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I'll start with my disclaimer that I'm founder of Trovebox and this isn't a sales pitch because we've focused Trovebox for business use. Great, that's out of t

by jmathai 13y ago

I'll start with my disclaimer that I'm founder of Trovebox and this isn't a sales pitch because we've focused Trovebox for business use. Great, that's out of the way. Storing and archiving photos & videos is near and dear to my heart [1] and I believe that cloud storage is one piece of answering yes to the question of "will I have my photos in 50 years?". My entire Shuttleworth Fellowship is based on this. Here's my $.02. Cost - we haven't yet but have all the pieces to use Amazon Glacier for storage of high resolution originals. That means storing 100 GB will cost you $1 / month. There's additional costs to keep thumbnails in S3 for immediate access -- my estimate is <$3 all inclusive for that 100GB. Ownership / Portability - a big part of my fellowship is to see how a hosted service (ala Flickr) can provide 100% ownership and portability. The solution is to let users (optionally) bring their own storage. So you can use the Trovebox software connected to your own Glacier and S3 bucket. Functionality - I think organization, viewing, sharing and archiving should be merged together. Instead of having your sharable photos in one place and your archives in another --- why aren't they combined? Raw - we support RAW and do conversion to JPEG. Open Source - Check [2]. Mobile - Check [3] [4] [5] [6]. API - Check [7]. [1] http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/current/jaisen-mathai/ http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/current/jaisen... [2] https://github.com/photo https://github.com/photo [3] https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios [4] https://github.com/photo/mobile-android https://github.com/photo/mobile-android [5] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trovebox/id511845345?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trovebox/id511845345?mt=8 [6] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trovebox.android.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trovebox.a... [7] https://trovebox.com/documentation https://trovebox.com/documentation

callmeed 13y ago
I work with wedding & portrait photographers who shoot 100GB or more in a single weekend. So, within a couple years they could be looking at $100/mo+. And it just grows from there. This is the fundamental problem I've always seen with cloud storage for photo/video pros (or hobbyists): they need long-term storage but the bill just keeps growing. Should they be expected to pay $1k/mo after they've been in business 10 years? --- On a separate note, how are you doing RAW <-> JPEG conversion on the server?
- jmathai 13y ago
  The bill would keep going up, yes. But that's the nature of any growing collection - even if you're using a drobo at home. The only hope is that cloud storage goes down over those same 10 years at a rate which makes it continually affordable. But it won't always be a fixed cost since the number of photos keeps going up. The RAW -> JPEG conversion is done using ufraw [1]. We originally tried extracting the thumbnails so the JPEGs would use conversion settings from the camera but most of the thumbnails are too small to do anything useful with. [1] http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
  - callmeed 13y ago
    That also assumes we've reached "peak megapixel" ... it seems to have plateaued recently but I'm not convinced a RAW file in 5 years will be about the same size as now.

by jmathai 13y ago

callmeed 13y ago

I work with wedding & portrait photographers who shoot 100GB or more in a single weekend. So, within a couple years they could be looking at $100/mo+. And it just grows from there. This is the fundamental problem I've always seen with cloud storage for photo/video pros (or hobbyists): they need long-term storage but the bill just keeps growing. Should they be expected to pay $1k/mo after they've been in business 10 years? --- On a separate note, how are you doing RAW <-> JPEG conversion on the server?

jmathai 13y ago
The bill would keep going up, yes. But that's the nature of any growing collection - even if you're using a drobo at home. The only hope is that cloud storage goes down over those same 10 years at a rate which makes it continually affordable. But it won't always be a fixed cost since the number of photos keeps going up. The RAW -> JPEG conversion is done using ufraw [1]. We originally tried extracting the thumbnails so the JPEGs would use conversion settings from the camera but most of the thumbnails are too small to do anything useful with. [1] http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
- callmeed 13y ago
  That also assumes we've reached "peak megapixel" ... it seems to have plateaued recently but I'm not convinced a RAW file in 5 years will be about the same size as now.