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From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every o

by VLM 4y ago

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some serious storage. Now I could imagine if you owned five security cameras and stored a snapshot every minute for a month, that's about a fifth of a million photos, but that's all autogenerated and if you lose your complete set you'll have a new set in a month anyway.

delfinom 4y ago
They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there
- aftbit 4y ago
  IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    It’s a complete pain if you use a laptop as your daily driver. You don’t want the entire drive filled with photos, and using an external drive with Apple Photos is a PITA as the integration with iCloud doesn’t play nice if the drive isn’t reliably attached. Apple would make a lot of lives easier if they made a tidy way of exporting images from Photos easier to automate. And while they are there, a photo file structure that wasn’t horrible, with photos names something like ‘date-time’.
    - aftbit 4y ago
      Ah yea, if you are stuck using an over-priced Mac laptop as your main machine, and cannot upgrade the storage or use an external hard drive or NAS because of buggy Apple software, that would be a decent reason to keep some of your photos in an exported state instead of keeping the whole archive flat and available online at the same time. Even so, you _can_ buy a MacBook Pro with up to an 8TB drive, it just costs 2x what it should.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Pretty much yes. Though I’d pay a lot more than I did for my laptop, it’s that good. I regularly see other machines get rated and do try them out but the hardware (trackpad in particular) is never anything like as nice. It works fine with a nas. Each to their own.
        aftbit 4y ago
        Yea absolutely. I use a Linux desktop day-to-day, and a 6 year old ThinkPad on the go, but I'm a software engineer, not a creative professional. If I were a photographer by trade, I would certainly have a MacBookPro too.
warner25 4y ago
A quarter million is still a big number, but I'll admit to my family having 60,000 photos in storage. They're mostly since we started having kids in 2014, which works out to 20 per day. Of course, some days we take zero photos, and other days we take a bunch on burst because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. When we go out somewhere, I don't even think we take a lot of photos compared to most people; we're mostly in the moment and trying to wrangle the kids, and I'm shooting with a $200 Android phone. So I can imagine a family with older kids, that's more into photography and social media, easily accumulating 4x our number. Now, we select less than 10% for a private Flickr album that we actually enjoy looking at and sharing with the grandparents, etc. But so far it's been easier and safer to store the remainder instead of deleting them. I've gotten into trouble before with my wife when I deleted a photo that I thought was crummy, but she loved for some reason. Edited to add: We also photograph all of the kids' artwork as a compromise instead of trying to save all that paper or hang it up somewhere in our house, which would be their preference. Those go into their own albums, which has actually turned out to be pretty neat.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. But those nose-picking moments can be so easily utilised...usually when the kids get to 17-20yo and their partner 'Of course wants to see pics of when their loved one was a child'.
mceachen 4y ago
I’ve been taking (digital) photos since 1999. I’ve got 350k unique images, but more than a million unique SHAs. I’ll maybe take a couple a day when out for a walk. 10-50 for an event. 20-30 for a big family gathering. My kids were always a good excuse to pull out the camera. It all adds up. If you shoot with a big camera, people frequently opt for “JPEG+RAW” which is two image files every time you tap the shutter release. That adds up. Also, if you use(d) google photos, or any other service that downscaled your originals, and then _also_ directly take a backup of your DCIM directory off of your phone, there’s another source of duplicate images. I wrote more about this here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplicate/ https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...

by VLM 4y ago

delfinom 4y ago

They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there

aftbit 4y ago
IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  It’s a complete pain if you use a laptop as your daily driver. You don’t want the entire drive filled with photos, and using an external drive with Apple Photos is a PITA as the integration with iCloud doesn’t play nice if the drive isn’t reliably attached. Apple would make a lot of lives easier if they made a tidy way of exporting images from Photos easier to automate. And while they are there, a photo file structure that wasn’t horrible, with photos names something like ‘date-time’.
  - aftbit 4y ago
    Ah yea, if you are stuck using an over-priced Mac laptop as your main machine, and cannot upgrade the storage or use an external hard drive or NAS because of buggy Apple software, that would be a decent reason to keep some of your photos in an exported state instead of keeping the whole archive flat and available online at the same time. Even so, you _can_ buy a MacBook Pro with up to an 8TB drive, it just costs 2x what it should.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Pretty much yes. Though I’d pay a lot more than I did for my laptop, it’s that good. I regularly see other machines get rated and do try them out but the hardware (trackpad in particular) is never anything like as nice. It works fine with a nas. Each to their own.
      - aftbit 4y ago
        Yea absolutely. I use a Linux desktop day-to-day, and a 6 year old ThinkPad on the go, but I'm a software engineer, not a creative professional. If I were a photographer by trade, I would certainly have a MacBookPro too.

warner25 4y ago

A quarter million is still a big number, but I'll admit to my family having 60,000 photos in storage. They're mostly since we started having kids in 2014, which works out to 20 per day. Of course, some days we take zero photos, and other days we take a bunch on burst because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. When we go out somewhere, I don't even think we take a lot of photos compared to most people; we're mostly in the moment and trying to wrangle the kids, and I'm shooting with a $200 Android phone. So I can imagine a family with older kids, that's more into photography and social media, easily accumulating 4x our number. Now, we select less than 10% for a private Flickr album that we actually enjoy looking at and sharing with the grandparents, etc. But so far it's been easier and safer to store the remainder instead of deleting them. I've gotten into trouble before with my wife when I deleted a photo that I thought was crummy, but she loved for some reason. Edited to add: We also photograph all of the kids' artwork as a compromise instead of trying to save all that paper or hang it up somewhere in our house, which would be their preference. Those go into their own albums, which has actually turned out to be pretty neat.

InCityDreams 4y ago
>because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. But those nose-picking moments can be so easily utilised...usually when the kids get to 17-20yo and their partner 'Of course wants to see pics of when their loved one was a child'.

mceachen 4y ago

I’ve been taking (digital) photos since 1999. I’ve got 350k unique images, but more than a million unique SHAs. I’ll maybe take a couple a day when out for a walk. 10-50 for an event. 20-30 for a big family gathering. My kids were always a good excuse to pull out the camera. It all adds up. If you shoot with a big camera, people frequently opt for “JPEG+RAW” which is two image files every time you tap the shutter release. That adds up. Also, if you use(d) google photos, or any other service that downscaled your originals, and then _also_ directly take a backup of your DCIM directory off of your phone, there’s another source of duplicate images. I wrote more about this here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplicate/ https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...