

Ask HN: Family albums in 2012, what do you use? - sheraz

I'm at the age now where my peers are starting to have children. Digitally documenting a baby's life from pregnancy to kindergarten has created a storage and sharing problem for many -- especially among the early adopter crowd.<p>I have spoken to some new dads who say they have filled more than 2TB of space already. Shooting HD video and RAW format on that new Nikon seems to have created a storage problem not easily solved by the cloud.<p>I ask HN -- are you in this group? Do you think the 2TB dad is an edge case?<p>What are new moms and dads using to manage the family photo album these days given the file sizes, delivery formats, and sharing problems?
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japhyr
I am in this situation. Our baby is turning 1 next week, and we have about
250GB of pictures and video from his first year. We are keeping them on a
couple external drives, but that's not all. We are also trying to make a
printed photo book every so often.

I try to imagine my kid at 18 or 30 years old. He's going to want to have his
baby pictures. What file formats from 30 years ago are still readable? Are we
really going to keep converting our TBs of pictures to whatever new formats
come along? Maybe, but having printed books around is going to make me worry a
lot less about those external hard drives over the years.

My parents kept a lot of the negatives from when I was a kid. We have never
gone back to the negatives; we only ever look at the albums my mom put
together when I was a teenager. I think it's pretty much the same thing.

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sheraz
I don't think we will have to worry too much about old file formats like JPEG,
TIFF, and GIF. The formats are well-documented, and the GIF format is 25 years
old this year.

Also, I found this to be very relevant:
<http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/12/movage.php>

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zarroba
I think 2 TB is an absolute edge case. Even if you have that amount of data
you wouldn't need to share everything.

I love the concept of www.storytree.me. For me the storytelling element is the
most compelling factor when choosing the platform to share these type of
albums.

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sheraz
That was my gut feeling as well, but I my suspicion is that virtually
unlimited storage is turning us into digital pack-rats, either because of fear
of losing a file or because we are too lazy to cull the bad photos from the
good ones.

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bartonfink
I created a Facebook account for my daughter the day she was born as a way of
sharing pictures with family members and friends without forcing them to go
someplace else. It's a big hit even though I'm sure we're violating some ToS
by having signed up an infant.

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traxtech
SmugMug for the edited photos and videos + two backups copies of the raw
medias on HDD (one home, one on a family house).

2TB is low. Each time I go to a photo trip, I bring back almost 8Gb of raw
photos.

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sheraz
Do you delete the photos that are just plain worthless? Blurry, cropped
poorly, etc? Or are you just keeping all of it because storage is cheap?

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traxtech
Storage is cheap, but I delete about 1/3 of the photos : I don't want to have
to mentally discard them when I browse an album later.

