
Storage for Photographers, Part 2 - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-photographers-part-2/
======
NateDad
Everyone needs to check out [https://smugmug.com](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.)

~~~
rsync
"Everyone needs to check out [https://smugmug.com](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.

~~~
onethumb
Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek

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]

~~~
rsync
I wish you the best of luck and appreciate your style of running a business,
but I stand by my analysis.

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.

~~~
onethumb
Well, you're right that we're not plain old storage. We're not Dropbox or
something.

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.

------
jly
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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.

~~~
rimantas
Exatly. I'd like to know what percentage of photos ever taken and stored never
get a second look.

------
calinet6
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.

~~~
CamperBob2
Everything you say is 100% true, but be sure to keep the OS up to date if you
expose any IP addresses (security cameras, etc) to the world at large. NAS
boxes are just about the highest of high-value targets.

~~~
calinet6
Synology DSM has great auto-update systems :) But, absolutely correct.

------
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
> 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.

~~~
samch
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.

~~~
gknoy
Agreed. I also tend towards Save All The Things, because Future Me (or my
kids/grandkids!) might feel differently. I'd prefer to err on the side of
having too many pictures, than only having a few. We can always cull them
later, but it's hard to bring back what has been discarded.

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.

~~~
100k
I liked looking through my parents' photos as a kid, but there was a couple of
photo books at most. I can't imagine my (hypothetical) grandkids sorting
through 60 years worth of digital photos unless software has gotten a lot
better.

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.

~~~
saiya-jin
that's the sad part - few photos available made each of them worthy
inspection, bringing memories etc.

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.

------
magic5227
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.

~~~
matwood
My workflow after a photo session is:

* 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.

~~~
bambax
I do about the same except that "rating" need not be precise. There are only
three categories:

\- 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).

~~~
StavrosK
I'm doing the same, except the picks are realistically going to be separated
into four and five stars later, where there will probably only be one five-
star photo, maybe two if I'm super lucky. The four-star ones may go on
Instagram, or they usually just go to the great storage in the sky.

------
Veratyr
Wow, that was an amazing article. So comprehensive!

A few things I'd like to add though:

\- Mylio ([http://mylio.com](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
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).

------
knurdle
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.

~~~
devNoise
I had a ReadyNAS NV before they were bought by Netgear and though it was good.
Unfortunately, I had more drives fail in the ReadyNAS than the computers I was
making backups from. As time went on it became hard to find drives that were
on the compatibility list.

------
dperfect
> 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.

~~~
ValentineC
> 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?

~~~
dperfect
I'm using CrashPlan, along with Amazon Glacier storage via Arq (also mentioned
in the article, though it sounds like Paul was regularly accessing photos from
Glacier whereas I never plan to access except in a restore scenario).

------
jupiter909
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.

------
rsync
"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).

~~~
slantyyz
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.

~~~
prapam2
Are Blue-Rays/M-Disc reliable for long term storage?

~~~
slantyyz
I guess that's unproven. M-Disc is supposed to be very reliable.

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.

------
ScottBurson
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.

[0] [http://zfsonlinux.org/](http://zfsonlinux.org/) [1]
[http://www.mdisc.com/](http://www.mdisc.com/)

~~~
lutorm
This is my solution, too. And then I push periodic zfs snapshots to an off-
site server. It's not fast given my upload speed with TWC, but it's doable.

~~~
StavrosK
Try attic, you'll thank me.

------
ksml
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/](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)

------
fencepost
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.

------
jscheel
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.

~~~
slantyyz
>> Culling is an important part of the photographic process.

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.

------
uptown
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/](http://koken.me/)

------
distantsounds
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.

~~~
alkonaut
A "real" cloud backup (That is, not just cloud storage) like CrashPlan is just
a few dollars per month. I pay less than $3 per computer per month for backup
of several TB _with history for each file_. I just couldn't imagine it would
be worth buying the hardware or configuring my own backup to make a non-cloud
equivalent.

~~~
NigsMcGee
Crashplan recently removed it's multi-year plan and increased prices. Gone are
the days of 4-year plans that average out to a few dollars per month.
Crashplan's prices have nearly doubled in the past three years alone.
Disappointing.

~~~
alkonaut
How I reach as low as $3 per computer per month is through the family plan
which is something like $12-13 but allows up to 10 computers. Not only does it
back up my photos, it also solves the "I clicked OK in some dialog and now the
computer behaves funny" of relatives.

~~~
ValentineC
Are you able to access the files of your relatives with CrashPlan's web
restore feature?

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.

~~~
alkonaut
Yes, I think everyone can see everything within the family plan (though
haven't checked if just my account is admin). To me this is certainly fine for
me/spouse/children/parents but wouldn't use it for other family and friends,
which I assume is what actually makes this license work without being abused.

------
akeck
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.

------
ishikawa
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.

------
lips
This makes my brain hurt just reading it. I honestly don't see any significant
functional upside to all this complexity. My recipe: External 2-bay removable
SATA, an order of cardboard boxes, esd foam, and esd bags, a desk drawer, a
closet at work, your SO, family member

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.

------
trwhite
I don't think I agree with any of this. There's no need to be storing anywhere
near that amount as a hobbyist.

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.

~~~
PStamatiou
If you read my post you'll see that I ruthlessly edit and cull before posting
any of my photos. It's not about that, it's just about keeping the original
set. I want to keep everything on hand as I sometimes go back and make videos
like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fR4MjImSU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fR4MjImSU0)

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.

~~~
barrkel
Replying here so that you'll hopefully see it:

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.

~~~
PStamatiou
I remember reading about this issue when I was setting the NAS up and I kept
monitoring the load cycle counts but saw nothing out of the norm. Wondering if
this was updated in recent drive firmware? I will take a look at that tool
though, thanks!

~~~
PStamatiou
Hey again, so I just checked the Load_Cycle_Count on all the drives. I've been
running this setup pretty much 24/7 since February and they all have a count
of just 108. It looks like WD fixed this in recent Red batches.

~~~
barrkel
Cool, good to know. I have 11 4TB WD Reds, 10 of which are all in the 100k
range (the other one is a warm spare). I was pretty upset when I saw the
numbers.

------
Amanjeev
Has anyone used [http://www.drobo.com](http://www.drobo.com)? What are the
views when compared to Synology?

~~~
ValentineC
Scott Kelby, a fairly well-known photographer, isn't a huge fan of Drobo, most
likely because they're using proprietary hardware RAID [1].

Synology, on the other hand, uses Linux mdadm. You can stick your RAIDed disks
into a normal PC and access your data.

[1] [http://scottkelby.com/2012/my-life-after-
drobo/](http://scottkelby.com/2012/my-life-after-drobo/)

------
clintonb
> Ever since my first iPhone in 2007, I've been keeping every mobile phone
> photo and video I've taken.

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.

------
fxxxit
I have a little i3 NUC with 2TB HDD. I quickly go through my photos when I
upload them and then they go directly into my OneDrive folder which will sync
while I sleep. 10TB (soon to be unlimited) storage because I have Office 365
means I never worry about running out of space.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Nice article!

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.

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aaronbrethorst
How about taking fewer photos? Do you really need two nearly identical photos
of a hand reaching for food in a Japanese restaurant, or three photos of a
bowl of miso soup?

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.

~~~
vvanders
Yup, proper post-import culling is key. I shoot a ton but 95% of it never
makes it past import.

Lightroom is great at this and why you see a large number of photogs using it.

~~~
slantyyz
>> I shoot a ton but 95% of it never makes it past import

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.

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AbeEstrada
My storage solution is Blue-ray discs + External HDD + AWS Glacier. Once I use
the RAW files, I rarely need them, that's why I store them in Blue-ray discs
as a backup.

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magic5227
For those who don't need quite as much storage (12tb!) I recommend trying
Apple's new iPhoto library. It has been pretty close to a dream solution for
me.

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).

~~~
digikata
Do you backup the library to something outside of iPhoto? I've been wondering
if there's a nice automatable way to backup that library onto a home Linux
computer.

~~~
magic5227
Yes I also keep my own backups. I use Crashplan for the iphoto library, as
well as a local SSD backup.

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.

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beachstartup
i'm so glad i wasn't born with the digital hoarder gene. apparently my
absolute-zero proclivity to hang onto photographs and other media is extremely
rare. i'm just not into it. i'll snap some stuff on my phone to share with my
close friends, and then let it get deleted or whatever. i don't upload it to
socialmedia. i just don't give a shit, to be honest.

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.

------
imaginenore
As a photographer, he is doing it wrong.

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.

~~~
mpdehaan2
Yep, makes for an online gallery that isn't any fun to look at.

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](http://www.mpixpro.com/Catalog.aspx/standouts)

~~~
jscheel
I agree 100%. Printing your photos really helps elicit a more visceral
response. That said, what is mpix? I looked at it, but it wanted me to go
through an approval process to create and account to see the prices.

~~~
mpdehaan2
That might be new -- weird. mpix is the online version of Miller's Imaging,
which is a pro lab. They make very nice prints.

They basically will ship photos anywhere (mounted, whatever), well armored,
and prices were pretty decent.

~~~
jscheel
Nice, I'll check them out!

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coldtea
> _I captured 275GB of photos and videos on my last trip. Just one trip!_

Maybe throw the junk away and use some judgement as to what to shoot and what
to keep?

