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> Where on earth do normal people store that much data? They don't. Normal people realize that keeping that many photos is a negative value proposition; it's

> Where on earth do normal people store that much data? They don't. Normal people realize that keeping that many photos is a negative value proposition; it's a burden rather than an asset. Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like. By all means, keep everything if you want to, but I find it troublesome that storage is considered the problem, rather than making no attempt to cull images. Clearly a great deal of effort has gone into these images to make his various travelogues, so the effort to see which ones make the cut has been done already. That said, it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here. Any reasonable PC MoBo is going to have 6 SATA ports, so you can quite easily make a 4 drive RAID 5. Personally, I just RAID 1 a couple 3TB drives and call it good.

chinhodado 11y ago
I share the same sentiment. I have friends who would, on a trip, shoot everything they see, and shoot each scene a dozen times (literally) with little variation in angle, exposure, etc. They do this on maximum resolution, highest quality settings (Fine JPEG, even RAW). After a trip, they dump everything into their storage and hardly ever look at what they've taken again. And they would constantly complain about not having enough storage.
- philliphaydon 11y ago
  I'll go to the Zoo or somewhere and take 1000s of photos, then spend hours in Lightroom deleting maybe 80% of that till I have ~100 I keep and ~20 I edit. I don't understand why people keep the same shot 23423352 times.
  - chinhodado 11y ago
    I think it's because of the mindset "I can revisit what I have taken and make my selection later. I don't want to lose any memory. Storage is cheap." Over time, it becomes a burden to maintain all that.
  - amalag 11y ago
    They keep trying to keep what could have been, not what they have. They need to take a basic photography class to understand noone wants an out of focus or otherwise ruined picture, no matter how great it could have been.
    - slantyyz 11y ago
      >> They need to take a basic photography class to understand noone wants an out of focus or otherwise ruined picture, no matter how great it could have been. It's not always about how technically or artistically great a photo is. Sometimes it's about an emotional connection to a photo. When I did a massive cull of my library last year, I kept quite a few admittedly bad shots, simply because they captured a meaningful moment to me.
      - tdkl 11y ago
        Where is the emotional connection to a photo larger : 1) when there's maybe couple photos available 2) when you have 4GB of the same session, with multiple burst shots. I'd even argue that having 1 photo of a certain event brings you back memories of most what happened at that certain time IF you spent it there fully - meaning not jerking around most of the time with a camera/mobile phone taking photos.
        slantyyz 11y ago
        That depends. I don't have kids, so I can't speak to that, but I do have dogs, and they're not going to be with me forever, so I am more likely to keep some sub-optimal shots. When you have small kids or pets, you often have to "spray and pray" to get a sharp shot. I know some people keep the entire burst set of shots - their prerogative. I don't, I take the best shot or two. But sometimes that "best" shot still didn't come out great, whether it be because of thin DOF (often from being forced to shoot wide open in bad light), motion blur, or a slightly missed focus.
  - prawn 11y ago
    No one finds or makes time to edit their photo library. Either the process is overwhelming or the tools are not available where the user might have time.
Johnny555 11y ago
You're setting yourself up for data loss if you use RAID-5 with large consumer drives -- I wouldn't trust less than RAID-6 because the chance of a second failure while rebuilding the array after the first drive failed is too great. Especially since you likely don't have a cold spare on hand, so you have to wait a week to get the replacement drive. RAID-1 may be better since the rebuild is faster and doesn't stress the disks so much.
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  Agreed... this hasn't happened to me, but I've had a number of friends who have had drives fail while rebuilding a RAID-5 array. RAID-6, RAID-1, or ZFS are my preferred choices.
tertius 11y ago
"Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like." This is the exception to the rule. Not normal.
aeturnum 11y ago
>it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here. The NAS offers a nice, portable and independent system. I could run a RAID off my desktop, but that makes the desktop bigger and heavier and creates a migration headache when I change processors.
samch 11y ago
Do you have kids? I'm asking because I know we do, and it's really hard to cull photos of your children. If it's blurry or an otherwise crappy picture, then yes, we will delete it. Otherwise, we're holding on to it for the long run and nobody can persuade us otherwise. I agree that it's a burden, and it's one that many parents likewise share. It is difficult to be as selective with the shutter as you suggest. Kids don't really sit still, and you have to burst during those precious seconds when everything is just right. In our case a NAS would make a lot of sense. We've tried Arc (with Glacier/S3) and other storage solutions (Time Machine), but I've had my eye on a Synology unit for quite some time. Also, internal storage as you suggest obviously isn't an option for MacBook Pro users like us.
- joshyeager 11y ago
  Synology is great. I have a DS-215j, and it handles everything I need much more smoothly than my old NAS. And since their OS is shared across their whole product line, you get access to all the enterprise-level features of their big units, and you don't have to worry about your device getting abandoned six months after you buy it.
- gknoy 11y ago
  Agreed. I also tend towards Save All The Things, because Future Me (or my kids/grandkids!) might feel differently. I'd prefer to err on the side of having too many pictures, than only having a few. We can always cull them later, but it's hard to bring back what has been discarded. If you have someone in your life who likes to do genealogy research, talk to them. You might also find that you would have been Very Interested in seeing what your grandparents did in their spare time, hear how they spoke, and so forth. 30 years from now, my kids will (I hope) be starting their own families, and I'd like their kids to be able to have insight into what their parents were like as kids, or what I and my wife are like as parents.
  - 100k 11y ago
    I liked looking through my parents' photos as a kid, but there was a couple of photo books at most. I can't imagine my (hypothetical) grandkids sorting through 60 years worth of digital photos unless software has gotten a lot better. The busy work and stress of dealing with digital photos has actually caused me to take fewer photos. I have a preservationist bent and I just don't want to deal with organizing them.
_delirium 11y ago
I know a lot of people who intend to take that route but few actually get around to it. Like filing photos into albums in the olden days, "sort, tag, and cull" is perpetually on the to-do list, so photos just pile up instead. However, the regular people I know (i.e. people who aren't photography enthusiasts) shoot far less than the terabyte/year he mentions, by orders of magnitude. For one, regular people don't shoot RAW, and a typical consumer-level digital camera, shooting JPG, produces photos around 3-4MB each. Even if you shoot 2000-3000 photos a year, you're talking on the order of 10 gigs, not 1000 gigs.
- ghaff 11y ago
  iPhone photos aren't the storage problem. Heck, I have lots of RAW photos and my total photo storage is still "only" about 1TB. And, yeah, were I to spend a couple of days culling I could get rid of a few hundred GB of stored pics but that's the sort of boring housekeeping task that never pops to the top of the stack.

chinhodado 11y ago

I share the same sentiment. I have friends who would, on a trip, shoot everything they see, and shoot each scene a dozen times (literally) with little variation in angle, exposure, etc. They do this on maximum resolution, highest quality settings (Fine JPEG, even RAW). After a trip, they dump everything into their storage and hardly ever look at what they've taken again. And they would constantly complain about not having enough storage.

philliphaydon 11y ago
I'll go to the Zoo or somewhere and take 1000s of photos, then spend hours in Lightroom deleting maybe 80% of that till I have ~100 I keep and ~20 I edit. I don't understand why people keep the same shot 23423352 times.
- chinhodado 11y ago
  I think it's because of the mindset "I can revisit what I have taken and make my selection later. I don't want to lose any memory. Storage is cheap." Over time, it becomes a burden to maintain all that.
- amalag 11y ago
  They keep trying to keep what could have been, not what they have. They need to take a basic photography class to understand noone wants an out of focus or otherwise ruined picture, no matter how great it could have been.
  - slantyyz 11y ago
    >> They need to take a basic photography class to understand noone wants an out of focus or otherwise ruined picture, no matter how great it could have been. It's not always about how technically or artistically great a photo is. Sometimes it's about an emotional connection to a photo. When I did a massive cull of my library last year, I kept quite a few admittedly bad shots, simply because they captured a meaningful moment to me.
    - tdkl 11y ago
      Where is the emotional connection to a photo larger : 1) when there's maybe couple photos available 2) when you have 4GB of the same session, with multiple burst shots. I'd even argue that having 1 photo of a certain event brings you back memories of most what happened at that certain time IF you spent it there fully - meaning not jerking around most of the time with a camera/mobile phone taking photos.
      - slantyyz 11y ago
        That depends. I don't have kids, so I can't speak to that, but I do have dogs, and they're not going to be with me forever, so I am more likely to keep some sub-optimal shots. When you have small kids or pets, you often have to "spray and pray" to get a sharp shot. I know some people keep the entire burst set of shots - their prerogative. I don't, I take the best shot or two. But sometimes that "best" shot still didn't come out great, whether it be because of thin DOF (often from being forced to shoot wide open in bad light), motion blur, or a slightly missed focus.
- prawn 11y ago
  No one finds or makes time to edit their photo library. Either the process is overwhelming or the tools are not available where the user might have time.

Johnny555 11y ago

You're setting yourself up for data loss if you use RAID-5 with large consumer drives -- I wouldn't trust less than RAID-6 because the chance of a second failure while rebuilding the array after the first drive failed is too great. Especially since you likely don't have a cold spare on hand, so you have to wait a week to get the replacement drive. RAID-1 may be better since the rebuild is faster and doesn't stress the disks so much.

dietrichepp 11y ago
Agreed... this hasn't happened to me, but I've had a number of friends who have had drives fail while rebuilding a RAID-5 array. RAID-6, RAID-1, or ZFS are my preferred choices.

tertius 11y ago

"Rather than trying to hold on to everything, they choose what is actually worth revisiting. This could mean they're a little more selective with the shutter, or they only keep the photos they like." This is the exception to the rule. Not normal.

aeturnum 11y ago

>it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here. The NAS offers a nice, portable and independent system. I could run a RAID off my desktop, but that makes the desktop bigger and heavier and creates a migration headache when I change processors.

samch 11y ago

Do you have kids? I'm asking because I know we do, and it's really hard to cull photos of your children. If it's blurry or an otherwise crappy picture, then yes, we will delete it. Otherwise, we're holding on to it for the long run and nobody can persuade us otherwise. I agree that it's a burden, and it's one that many parents likewise share. It is difficult to be as selective with the shutter as you suggest. Kids don't really sit still, and you have to burst during those precious seconds when everything is just right. In our case a NAS would make a lot of sense. We've tried Arc (with Glacier/S3) and other storage solutions (Time Machine), but I've had my eye on a Synology unit for quite some time. Also, internal storage as you suggest obviously isn't an option for MacBook Pro users like us.

joshyeager 11y ago
Synology is great. I have a DS-215j, and it handles everything I need much more smoothly than my old NAS. And since their OS is shared across their whole product line, you get access to all the enterprise-level features of their big units, and you don't have to worry about your device getting abandoned six months after you buy it.
gknoy 11y ago
Agreed. I also tend towards Save All The Things, because Future Me (or my kids/grandkids!) might feel differently. I'd prefer to err on the side of having too many pictures, than only having a few. We can always cull them later, but it's hard to bring back what has been discarded. If you have someone in your life who likes to do genealogy research, talk to them. You might also find that you would have been Very Interested in seeing what your grandparents did in their spare time, hear how they spoke, and so forth. 30 years from now, my kids will (I hope) be starting their own families, and I'd like their kids to be able to have insight into what their parents were like as kids, or what I and my wife are like as parents.
- 100k 11y ago
  I liked looking through my parents' photos as a kid, but there was a couple of photo books at most. I can't imagine my (hypothetical) grandkids sorting through 60 years worth of digital photos unless software has gotten a lot better. The busy work and stress of dealing with digital photos has actually caused me to take fewer photos. I have a preservationist bent and I just don't want to deal with organizing them.

_delirium 11y ago

I know a lot of people who intend to take that route but few actually get around to it. Like filing photos into albums in the olden days, "sort, tag, and cull" is perpetually on the to-do list, so photos just pile up instead. However, the regular people I know (i.e. people who aren't photography enthusiasts) shoot far less than the terabyte/year he mentions, by orders of magnitude. For one, regular people don't shoot RAW, and a typical consumer-level digital camera, shooting JPG, produces photos around 3-4MB each. Even if you shoot 2000-3000 photos a year, you're talking on the order of 10 gigs, not 1000 gigs.

ghaff 11y ago
iPhone photos aren't the storage problem. Heck, I have lots of RAW photos and my total photo storage is still "only" about 1TB. And, yeah, were I to spend a couple of days culling I could get rid of a few hundred GB of stored pics but that's the sort of boring housekeeping task that never pops to the top of the stack.