Storage for Photographers, Part 2
paulstamatiou.com
paulstamatiou.com
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.)
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.
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.
FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.
What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline.
Now I'm not sure if that means, it's recompressed when it's streamed, or if it's recompressed when it's uploading, for streaming.
For videos, we don't preserve the uploaded video for a variety of reasons, but the primary being that our intent is to support Internet-deliverable formats & filesizes. Customers regularly upload videos that vastly exceed Blu-ray bitrates (literally hundreds of megabits-per-second) that just aren't Internet-useful.
That's different from a JPEG, GIF, or PNG where the original file is Internet-useful, deliverable, and makes a meaningful difference. That file is very useful for sharing, which is what we do - we share.
We don't consider ourselves to be a backup service, and there are lots of great backup services out there to choose from that would love to take a 3GB 5 minute video. We take extraordinary care with our customers photos & videos, but we're a photo & video sharing service, not a backup service.
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.
3) They start to mine your data to learn more about you...
Compared to Smugmug I think OneDrive (Office 365) and Amazon Cloud Drive seems like the better option to me though. With ACD I can store any file type and encrypt it with Arq[1] for $60 a year.
SmugMug has no ads, so #3 hasn't seemed appealing to us, let alone that I think we already have a great contract with our customers: They pay us right up front, and in return we build the best photo sharing service in the world. Seems fair to me. :)
I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment.
13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :)
Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck.
[edited: typo]
Here are my replies(tl;dr: Yes!):
1) http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?s=14872c114ae3fe4ff300ac6f...
2) http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=218132&postcount=16
[edited to add 2nd reply since it seemed relevant]
Any idea if/when you'll be supporting 4k video? I could do with somewhere good to store my videos, but I'm mostly shooting in 4k these days...
I think it's safe to say we will support 4K sometime in the future, but that's pending customer demand, which we're just not seeing huge amounts of.
FYI, it isn't constrained technically or for business reasons, but instead is constrained for product reasons. We can see that longer videos simply don't get watched as often. And we rarely get pushback from our customers on the 20 minute limit, probably for this reason - they're making videos their friends, families & customers want to watch, which are less than 20 minutes.
But I'd love to know your use case and what you'd use longer video lengths for. Entirely possible we're off base here and aren't thinking of some great use cases.
Every video service ends up deciding what's more important to them. To us, our decision point has been that we should deliver higher quality 1080p video than anywhere else on the Internet, and I believe we deliver that today. Our quality at that resolution exceeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. As a result, though, fewer people can stream it at 1080p. There are two parts to our bet: 1) Bandwidth continues to increase, so in the future more people will be able to view it at this quality, and 2) our brand promise is that your photos & videos look better here than anywhere else.
But we can't just leave it at that, because people do want to watch these videos. So what we do is compromise on the compression at lower resolutions so they stream quickly and with few errors. At 720p and lower, we're comparable to the other services in terms of quality, bitrate, and deliverability. In the end, it means we can deliver a very good experience to people with ample bandwidth, and a fairly good experience to people without.
If you have some examples, I'd be happy to take a look and make sure we're meeting our goals on both those fronts.
Do you keep the original source files if I need to access them, or just the recompressed files?
We definitely do not support unlimited RAW uploads, and we do recompress videos for streaming (at insanely high quality, though!). Stay tuned on RAW.
Additionally, we limit photos (JPEG, GIF, PNG) to 150MB or 210 Megapixels apiece, and videos to 20 minutes and 3GB. Those have continued to grow over time as additional devices demand them, and I expect that trend to continue.
[1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-...
So far the only real alternative I'm aware of is pics.io.
I'm mulling over implementing it myself, as a self-host solution. Probably aim for ingesting RAWs to DNGs, and have the possibility of losslessly doing some edit/transforms (store the operations outside the DNG files) -- along with export/view/cache as jpeg and jpeg 2000 for web browsing etc.
I suppose one would still need DNG/RAW if one want to keep the door open for being able to "re-develop from negative" on archived photos (jfr. archiving/keeping old negatives, which would be the equivalent for traditional photography).
Anyway, the site[1] might be of interest for those that find this thread interesting.
[1] http://www.dpbestflow.org/file-format/archive-file-formats
Which means we need to build something entirely new, which I'm happy to do, but we're currently in limbo and gathering feedback.
If your product is storage, and is unlimited at a flat rate, and you continue to scale, you will have to throttle somewhere (speed, "image quality", upload rate, whatever) or you'll be out of business.
So maybe your product isn't plain old storage ? Maybe this doesn't apply to you. Again, cheers and best of luck to you.
We're unlimited JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and our target market is people passionate about photography. That is a major differentiator, and certainly helps constrain costs.
That being said, we do have some truly giant consumers. But it works. :)
I just think, fundamentally, people don't want to worry about managing their photo storage. I certainly don't. So I built a service that doesn't have that constraint, then figured out how to make money at it.
You might want to read up on how long Smugmug has been in business :)
They are pretty awesome. I recently switched over to them after their UI improvements and admin trumped a previous photo hosting provider.
I liked your service and cancelled because I was in China and couldn't reliably use the service. Every one of those reminder emails I've receive makes me feel like SmugMug is not a good company. I am not in China anymore and don't think I would use the service of a company that can manage to send so many emails to remind me they can't take money out of my bank but don't do so when they do.
Second, by way of explanation, not apology, we're the keepers of people's priceless memories & creations. We cannot lose them. But at the same time, we can't offer our service for free, or we'd lose everyone's photos. When someone's credit card expires, we've entered the danger zone where, if we're not very careful, we might inadvertently lose someone's photos who actually really wants to pay.
The summary is we hear more than 100:1 from people about "I didn't get that email!" versus "You're emailing me too much about this!". And when it literally means the difference between removing someone's photos or not, we err on the side of trying to get ahold of you aggressively so you can make an informed choice about your content rather than having us make an automated one.
We go to great lengths to ensure even expired accounts don't lose their photos, but there's only so much we can do.
Again, very sorry our policies & systems are annoying you, and would love to fix & improve them. Please do get in touch.
It seems to me there are three major factors here: * the annual fee * the price of storage at their scale * the average amount of storage used per customer
It seems to me entirely possible that these factors could have values such that true unlimited storage is sustainable, barring a malicious actor.
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.
(example: http://photos.michaeldehaan.net)
As for the "buy" option, it's pretty easy to turn off - you can save a "quick settings" set of options and then select all your galleries, and then apply the "quick settings" to the batch of galleries. And when creating a new gallery, just pick that preset of "quick settings". This includes more than just the "buy" option, and also things like whether to show EXIF, and stuff like that.
The one thing you can't do is change the "quick setting" and then have all the galleries change automatically to match the setting.
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-...
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-ni...
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... :-)
IIUC I think anonymous / not logged in people will always see ads on your pics regardless of your account status.
It doesn't make "perfect sense" to me that an "Ad-Free Account" would deliver ads to anyone. The name strongly suggested that the visitors to my gallery would be free from ads. That's exactly what I wanted and what I was happy to pay good money for.
Sure, you could say it's my fault for not reading the fine print. But you have to admit that the very name of the account was highly misleading.
I'm glad they changed it so now my visitors are free from ads as the original account name led me to believe. Still, it sucks that they used such a misleading name in the first place.
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.
The future is here! Canon's 50.6 MP 5DS is shipping now.
I'm super impressed with the Fuji lineup lately (and size) - i.e. XT-1 (clarification: I own one), though at APS-C I'd still like a greater megapixel count. Faster lenses and portability do seem to be sufficiently make up for the sensor size in my book though; but if Sony was putting out some drool-worthy fast primes it would be tempting.
Available Light / Flash > Lenses >>> Camera
Also lenses hold(or appreciate in the case of the EF 300 2.8 and 400 2.8) while you can pick up last-gens camera body for a hugely discounted price.
Totally agree about available light being the most important thing, though. I think it even trumps having a good subject in many cases.
Now Canon with proper sensors, that would be a killer combination, wouldn't it
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.
I don't understand why people keep the same shot 23423352 times.
Over time, it becomes a burden to maintain all that.
It's not always about how technically or artistically great a photo is. Sometimes it's about an emotional connection to a photo.
When I did a massive cull of my library last year, I kept quite a few admittedly bad shots, simply because they captured a meaningful moment to me.
1) when there's maybe couple photos available 2) when you have 4GB of the same session, with multiple burst shots.
I'd even argue that having 1 photo of a certain event brings you back memories of most what happened at that certain time IF you spent it there fully - meaning not jerking around most of the time with a camera/mobile phone taking photos.
When you have small kids or pets, you often have to "spray and pray" to get a sharp shot. I know some people keep the entire burst set of shots - their prerogative. I don't, I take the best shot or two. But sometimes that "best" shot still didn't come out great, whether it be because of thin DOF (often from being forced to shoot wide open in bad light), motion blur, or a slightly missed focus.
This is the exception to the rule. Not normal.
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.
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.
If you have someone in your life who likes to do genealogy research, talk to them. You might also find that you would have been Very Interested in seeing what your grandparents did in their spare time, hear how they spoke, and so forth.
30 years from now, my kids will (I hope) be starting their own families, and I'd like their kids to be able to have insight into what their parents were like as kids, or what I and my wife are like as parents.
The busy work and stress of dealing with digital photos has actually caused me to take fewer photos. I have a preservationist bent and I just don't want to deal with organizing them.
now, having 100 GB of photos & videos from somebody's childhood will either produce ignorance of whole content (no, nobody will ever want to go through all of them, guaranteed, and if yet they would hate it), or some automated way (yet to be invented) to take out best maybe 100-200.
By not selecting few good worthy now, you're just pushing the decision into the future, to your/somebody else's shoulders.
you know you can buy a cheap desktop for $400 and use it for nas and more? like a backup computer when your laptop is dead?
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.
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.
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.
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)
I'm quite glad I have them, and rating and filtering is just as good as tossing them out in my experience.
* 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.
- good / pick (5 stars)
- bad => delete (your first step)
- in between => no need to rate further
There is no objective difference between a 2-star and a 3-star image; the really interesting step is to rate the picks (I actually quite enjoy this step).
cumbersome process, but I simply don't like the workflow Lightroom is forcing me to use, so I use it only for Raw edits. Now where to backup those selected few is another question, since I don't want to pay...
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.
If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.
On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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?
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).
Are you talking about Unrecoverable Read Errors? [1]
One drive dies, and the response to that drive dying is to go beat the shit out of the remaining drives, and given their large size, that beating goes on for days (possibly).
Yes, an unrecoverable read can be one failure mode, although not necessarily the scariest - you can often tell your raid hardware to ignore UREs and just rebuild anyway, hoping that the missing bits aren't crucial (which in the case of photo storage isn't that bad of a bet...).
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 any case, it's moot for me. I am regularly rewriting the -entire data set-. I am not doing incrementals, so it is pretty unlikely that I'll ever use my oldest burned discs for recovery.
This still makes more sense to me than trying to store it all in the cloud.
It is indeed important, but it is hard. I was a pack rat until about last year.
I think I must have culled about 50% of my library's images, and then I converted whatever remaining RAW files I had to JPEG, which shrunk it to about a third of its original size. I realized there was no point in keeping the RAWs after I did my post -- I'm not that serious a photographer, and I was never going to revisit the images for editing again. Of course, every person has their own requirements -- I'm only speaking for myself.
I also tried to be my own harshest critic, and each image had to meet only -one- of two criteria:
1- Am I be willing to print it and display it?
2- Do I have a strong emotional connection to the photo? (this is how a lot of less-than-perfect images survived the cull)
These days, I spend more time culling after a day of shooting than I do in post on my keepers. More often than not, I will delete up to 80% of my shots in a day, and a lot of the deleted shots are perfectly fine.
>> There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process.
My own process is relatively simple - I point Crashplan to three targets: the cloud, a mapped drive (NAS) and a local drive that's designated for backup only.
I also periodically burn my library to BluRay discs (thankfully my library is now small enough to fit on 2x50GB discs). I also intend to use Google Photos, but just haven't found the time to do it yet.
That feels very much like easily violated privacy/personal space to me, and is the one thing that continues to bug me whenever I consider switching to the family plan to get better value.
Block level clones are fast and easy when you do them frequently on dedicated drives. I've successfully recovered from serious simultaneous failures (Deskstar disaster of 2008), and haven't changed the setup, managed settings, or paid any bills in years.
1) Learning to be more selective in the pictures you take forces you to be a better photographer. Shoot film for a month and you'll learn this.
2) Learning to edit (in the sense of choosing your best) photographs also forces you to be a better photographer. In realising what makes a better picture, you'll learn what looks good and what doesn't.
Or now that I imported them to Google Photos it creates a bunch of GIFs and other fun things for me. If I didn't have the 5 shots of that same thing, etc ,etc, I wouldn't have any of this.
WD Red drives do not have head parking disabled. In fact this is a matter of some annoyance in the NAS world, because the default settings (8 second timeout) lead to astronomical SMART Load_Cycle_Count numbers when used in a typical NAS. Google around and you'll see.
Run smartctl on your drives and check the value of Load_Cycle_Count. That's the number of times the drive has come out of head parking. Most of my WD Reds were over 100K before I noticed - the duty limit is 600K. idle3-tools on Linux comes with idle3 tool, which can read and alter the head park timeout.
Synology, on the other hand, uses Linux mdadm. You can stick your RAIDed disks into a normal PC and access your data.
Have you ever considered deleting some of the photos or videos? I shoot headshots along with my personal projects (RAW files are 20MB+), and I don't generate anywhere close to 1TB of data per year. This is primarily because I only save what I need or think I will need later.
Wondering why a custom built solution was such a pain to maintain to the author - he mentions updates, but once you have a working system, no real reason to update unless there is a feature or security issue that needs to be addressed.
On my last trip, I shot four rolls of 120 film (645 format, so 64 photos total), and maybe 500 digital photos, of which I deleted 90%. I still save about 5,000 RAW files per year, or about 100GB/year, but this is a relatively manageable amount. I'm approaching the saturation point on my iMac's hard drive, but should be able to last for another several years by shipping the oldest RAWs off to Glacier and keeping high-res JPGs around locally for reference.
edit:
also, next time you're up here in Seattle, you should visit the Jose Rizal Bridge at sunset, and the observatory on the 73rd floor of Columbia Tower.
As for taking fewer photos, I like to capture as much as possible and then I distill that down later into my photo sets/stories. I want a big funnel to choose from and not have to do that on the fly. This is my hobby and passion and I love it. :)
As for the nearly identical photos aspect - I always take a few shots & similar compositions of the same thing to make sure that at least one shot is super in focus.
I always take a few shots & similar
compositions of the same thing to
make sure that at least one shot is
super in focus.
Lightroom is great at this and why you see a large number of photogs using it.
If you've got a computer friendly game controller, one neat way to speed up your culling is to use some key mapping software (Joy2Key on Windows, Joystick Mapper on Mac) to make the controller's buttons map to rating or mark for deletion commands for LR/Aperture/Other. You can then sit back and zip through your shots very quickly.
Now I can take photos on a trip, upload them via my iPad. Make edits to RAW files, curate, and it syncs every time I can connect to wifi, backing up my originals and syncing across all changes to any Apple device (and web).
Fortunately iPhoto libraries are just folders so by backing it up you can always take out the folder of originals and put them in Google or anything else.
we're surrounded by this stuff day in and day out on every screen we have, i make no effort to keep any of it longer than a few weeks. in fact i have a problem getting rid of old photos, somehow they seem to follow me around on device to device through no fault of my own! they're almost like viruses.
You should never ever ever store every shot you take. Your job as a photographer is to delete 95-99% of the shots. Select the best, delete the rest.
The exception to that is the commercial client photos, but that's not what he is talking about.
If you're going to save 275GB of photos per trip, it's guaranteed you will never look through them again. Look at his photos - I don't see a single shot I would have saved (well maybe the fisheye one from Hawaii). He has 3-4 nearly identical copies of each shot. Tons of boring stuff.
Perhaps common sense, but I recommend remembering to print photos (say 4x6") you really care about (works especially if you lose your backup) and also hang some of the stuff you really care about it (because you're unlikely to look at them electronically).
Take advantage of your walls, if you have a event decent camera, seeing your stuff 10x14, 16x20 or even 20x30 is also exceptionally worth it.
I'm kind of fond of mpix standouts which to me look a lot better than seeing things behind glass - http://www.mpixpro.com/Catalog.aspx/standouts
They basically will ship photos anywhere (mounted, whatever), well armored, and prices were pretty decent.
https://instagram.com/p/5Bf7g_tBxn/?taken-by=pstamatiou
As for posting the online galleries - oh I absolutely ruthlessly cull! You should take a look at some of my travel sets: http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/ :)
Maybe throw the junk away and use some judgement as to what to shoot and what to keep?