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There's a huge market here for something that professional photographers could use. I know several and they all tell each other to keep buying more external 1t

by edrxty 5y ago

There's a huge market here for something that professional photographers could use. I know several and they all tell each other to keep buying more external 1tb hard drives then back everything up to random cloud image hosts. Most of them end up with a bunch of zip lock bags laying around full of disks and thumb drives. I made the mistake of building a NAS for one at one point but it turns out that you need to be really diligent about documenting the setup as rebuilding a raid5 array when it inevitably fails can be very difficult if you don't remember what the actual configuration was. The crux of the issue is that they need massive storage capacity but whatever the solution is needs to be able to manage merging disjoint Adobe Lightroom catalogs while de-duplicating and without the possibility of data loss, all while needing basically no maintenance because these people tend not to be incredibly computer literate.

notyourday 5y ago
You are confusing the market of people who say that want something with market of people who will pay for it.
ksec 5y ago
This has been a problem for what? Nearly a decade now? I thought NAS vendor would one day figure it out. Nope. No one seems to give a damn. Not to mention some tools to help with all the duplication we had on different HDD or USB Sticks.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
Would you mind sharing why these photographers can't use Dropbox/Photoshelter/etc? Photoshelter looks to have a $50/month unlimited cloud storage plan[0], which seems pretty cheap if they're going to really take advantage of the "unlimited" aspect. For a professional photographer $50/month to not have to worry about carrying around this stuff seems like a deal (and less if they don't have that much to store). [0]: https://www.photoshelter.com/signup/subscriber https://www.photoshelter.com/signup/subscriber
- pfranz 5y ago
  I haven't done serious photography in years, but my guess is that the market isn't quite as big as the parent suspects (the people who want it aren't willing the pay). There's a giant graveyard of push-button photo backup sites targeting photographers. Sadly, I would be suspicious of using any service (since it would mean uploading 100s of gigs of images for the kinds of people who would use it) since they shut down so often. I've never heard of Photoshelter, but it sounds like you upload high-resolution final images that are ready to view and print--it doesn't seem all that different from Smugmug or Flickr. Most photographers want to archive the source files and edits (project files). I see you can technically upload RAW files, but unless that integrates very well with your photo management software, I'm not sure if it's of much use. Lightroom databases can get relatively large since it includes caches and thumbnails. So you'd need a separate system for backing up those that ties it back to the RAW files. Dropbox might work, but I'm not sure how approachable "smart sync" is and their pricing tiers don't seem like a great fit. My guess is a well-loved open source project that wraps around b2 or AWS might be the best fit. But, honestly, a pile of hard drives will probably win out. You make your investment upfront and it's a simple enough mental-model. Unfortunately, they tend to die and with large data sizes photographers don't always go for redundancy.
rovr138 5y ago
>I made the mistake of building a NAS for one at one point but it turns out that you need to be really diligent about documenting the setup as rebuilding a raid5 array when it inevitably fails can be very difficult if you don't remember what the actual configuration was. This is actually the reason why I bought a NAS for my primary storage at home. Just because if it crashes, I will have support or I can just buy another one with the same configuration and make it work. If it crashes, the last thing I want to do is have to fiddle with settings around my data.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zippergz 5y ago
As a former professional photographer, and still a friend of many, I'm not convinced that it's a huge market. Actual profitable full-time professional photographers who can afford to buy equipment is a small and shrinking population. You could probably sell it to advanced amateurs too (who often spend MORE on equipment than real pros), but I still don't know if it's a large enough market to reach economies of scale and make the price reasonable.
hnick 5y ago
What would this look like? Consumer grade tape devices? I've actually had a lot of external HDDs die compared to internal ones so I'm wary of using those. My wife has a bunch of photos/videos for a small business and I have to admit we haven't been diligent in backing up. It's a lot of data to save the larger sources. And we also went down the NAS route, mainly for access convenience though.
mimentum 5y ago
I'm a pro-photographer and work in IT as well. I have run into this storage problem on more occassions than I can poke a stick at. I've seen first hand accounts like the one linked, where people acquire hard drive after hard drive with no end in sight. But the problem isn't limited to just photographers, it's anyone who acquires data of any type. However that being said, I use a combination of NAS of which I have about 40TB of pure photos (yes a lot of images). I've been dabbling with LTO to backup images, but you need to know what you are doing with tape. It's not a simple drop type opperation as a hard drive is. You can get a lot of shoeshining if you don't do things properly. So for long term easy access, I recommend to others to look into 4-Bay NAS units (at a minimum) for future flexibility. QNAP or Synology to aid the config and use a blob storage service to store the data (if upload speed permits). I used to use Backblaze but even with basic B2 storage, I found it more expensive than Google Cloud storage (coldline). But with anything your use case, preparedness to learn and financial situation will dictate what you end up doing.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Plus my experience is that my storage consumption increases more or less linearly whereas drive capacity is more exponential. I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond 4k for videos (that’s already way more than one can perceive on most screen formats, except perhaps for multiplex cinemas). And I am not sure of what is the point of a 100MP camera. You can find 18TB drives now. Very quickly the rationale for replacing drives won’t be that you run out of space but that they become old and too dangerous to keep around, or that you want the performance of SSDs, when they reach this level of price/GB.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    I've got a 60MP camera (Sony a7R4), and I could see the point of a 100MP: extreme crops while still having acceptable image quality in the result. Doing bird photography after a certain point the size and weight of the lens becomes an effectively insurmountable issue (somewhere around the 600-800mm range, depending on maximum aperture) and the only way to get more "reach" is to be able to crop the resulting photo. So I'd never use the full 100MP, but I might discard 75% of it to get a nice print-quality bird image of reasonable size. Of course you also need a really good, sharp lens to take advantage of such a high-res sensor. Any flaws in the lens or your technique or settings will show up more dramatically in a deep crop. So it's not going to save you money on a shorter focal length lens, it's just going to save weight.
tw04 5y ago
Synology would be the obvious answer. It checks all those boxes and supports s3 or another Synology for remote backups with hyperbackup. You'll pay a premium over rolling your own but overall they're pretty darn stable.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Not to mention they keep updating older hardware for a long time. My parents have my old DS212j (2011) and it still gets updates.
jjav 5y ago
> I made the mistake of building a NAS for one at one point but it turns out that you need to be really diligent about documenting the setup as rebuilding a raid5 array when it inevitably fails can be very difficult if you don't remember what the actual configuration was. ZFS mirror pools is where it's at. I can pop out any one drive of the pool and take it to any random unrelated machine and restore everything.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  There’s a very funny video about that done with USB sticks. They remove all sticks then randomly put them back while the ZFS volume slowly comes back to life.

by edrxty 5y ago

notyourday 5y ago

You are confusing the market of people who say that want something with market of people who will pay for it.

ksec 5y ago

This has been a problem for what? Nearly a decade now? I thought NAS vendor would one day figure it out. Nope. No one seems to give a damn. Not to mention some tools to help with all the duplication we had on different HDD or USB Sticks.

hardwaresofton 5y ago

Would you mind sharing why these photographers can't use Dropbox/Photoshelter/etc? Photoshelter looks to have a $50/month unlimited cloud storage plan[0], which seems pretty cheap if they're going to really take advantage of the "unlimited" aspect. For a professional photographer $50/month to not have to worry about carrying around this stuff seems like a deal (and less if they don't have that much to store). [0]: https://www.photoshelter.com/signup/subscriber https://www.photoshelter.com/signup/subscriber

pfranz 5y ago
I haven't done serious photography in years, but my guess is that the market isn't quite as big as the parent suspects (the people who want it aren't willing the pay). There's a giant graveyard of push-button photo backup sites targeting photographers. Sadly, I would be suspicious of using any service (since it would mean uploading 100s of gigs of images for the kinds of people who would use it) since they shut down so often. I've never heard of Photoshelter, but it sounds like you upload high-resolution final images that are ready to view and print--it doesn't seem all that different from Smugmug or Flickr. Most photographers want to archive the source files and edits (project files). I see you can technically upload RAW files, but unless that integrates very well with your photo management software, I'm not sure if it's of much use. Lightroom databases can get relatively large since it includes caches and thumbnails. So you'd need a separate system for backing up those that ties it back to the RAW files. Dropbox might work, but I'm not sure how approachable "smart sync" is and their pricing tiers don't seem like a great fit. My guess is a well-loved open source project that wraps around b2 or AWS might be the best fit. But, honestly, a pile of hard drives will probably win out. You make your investment upfront and it's a simple enough mental-model. Unfortunately, they tend to die and with large data sizes photographers don't always go for redundancy.

rovr138 5y ago

>I made the mistake of building a NAS for one at one point but it turns out that you need to be really diligent about documenting the setup as rebuilding a raid5 array when it inevitably fails can be very difficult if you don't remember what the actual configuration was. This is actually the reason why I bought a NAS for my primary storage at home. Just because if it crashes, I will have support or I can just buy another one with the same configuration and make it work. If it crashes, the last thing I want to do is have to fiddle with settings around my data.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zippergz 5y ago

As a former professional photographer, and still a friend of many, I'm not convinced that it's a huge market. Actual profitable full-time professional photographers who can afford to buy equipment is a small and shrinking population. You could probably sell it to advanced amateurs too (who often spend MORE on equipment than real pros), but I still don't know if it's a large enough market to reach economies of scale and make the price reasonable.

hnick 5y ago

What would this look like? Consumer grade tape devices? I've actually had a lot of external HDDs die compared to internal ones so I'm wary of using those. My wife has a bunch of photos/videos for a small business and I have to admit we haven't been diligent in backing up. It's a lot of data to save the larger sources. And we also went down the NAS route, mainly for access convenience though.

mimentum 5y ago

I'm a pro-photographer and work in IT as well. I have run into this storage problem on more occassions than I can poke a stick at. I've seen first hand accounts like the one linked, where people acquire hard drive after hard drive with no end in sight. But the problem isn't limited to just photographers, it's anyone who acquires data of any type. However that being said, I use a combination of NAS of which I have about 40TB of pure photos (yes a lot of images). I've been dabbling with LTO to backup images, but you need to know what you are doing with tape. It's not a simple drop type opperation as a hard drive is. You can get a lot of shoeshining if you don't do things properly. So for long term easy access, I recommend to others to look into 4-Bay NAS units (at a minimum) for future flexibility. QNAP or Synology to aid the config and use a blob storage service to store the data (if upload speed permits). I used to use Backblaze but even with basic B2 storage, I found it more expensive than Google Cloud storage (coldline). But with anything your use case, preparedness to learn and financial situation will dictate what you end up doing.

cm2187 5y ago
Plus my experience is that my storage consumption increases more or less linearly whereas drive capacity is more exponential. I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond 4k for videos (that’s already way more than one can perceive on most screen formats, except perhaps for multiplex cinemas). And I am not sure of what is the point of a 100MP camera. You can find 18TB drives now. Very quickly the rationale for replacing drives won’t be that you run out of space but that they become old and too dangerous to keep around, or that you want the performance of SSDs, when they reach this level of price/GB.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  I've got a 60MP camera (Sony a7R4), and I could see the point of a 100MP: extreme crops while still having acceptable image quality in the result. Doing bird photography after a certain point the size and weight of the lens becomes an effectively insurmountable issue (somewhere around the 600-800mm range, depending on maximum aperture) and the only way to get more "reach" is to be able to crop the resulting photo. So I'd never use the full 100MP, but I might discard 75% of it to get a nice print-quality bird image of reasonable size. Of course you also need a really good, sharp lens to take advantage of such a high-res sensor. Any flaws in the lens or your technique or settings will show up more dramatically in a deep crop. So it's not going to save you money on a shorter focal length lens, it's just going to save weight.

tw04 5y ago

Synology would be the obvious answer. It checks all those boxes and supports s3 or another Synology for remote backups with hyperbackup. You'll pay a premium over rolling your own but overall they're pretty darn stable.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Not to mention they keep updating older hardware for a long time. My parents have my old DS212j (2011) and it still gets updates.

jjav 5y ago

> I made the mistake of building a NAS for one at one point but it turns out that you need to be really diligent about documenting the setup as rebuilding a raid5 array when it inevitably fails can be very difficult if you don't remember what the actual configuration was. ZFS mirror pools is where it's at. I can pop out any one drive of the pool and take it to any random unrelated machine and restore everything.

rbanffy 5y ago
There’s a very funny video about that done with USB sticks. They remove all sticks then randomly put them back while the ZFS volume slowly comes back to life.