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My company serves thousands of professional photographers (wedding, commercial, fashion, etc.). What you're describing is definitely an issue for photographers

My company serves thousands of professional photographers (wedding, commercial, fashion, etc.). What you're describing is definitely an issue for photographers but I think getting them to use a tool like you've described would be an uphill battle. Right now, most of them use Drobos or similar devices. You'd be asking them to add steps to their workflow which is always tough to do. Also, I think your estimate of 18 mins to upload 6+GB is an order of magnitude off. We have tools that allow people to upload JPEGs and most customers claim it takes longer than that just for 100s of MBs. My (wild) guess is that Adobe is going to get in this space too. It only makes sense to have your Lightroom catalog in the cloud. Maybe they wont offer an affordable solution for terabytes of data, but I'm not sure photogs want their images in two different "clouds". I think the key is to do customer development from full-time photographers who aren't hackers. I'd be happy to send out a survey to some clients if you want do more research.

beat 13y ago
As a photographer with a couple of terabytes of old raws (I back up to Time Machine locally, and offsite at a friend's house occasionally), I'm very curious as to what Adobe will offer in this regard with LR5.
- callmeed 13y ago
  They may not offer anything at the TB-level, who knows. But something is coming: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage-services http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage... and I still think it will be hard to convince people to "put these files on Adobe's cloud and these files on this other cloud using X software"
jwarren 13y ago
Spot on. In a few years, cloud storage will be more acceptable, working photographers will be ever more tech literate and bandwidth will increase. I think you're totally right about Adobe too. Those Smart Previews they added for LR5 - those are not just for space-starved SSD drives...
bambax 13y ago
My Lightroom catalog is backed up to a folder in Dropbox, and this works really well. You can't really have the current catalog in Dropbox because then each action and edit become really slow. But if you set up Lightroom to do a backup every time you quit the program, and that backup is in Dropbox, you get the best of both worlds (strong backups + snappy edits). Lightroom backups are really "backups", as they are named by date+time, so in Dropbox I have a history of everything I ever did in Lightroom, not just the current (last) version. It's also fast because I suspect Dropbox is able to do some rsync magic and only re-upload new packets; my Lightroom catalog is around 150 MB and the upload to Dropbox is almost instantaneous (on a pretty lousy upstream bandwidth). Of course this doesn't address the problem of backing up RAWs, but as far as Lightroom is concerned I feel pretty safe.
- gerardmurphy 13y ago
  Just to be clear here... Your Lightroom catalog is very important but is not backing you your Photos. (which I know you said at the end. I am just emphasizing) Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)

beat 13y ago

As a photographer with a couple of terabytes of old raws (I back up to Time Machine locally, and offsite at a friend's house occasionally), I'm very curious as to what Adobe will offer in this regard with LR5.

callmeed 13y ago
They may not offer anything at the TB-level, who knows. But something is coming: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage-services http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage... and I still think it will be hard to convince people to "put these files on Adobe's cloud and these files on this other cloud using X software"

jwarren 13y ago

Spot on. In a few years, cloud storage will be more acceptable, working photographers will be ever more tech literate and bandwidth will increase. I think you're totally right about Adobe too. Those Smart Previews they added for LR5 - those are not just for space-starved SSD drives...

bambax 13y ago

My Lightroom catalog is backed up to a folder in Dropbox, and this works really well. You can't really have the current catalog in Dropbox because then each action and edit become really slow. But if you set up Lightroom to do a backup every time you quit the program, and that backup is in Dropbox, you get the best of both worlds (strong backups + snappy edits). Lightroom backups are really "backups", as they are named by date+time, so in Dropbox I have a history of everything I ever did in Lightroom, not just the current (last) version. It's also fast because I suspect Dropbox is able to do some rsync magic and only re-upload new packets; my Lightroom catalog is around 150 MB and the upload to Dropbox is almost instantaneous (on a pretty lousy upstream bandwidth). Of course this doesn't address the problem of backing up RAWs, but as far as Lightroom is concerned I feel pretty safe.

gerardmurphy 13y ago
Just to be clear here... Your Lightroom catalog is very important but is not backing you your Photos. (which I know you said at the end. I am just emphasizing) Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)