

Ask HN: how do i move 5 GB of photos? - jgamman

my friends all have digital SLRs and when we get together for a holiday each of us can rack up 5 GB of photos then head back to our respective countries.  any ideas on how a bunch of non-IT people can easily send/download 5 GB from each other?  flickr etc won't work since each photo is 3-5 MB and 5 GB is a fair chunk o' space.  this seems like a page 1, paragraph 1 use of the net yet i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line - any advice?
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raghus
_Flickr etc won't work since.._ \- actually, Flickr is a great solution. Just
get an Pro account for $25/yr which comes with unlimited uploads and unlimited
sets. You can even set up Flickr uploading to upload lower res files right
from your DSLR biggies and get the whole upload done much much faster. You can
tag each others photos and pick the best by favoriting etc. add comments, ask
questions etc. There's much you can do with Flickr - I'd definitely look into
that option.

~~~
jgamman
thanks for the tip, i'll spend some time investigating this but still
25$/year...

~~~
brlewis
Problem with the tip is flickr favoriting doesn't work so well for letting a
group pick a good subset of a large batch of photos. Favorites are more for
letting your friends know great individual photos you've discovered as you
wander flickr.

More apropos to what you're doing is ourdoings.com's option (on by default) to
let anybody move a photo between the "featured" and "more photos" sections for
a given entry. Make an unlisted site just for your friends, tell them to click
on the "Edit" tab and volunteer. Once you approve them, everybody can upload,
etc., so it's a nice group site.

It's integrated with Clickpass (a YC startup), so registration is trivial. You
can edit photos after uploading thanks to integration with Snipshot (another
YC startup). If $25 is a lot of money, maybe you should make your site public
rather than unlisted. That way you could collect tips with tipjoy (another YC
startup). Public sites are also the only ones that can use Disqus integration,
until such time as Disqus supports private comments. OurDoings is the only
photo-sharing site with Disqus comments.

~~~
raghus
Hey, you forgot to say that Disqus is also a YC startup ;-)

~~~
brlewis
Caught! ;-)

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technoguyrob
<http://streamfile.com> lets you "stream" a file like a movie, so you don't
have to wait for an upload to finish. Just zip up the 5GB into 3 packs
(browsers won't let you upload more than 2GB), and stream it. Then let it
stream until the other party receives it.

P.S. Streamfile is written in Erlang, which is kind of cool.

~~~
derefr
You mean like netcat? (Not to say that it's what they should use, but the idea
is the same, right?)

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jm4
Hmm... Good question... Bit torrent might be worth looking into. It will
probably take forever, but once it gets going you can just leave it for a
couple days and it's easy to resume a transfer if anyone gets disconnected.

It might even be easier and faster to go low tech. A few DVD-Rs or Flash
drives and stamps would do the trick.

~~~
tjr
Agreed. I work on recording projects with musicians all over the U.S. For huge
data files, a DVD in the mail is way more convenient than the internet, and
possibly even faster, if you factor in next-day delivery and less-than-robust
network transfers.

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noelchurchill
Why non burn to DVD and drop in the mail box?

~~~
jgamman
um yeah, we're doing that now but i thought with the whole interweb tube thing
there'd be something a little more point-to-point sitting in the mac or xp
os's ;-)

~~~
noelchurchill
What about using MobileMe:

"Keep your visitors in sync. A mere click in your Gallery allows visitors to
subscribe to your online photos, creating an album in their own iPhoto
libraries with your full-resolution photos. When you update your Gallery, the
albums on their computers update as well."

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grimoire
I'm with the whole DVD thing. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a box of
discs in a postal van. The ping time on the other hand...

~~~
boredguy8
There's a photo in our office of a couple employees handing hard drives down a
chain like a fire brigade. The caption: "The bandwidth is great. It's the
latency that kills you."

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zepolen
Here's an idea, make a gmail account that you all have access to and use the
gmail hard drive (<http://en.seguridadpc.net/gmail_hard_disk.htm>) to share
between yourselves.

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hollywoodcole
One byte at a time! lol

I would sign up a gmail account and upload the photos to it. Then give access
to all your friends so that they can download and archive what you all want.
It won't be pretty but you will be able to send the account.

~~~
derefr
On that note, Dropbox streamlines exactly the process you describe (I'm
whoring it out now as it's pretty darn good... now that I finally got an
invite. I have a few of my own, too, if you're curious.)

~~~
shawndrost
ooh! yes please, sdrost@gmail.com

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nickb
1) Use an embedded bittorrent tracker inside Azureus/uTorrent

2) Sneakernet! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet>

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dominik
Flickr and Smugmug both have unlimited uploading for their photos. Both
services are user friendly, even to non-technical users. Flickr's pro service
is $25/yr and Smugmug's entry level service is $40/year. I personally host
over 50 GB of photos at Smugmug.

My only other piece of advice: upload from somewhere with high upload
bandwidth.

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aneesh
_i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line_

Even in this day and age, the off-line solutions are better. Get a DVD or
flash drive and send it by mail or FedEx. Even on a moderately fast connection
5 GB is no joke to download.

~~~
jgamman
i'm starting to get that idea - seems sad huh?

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brlewis
I have excess capacity on ourdoings.com and no limits yet. I've made a lot of
UI improvements lately. Let me know if you encounter anything difficult for
non-IT people.

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lampy
Microsoft Mesh (in P2P mode, without storing data on server)?

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brk
Why not swap photos before you leave and you're all local to each other?

Otherwise, I'd say find a $5/mo web server account. Everyone zips up their
images, ftp's them to the server, and you download each persons image bundle
as a simple link.

You'd probably have no more than 100GB of aggregate monthly transfers, lots of
options in that range. Plus you'd get email accounts and maybe make your own
private forum to stay in touch.

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joshwa
Do you all need _all 5GB_ of photos? Probably not. I'd venture that:

\-- the total number of shots can be edited down to the 'keepers'

\-- web-resolution is sufficient for 95% of the photos being traded

Have everyone edit out the losers, batch process down to 800px jpegs, upload
to a flickr group, and then transmit the ones you need higher-res versions of
individually via email or mediafire or similar.

~~~
hhm
I guess they probably include videos too.

~~~
joshwa
OP said DSLRs, but for video the same thing applies. Downres to something
reasonable for sharing, and limit the output-quality transfers to the ones you
_know_ you want.

This is how even professionals shooting 50-200GB/day do things-- nobody
delivers a HD with _every single outtake_ , but instead they just post a web
gallery of the candidates and then deliver the high-res files of the just the
final selects.

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qwerasdfzxcv
1\. install eMule (from emule-project.net) or aMule (for mac users)

2\. put pics in your shared folder (do not share or download ANY other files)

3\. go to shared files screen, select all, right click and select 'copy ED2K
links' iirc.

4\. send links by email

5\. tell all the others to not share or download ANY other files.

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Kilimanjaro
Get a .info domain really cheap for $1.99, get the cheapest unlimited hosting
service, upload pics via ftp, get an open source photo manager.

See? less than $5 a month splitted among 5 guys for your own personal photo
sharing site, easier impossible.

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brfox
Are there any companies where they will send you a 16gb flash drive, you fill
it up and send it back, then they host the files (or upload them to flickr,
smugmug, etc)?

I'd pay $25 for that service.

------
dhouston
<http://getdropbox.com>

(granted, we don't let people buy additional space yet, but ping
beta@getdropbox.com and we can hook you up :P)

~~~
pourone
need a dropbox please thanks

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callmeed
Get an Amazon S3 account and use an S3-compatible client to upload/download
the files.

You can also set permissions on the files so that people can download them
directly.

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bprater
Curious why you head out before you share pictures? If you did it right there,
you could burn x numbers of DVDs.

~~~
jgamman
khatmandu is not known for it's blistering high tech hub - at least not in the
district i was in. besides, my last couple days after hiking everest with
friends from around the world and i spend it burning dvd's? i don't think so!
;-)

------
jgamman
thanks for all the tips everyone. i'm glad that the answer wasn't obvious but
still it seems strange to me that we're all connected yet for non-ITers to
move anything large a usb stick and a postage stamp is still one of the top
contenders!!

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tk999
try: <http://share.memeo.com>

1\. install the desktop client

2\. drop all the pictures there

3\. invite everybody you know.

everybody will sync all the photos (no limit). And it is FREE.

~~~
jgamman
so close!!! this is exactly what i'm looking for but no mac version yet ;-(

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symptic
It'll cost you a little bit of cash, but why not Amazon Web Services?

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verbal
you should try out syncplicity. they do backup and syncing like dropbox, but
you can sync any folder(s). you can also share what you've synced with other
people.

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ulvund
Wuala, a distributed filesystem, make a group.

~~~
jgamman
that's not downloadable till 14 Aug... but it looks very close to what i'm
looking for. i'll bookmark it and check it out in a few weeks.

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jimm
www.pando.com

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volida
rapidshare

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prakash
fedex?

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albertcardona
Don't understimate the bandwidth of of a truckload of hard drives. I.e.
fedexing hard drives is the easiest and fastest.

[There is a file sharing society in Japan, by invitation only, whose members
ship encrypted hard drives to each other. Not just for bandwidth reasons.]

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newt0311
Um... Since nobody has suggested it yet, open up an ssh port on a computer and
use sftp.

~~~
youmon
he said that they were a "bunch of non-IT people"

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ycseattle
jgamman can you email me at ycseattle (-at-) gmail.com? I am working on this
exact idea.

