About 5), (and possibly last paragraph of 2+3)), I would like to see all RAW files supported. You mentionned DNG, I guess you're a Nikon user. I'm not. And I'm right your target user : (I'm Swiss,) not a pro, not looking for an on-line portfolio, but former photographer now doing it as a hobby. When not shooting film I only shoot RAW, and mine are .cr2, not .dng.

Long-term archiving of my digital pictures (be it png, jpg, cr2, png, scanner raw format) has been a concern for quite a long time. I have been a paying flickr user for a few years now but it doesn't fit my needs as I cannot store there my RAW files. I would definately pay 8$/m to have a safe backup somewhere, and your display / scaling / serving service would be a huge +. :)

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