Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year - you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug.
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)
"Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year)"
Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways:
1) Out of business
2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated
That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them.
Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.
Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek
I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment.
13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :)
Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck.
As I was writing this, I remembered a thread from our message forum in 2005 where a customer asked if they could upload more than 2TB of photos under our "unlimited" plan. Remember, this was in 2005.
I am a happy user of smugmug for a long time, because it was the best service I found that could handle 1080 videos. But I believe I'm a different kind of customer. I only want to have my personal backup. I don't want to sell photos. Google Photos has become very appealing as the interface is great to see the pictures and videos. But what I really don't like on Smugmug is that the Android App can't be trusted. It sometimes skip a lot of files and also don't handle duplicate files after the album has apparently more than 1000 files. The result is a messy album. I already reported this to support (by that time I did not realize the 1000 files issue, just the behavior) but I had no response. This is not a complain about the service that I really like. It is a feedback according to my behavior as a user. I am testing Amazon Cloud Drive and I'm really impressed. It lacks the great Google Interface but don't change the quality of my videos.
It's a little weird you didn't correct that unlimited is only on compressed image formats; not RAW and there are video length restrictions, though generous.
Sorry about that, was trying to correct the "They'll go out of business" or "They don't really mean unlimited" comments about our business.
We definitely do not support unlimited RAW uploads, and we do recompress videos for streaming (at insanely high quality, though!). Stay tuned on RAW.
Additionally, we limit photos (JPEG, GIF, PNG) to 150MB or 210 Megapixels apiece, and videos to 20 minutes and 3GB. Those have continued to grow over time as additional devices demand them, and I expect that trend to continue.
As you're on here - will a new alternative to Smugmug Vault surface again soon? As far as I can tell, smugmug doesn't support raw at all for new users at this time?
So far the only real alternative I'm aware of is pics.io.
I should have mentioned that the reason we no longer offer SmugVault for RAW storage is that Amazon has deprecated AWS DevPay, the product we built SmugVault on, and will be shutting it down "soon".
Which means we need to build something entirely new, which I'm happy to do, but we're currently in limbo and gathering feedback.
Personally I need to store RAWs. I don't have any use for a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system that doesn't let me store RAWs (or at least import to DNG with most, if not 1:1, of the information intact).
I'm mulling over implementing it myself, as a self-host solution. Probably aim for ingesting RAWs to DNGs, and have the possibility of losslessly doing some edit/transforms (store the operations outside the DNG files) -- along with export/view/cache as jpeg and jpeg 2000 for web browsing etc.
Somewhat related, I came across dpbestflow[1] again, just now -- and I see they've added some information about (archive) file formats since I stopped by last. I wasn't aware jpeg 2000 had a lossless mode (nor that it generally compressed better than other lossless formats). Nor was I aware a number of archive institutions have standardized their DAM/Archiving on lossless jpeg 2000.
I suppose one would still need DNG/RAW if one want to keep the door open for being able to "re-develop from negative" on archived photos (jfr. archiving/keeping old negatives, which would be the equivalent for traditional photography).
Anyway, the site[1] might be of interest for those that find this thread interesting.
Hello SmugMug CEO, I've received many emails the last two months about my credit card expiration. The problem is I cancelled my account a couple years ago. I have not gone through a couple of years of bank records to find when/if you kept charging me and didn't send an email.
I liked your service and cancelled because I was in China and couldn't reliably use the service. Every one of those reminder emails I've receive makes me feel like SmugMug is not a good company. I am not in China anymore and don't think I would use the service of a company that can manage to send so many emails to remind me they can't take money out of my bank but don't do so when they do.
First, I'm very sorry. We certainly shouldn't be sending you tons of emails if you've cancelled your account. Mind emailing me your details (I'm just don at) and I can find & fix the bug?
Second, by way of explanation, not apology, we're the keepers of people's priceless memories & creations. We cannot lose them. But at the same time, we can't offer our service for free, or we'd lose everyone's photos. When someone's credit card expires, we've entered the danger zone where, if we're not very careful, we might inadvertently lose someone's photos who actually really wants to pay.
The summary is we hear more than 100:1 from people about "I didn't get that email!" versus "You're emailing me too much about this!". And when it literally means the difference between removing someone's photos or not, we err on the side of trying to get ahold of you aggressively so you can make an informed choice about your content rather than having us make an automated one.
We go to great lengths to ensure even expired accounts don't lose their photos, but there's only so much we can do.
Again, very sorry our policies & systems are annoying you, and would love to fix & improve them. Please do get in touch.
One of the reasons I stopped using SmugMug was that all my videos were re-encoded/recompressed, and I could visibly see degradation. Is this still the case?
One of the great dilemmas with online video is the bitrate at which you compress. The more you compress, the better then deliverability (faster starts + fewer skips, stutters, pauses, etc). But, of course, you suffer quality loss. If you compress less, at a certain point, almost no one can view your videos because the bandwidth requirements are too high.
Every video service ends up deciding what's more important to them. To us, our decision point has been that we should deliver higher quality 1080p video than anywhere else on the Internet, and I believe we deliver that today. Our quality at that resolution exceeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. As a result, though, fewer people can stream it at 1080p. There are two parts to our bet: 1) Bandwidth continues to increase, so in the future more people will be able to view it at this quality, and 2) our brand promise is that your photos & videos look better here than anywhere else.
But we can't just leave it at that, because people do want to watch these videos. So what we do is compromise on the compression at lower resolutions so they stream quickly and with few errors. At 720p and lower, we're comparable to the other services in terms of quality, bitrate, and deliverability. In the end, it means we can deliver a very good experience to people with ample bandwidth, and a fairly good experience to people without.
If you have some examples, I'd be happy to take a look and make sure we're meeting our goals on both those fronts.
We've increased it a few times over the years, so I'd guess we'll increase it again in the future.
FYI, it isn't constrained technically or for business reasons, but instead is constrained for product reasons. We can see that longer videos simply don't get watched as often. And we rarely get pushback from our customers on the 20 minute limit, probably for this reason - they're making videos their friends, families & customers want to watch, which are less than 20 minutes.
But I'd love to know your use case and what you'd use longer video lengths for. Entirely possible we're off base here and aren't thinking of some great use cases.
I wish you the best of luck and appreciate your style of running a business, but I stand by my analysis.
If your product is storage, and is unlimited at a flat rate, and you continue to scale, you will have to throttle somewhere (speed, "image quality", upload rate, whatever) or you'll be out of business.
So maybe your product isn't plain old storage ? Maybe this doesn't apply to you. Again, cheers and best of luck to you.
Well, you're right that we're not plain old storage. We're not Dropbox or something.
We're unlimited JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and our target market is people passionate about photography. That is a major differentiator, and certainly helps constrain costs.
That being said, we do have some truly giant consumers. But it works. :)
I just think, fundamentally, people don't want to worry about managing their photo storage. I certainly don't. So I built a service that doesn't have that constraint, then figured out how to make money at it.
why would you want to use as much space as possible? the consumer should want to not have to think about storage space, not maximize their usage.
It seems to me there are three major factors here:
* the annual fee
* the price of storage at their scale
* the average amount of storage used per customer
It seems to me entirely possible that these factors could have values such that true unlimited storage is sustainable, barring a malicious actor.
3) They start to mine your data to learn more about you...
Compared to Smugmug I think OneDrive (Office 365) and Amazon Cloud Drive seems like the better option to me though. With ACD I can store any file type and encrypt it with Arq[1] for $60 a year.
Option '3' certainly could be on the list, but I'd guess that's primarily for advertising-driving companies. (Google Photos comes to mind).
SmugMug has no ads, so #3 hasn't seemed appealing to us, let alone that I think we already have a great contract with our customers: They pay us right up front, and in return we build the best photo sharing service in the world. Seems fair to me. :)
Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for!
I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot.
This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account?
Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't!
Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added).
And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)
I thought Flickr premium accounts were so that YOU didn't see ads when logged in, not so people viewing your pics didn't see ads. Did they change that somewhere along the lines?
IIUC I think anonymous / not logged in people will always see ads on your pics regardless of your account status.
Maybe that's the case, but if so it still doesn't make sense. Facebook puts ads on your content because it's a free service. If you are paying for Flickr, they really shouldn't be putting ads on your content, regardless of whether it's you or another user.
I bought and paid for something called an "Ad-Free Account".
It doesn't make "perfect sense" to me that an "Ad-Free Account" would deliver ads to anyone. The name strongly suggested that the visitors to my gallery would be free from ads. That's exactly what I wanted and what I was happy to pay good money for.
Sure, you could say it's my fault for not reading the fine print. But you have to admit that the very name of the account was highly misleading.
I'm glad they changed it so now my visitors are free from ads as the original account name led me to believe. Still, it sucks that they used such a misleading name in the first place.
By your logic a company should not consider anything but maximizing revenue for every single product decision. While some successful companies follow this strategy, like Comcast and 90s era Microsoft, it only frustrates and angers customers until they wish for your demise. It's also a very cynical way of looking at the world. It's possible to both profit and make the world a better place.
Good point, perhaps I just misunderstood the terms of the account. Also I thought I had a "Flickr Pro" account but apparently it was just an "Ad-free" account which is now being converted to Flickr Pro. So the whole thing may have been confusion on my part, but it sure caught me by surprise.
Flickr has just changed their policy on this. They are re-introducing pro accounts and will not show ads when anyone is viewing those accounts. Unfortunately, they also doubled the price of pro.
As a pretty serious hobbyist photo-taking-guy I'm a big fan of smugmug, my "sharing photos with friends and family" photo website (http://gmcbay.com) is hosted with them, but I don't think of them or use them as a good long-term file "storage"/backup solution.
All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO.
I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups.
For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.
Indeed, I still use an aging 2008 Mac Pro and the benefits of internal storage are pretty profound. I have two Time Machine HDDs (An Internal + an External), which counts for two of my six HDDs. I'm debating going towards a service like blackblaze as I have a decade of photos on my computer.
I also use smugmug, and hope it's ok to mention my open-source command line tool for syncing with SmugMug, smugline[0].
That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates.
FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.
That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug).
What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline.
Yeah, not only do we preserve the MD5 of the uploaded file for photos, we preserve the uploaded file itself fully intact. So getting the Original back will result in exactly the same bytes and thus the same MD5 hash. (You're correct that we used to apply some transformations to the photos that didn't materially change the pixel content, but changed bytes and thus the hash. We don't anymore).
For videos, we don't preserve the uploaded video for a variety of reasons, but the primary being that our intent is to support Internet-deliverable formats & filesizes. Customers regularly upload videos that vastly exceed Blu-ray bitrates (literally hundreds of megabits-per-second) that just aren't Internet-useful.
That's different from a JPEG, GIF, or PNG where the original file is Internet-useful, deliverable, and makes a meaningful difference. That file is very useful for sharing, which is what we do - we share.
We don't consider ourselves to be a backup service, and there are lots of great backup services out there to choose from that would love to take a 3GB 5 minute video. We take extraordinary care with our customers photos & videos, but we're a photo & video sharing service, not a backup service.
> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok).
Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website.
I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2].
I came to comment the same thing. A few months ago I revisited photo storage for my professional photographer spouse and without competitive raw storage smugmug isn't a replacement for our current multivendor storage stack.
> with a power account you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug
Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present.
I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries.
How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio?
Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.
As for the "buy" option, it's pretty easy to turn off - you can save a "quick settings" set of options and then select all your galleries, and then apply the "quick settings" to the batch of galleries. And when creating a new gallery, just pick that preset of "quick settings". This includes more than just the "buy" option, and also things like whether to show EXIF, and stuff like that.
The one thing you can't do is change the "quick setting" and then have all the galleries change automatically to match the setting.
smugmug.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. The certificate is only valid for secure.smugmug.com The certificate expired on 4/9/2015 16:24. The current time is 7/23/2015 17:43. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
Great article...lots of comments here about how you shouldn't keep that much data. I agree with that for hobbyists, but this is pretty relevant for professionals where the option to cull doesn't extend that far and there are business reasons for retaining terabytes of photos for an extended period. Additionally, next-gen cameras with 40-50MP RAWs are right around the corner.
I use a similar combination of home-built network storage (no RAID - just manual multiple backups) and glacier for offsite redundancy. Dealing with images as a business, I typically only work on a couple shoots at a time so syncing across devices is not a big concern, but long-term archiving and redundancy is.
I don't know, whenever I finish a shoot the first thing I do is go home and delete as many of the photos as I can. The ratio of "great photos"/"photos" is so ridiculously small (like < 1%) that you're realistically never going to use most of the photos you shoot anywhere.
I wish Sony would have a better native lens selection and then I'd probably be all over that.
I'm super impressed with the Fuji lineup lately (and size) - i.e. XT-1 (clarification: I own one), though at APS-C I'd still like a greater megapixel count. Faster lenses and portability do seem to be sufficiently make up for the sensor size in my book though; but if Sony was putting out some drool-worthy fast primes it would be tempting.
These are not even counting scanning negatives (can be massive) or digital backs for medium format cameras. Hasseblad had a 60+MP back 10 years ago just because the sensor was larger.
in all honesty, correct me if I'm wrong, Canon doesn't produce state-of-the-art sensors, does it. in fact, at least according to very same dxomark, Sony does... and since Sony glasses suck/there are too few & good ones are overpriced, to me it seemed logical to go Nikon way (which use Sony sensors, namely D750 in my case).
Now Canon with proper sensors, that would be a killer combination, wouldn't it
Just a +1 for the Synology NAS products. I'm frequently amazed every time I use it how clean the UI is and how they basically implemented a full window manager for the underlying Linux system in a web app. It's exactly what a NAS should be: powerful and flexible, yet easy to set up and use, but rock solid even if it just sits there. Lots of great things to say about using it in nearly exactly this setup for about a year now.
Everything you say is 100% true, but be sure to keep the OS up to date if you expose any IP addresses (security cameras, etc) to the world at large. NAS boxes are just about the highest of high-value targets.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
that's the sad part - few photos available made each of them worthy inspection, bringing memories etc.
now, having 100 GB of photos & videos from somebody's childhood will either produce ignorance of whole content (no, nobody will ever want to go through all of them, guaranteed, and if yet they would hate it), or some automated way (yet to be invented) to take out best maybe 100-200.
By not selecting few good worthy now, you're just pushing the decision into the future, to your/somebody else's shoulders.
I'd argue that my time + cost of parts would make this more expensive than a good NAS. When it comes to storing my photos and video, I'd rather have a purpose-built system than a DIY that I have to configure, patch, and maintain. Just my two cents.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a side note I think this brings up another interesting problem than just dealing with the storage, which is, how to enjoy so many photos in a lifetime.
Personally, I decided to severely restrict how many images I keep after a trip, so I'm more likely to actually view them years from now.
* Quickly scan pics and delete anything that is flat out bad. I try to get these on the spot, but some slip through.
* Go through again and rate.
* Go through again and adjust ratings further.
* Post process the 5 stars, and put them up to view.
* Everything else is saved through an offline backup service.
I find that the 5 star pics end up being great covers into an event. Often the 5 star pics are good enough, but sometimes they draw me in the look at the rest. The only downside is you have to be ruthless with your ratings.
mine is (say D750 as a source, with raw+basic jpeg):
- move all jpegs from card, keep raws there
- go through jpegs, select "best" (ie worth further work), for worthy ones take RAW from card instead of jpeg
- select panoramas to join in autopano
- join panoramas (source is jpeg, if anybody knows how to do it with Nikon Raws, please share!)
- select best panoramas (often quality is visible only after all is rendered)
- if I have multiple sources (photos, panos with different naming, GF camera, Gopro, phones etc.) I make one single unified ordering based on file names (this is crude process, but no clue about anything better)
- process those Raws in Lightroom, put them back
- post on flickr for parents (don't have FB)
- select even more for FB albums for all rest
- delete all raws on memory card (ie except those few worthy processing that were moved from it)
cumbersome process, but I simply don't like the workflow Lightroom is forcing me to use, so I use it only for Raw edits. Now where to backup those selected few is another question, since I don't want to pay...
I do about the same except that "rating" need not be precise. There are only three categories:
- good / pick (5 stars)
- bad => delete (your first step)
- in between => no need to rate further
There is no objective difference between a 2-star and a 3-star image; the really interesting step is to rate the picks (I actually quite enjoy this step).
I'm doing the same, except the picks are realistically going to be separated into four and five stars later, where there will probably only be one five-star photo, maybe two if I'm super lucky. The four-star ones may go on Instagram, or they usually just go to the great storage in the sky.
My parents had some old biscuit tins full of photos from their early years. Work dos, holidays, photos of me and my family growing up, our pets, early memories (for them, rather than me.)
I can't count how many hours I spent sat sorting through those photos and asking my Mum questions about who was in this one, or where this one was taken, or what year this was.
There were probably a few hundred photos. And this was in a time when it was costly to both take and develop photos and a pain to physically store them. I would've gladly sat looking at thousands of photos if they were there.
So now that I'm married and we have a little girl, I think about what our daughter's equivalent to my tin of photos may be. Maybe we do keep too many photos, but maybe she will enjoy looking at our many thousands of photos. Maybe she'll enjoy the technical challenge of making sense of her life in photos and videos. Or maybe she will hate us for storing so much! Either way I think, if I were her, I'd rather have more than less.
Still, when you shot film you rarely shot 20 frame bursts of the same baby-posing-with-toy that we do today with dSLRs. Simply because it was expensive and you were pretty likely to miss something important while you changed rolls.
If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.
On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.
I'm kinda up in the air about how to display the images I've sorted and edited the set down to something reasonable. I was a photo editor at my college paper and each event gets one photo you get practice cutting down the photo sets.
I send some to flickr, some google+ and so on. I need a more consistent strategy.
I uploaded to google plus a couple months back and it asked to create a "story". I really like the presentation of photos. Google makes it hard to link and share but the results for a group of photos are good.
Shrug. I've got about 1.5 TB from the last ten or twelve years, and I do often go back through the organized albums and events. Often it's to find something specific, often just looking for something good, often just for nostalgia.
I'm quite glad I have them, and rating and filtering is just as good as tossing them out in my experience.
I put them on my TV. I have a "TV" "playlist" or whatever you want to call it, and I move photos in and out every couple of weeks. I almost always have the TV on. I listen to streaming audio over the TV while it shows photos. When we're looking for something to watch, we often stop and talk about things and the screensaver kicks in, showing us our photos. And it's easy to change up! No picture frames to deal with or hanging anything.
I'm tending to keep all of my originals in case I ever want to flip through the full set, but I've been tagging a smaller portion into either a "good photography" or "good family/etc memory" categories. Then I can easily filter down to a smaller set of photos.
Then again, I haven't been taking a huge amount of photos lately. If I ramp it back up, maybe I'll need to reconsider.
Wow, that was an amazing article. So comprehensive!
A few things I'd like to add though:
- Mylio (http://mylio.com) is very helpful for syncing your collections across things. Not for everyone but it's worth a look to see if it works. Best thing for me is that it's peer to peer so I don't have to upload my collection to a cloud service to access it on all my devices. It does offer cloud but it's end to end encrypted (allegedly). Best thing is that it lets you configure whether you sync previews, thumbnails or originals to each device and even which photos to sync. Really handy if you want a new shoot on your phone to play with on the train or something.
- You can use Google Drive to get your photos into Google Photos. This lets you keep a bit exact backup in Drive while using your quota for Photos as well. Further, Google Apps for Work Unlimited, through a glitch or deliberately I don't know, offers unlimited Drive storage to accounts even with a single user in their organisation. I pay $10/month for unlimited Google Drive storage. It's advertised as being 1TB for single users so I'm not sure if this is a bug but thought it was worth mentioning.
- Google Photos will (quite helpfully) use the JPEG previews you embed in a DNG photo so if you tend to touch up things in Lightroom, embedding them will ensure that Google Photos displays things in the same way.
Really though, this was an amazingly comprehensive article. Thanks for posting!
Storage is cheap. Backup is easy (if you trust the cloud).
Keep as many TB local storage as you need (a non pro should probably be fine with a few TB for stills of you cull the imports of near-duplicates and OOF shots etc). Spinning disks cost next to nothing and are good enough.
Then, if you want, use one or more means of local protection, such as mirrored local disks or sync to a NAS, preferably at a remote location to protect against theft and fire but local is ok if you must. If you trust your backup service and you have a very good internet connection you could skip this step and just use a few TB of local storage.
Last and most importantly: have a proper backup. syncing to a copy isn't backup. A backup from which you can restore any file from history, after you corrupt it or accidentally delete it (you will do this, and it will happen many more times than you suffer from a disk malfunction or burglary). Even your own carefully crafted backup solution will fail. So plan for that too (by using a 3rd party service too).
There are several very cheap providers of unlimited backup of this kind, for example CrashPlan. Regardless of whether I used proper backup to a remote storage, I'd still make sure to also backup to a cloud service, or even backup both the PC and the NAS to the same service (at no extra cost if it's an unlimited service such as the CrashPlan 10 computer family plan).
Great article, I've had a similar setup for years now.
An 8 year old readynas that's still running, it's really slow but it works.
I do a sync with that and a local desktop with a big external drive.
And then I back up that local desktop to crashplan.
I have a comment about the drives, I generally like purchasing different manufacturer drives for my NAS when I'm buying them in bulk. I always worry about multiple drives from the same batch failing around the same time. It's happened to me before so now I'll buy similar capacity drives but from different models or mfrs.
I had a ReadyNAS NV before they were bought by Netgear and though it was good. Unfortunately, I had more drives fail in the ReadyNAS than the computers I was making backups from. As time went on it became hard to find drives that were on the compatibility list.
> The bad news is that I have over 1TB of photos and the next pricing tier after 1TB ($9.99/mo) is 10TB and that costs a whopping $99.99 per month. So I use Google Photos with the free compressed setting. I don't actually mind since I have my own file backup solution and I use it more for that added layer of intelligence, convenience and utility.
I've tried doing as suggested here, but here's the problem: if it's too expensive to store your RAW images on the cloud (which it is for most people), then your cloud photo library is really just a proxy of your library. That's not to say it isn't useful, but unless it's synchronized both ways with the original files, you're just asking for disorganization - from my experience anyway. You have to be careful and basically only touch the originals to let changes propagate one-way to the cloud proxy.
If it isn't hosting your RAW files, then it doesn't fill the role of a backup, and if your edits or tagging on the cloud aren't applied back to your originals, then any time/effort you put into organizing and editing your library on the cloud is somewhat wasted.
To be honest, I do use Apple Photo Streams for something similar - but I just treat it as a convenience for low-quality output/viewing of recent photos, mostly from my phone. Even then, the Photo Stream part is still a mess. My main library resides on a NAS (as in the article), is backed up to 2 low-cost cloud backup providers (still much cheaper than hosting a single RAW copy on Google Photos), and I use Lightroom for all actual editing and tagging since it applies to the authoritative library.
My point is - I too look forward to the day where at least one copy of my full library can be hosted on something like Google Photos in the cloud, but we're still a ways off from that being practical. Google Photos can be a convenience in some ways, but at current prices it really doesn't fit what I'm looking for.
> My main library resides on a NAS (as in the article), is backed up to 2 low-cost cloud backup providers (still much cheaper than hosting a single RAW copy on Google Photos), and I use Lightroom for all actual editing and tagging since it applies to the authoritative library.
I'm doing something similar, but just backing up to CrashPlan (which has a flat fee for backing up). What cloud providers are you using?
I'm using CrashPlan, along with Amazon Glacier storage via Arq (also mentioned in the article, though it sounds like Paul was regularly accessing photos from Glacier whereas I never plan to access except in a restore scenario).
Reading these comments it makes me think that what is being show here in many of these responses is one of core issues with the software world at large.
The issue is that of "It's not the way I do it therefore no-one should do it like that."
If a person wants to hold on to and horde masses of data then that is their prerogative. To give suggestions on how one would do it from their own view is acceptable but to outright dismiss another persons wants and needs is very myopic.
One could even view the building of the data storage systems as a hobby in itself and the act of doing so and documenting it will be of use to others, even in other industries.
I know of some professional photographers who have really poor data setups as they are very not that tech savvy so linking them to an article like this is very helpful.
"Well let's put aside the disk failure issue. Modern 4-drive NAS systems can tolerate a lost drive and alert you promptly to replace it. You'd have to have pretty bad luck to lose more than one drive at the exact same time."
Very interesting and well thought out posting, but the above quotation represents a very, very naive understanding of how these arrays work with large, multi-TB hard drives.
In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.
I am not anti-NAS - I use them myself for critical data - but with 3 and 4TB hard drive, I would only use raidz3 (or equivalent) at this point (and preferably with 12 or fewer drives in the array).
Is a RAID really necessary though? I know the RAID units today are pretty good, but I've had some failures in the past with older systems, and I just stay away from them, because I have less than 1TB of data that I can't afford to lose, and the mirroring doesn't really add a lot of value for my needs.
To keep things simple, I just make redundant copies by pointing Crashplan to multiple targets - the cloud, a single-drive NAS, and an internal hard drive in my desktop dedicated for backups.
I also burn periodic copies of my most critical data to Blu-Rays. Super critical data gets burned to M-Disc Blu-Rays.
I guess that's unproven. M-Disc is supposed to be very reliable.
In any case, it's moot for me. I am regularly rewriting the -entire data set-. I am not doing incrementals, so it is pretty unlikely that I'll ever use my oldest burned discs for recovery.
> In fact, the reality is exactly backwards to what he has written here: with multiple terabytes of data on the array, a single drive failure results in a long, intensive rebuild process that can serve to hasten the failure of the remaining drives.
Are you talking about Unrecoverable Read Errors? [1]
I'm talking about any problem that a hard drive could have.
One drive dies, and the response to that drive dying is to go beat the shit out of the remaining drives, and given their large size, that beating goes on for days (possibly).
Yes, an unrecoverable read can be one failure mode, although not necessarily the scariest - you can often tell your raid hardware to ignore UREs and just rebuild anyway, hoping that the missing bits aren't crucial (which in the case of photo storage isn't that bad of a bet...).
I think the key point here is raidz3 -- exactly why I've been running a FreeNAS server for the past 4 years. That and backing it up to Crashplan in case of a multi-drive failure.
I considered a NAS, but I had a Linux server already, so I just upgraded it with 6 4TB drives and installed ZFS [0]. I'm using raidz2, which is doubly redundant like RAID-6. For long-term backup I just got a BD-R drive with M-Disc support [1]; haven't tried it yet.
This still makes more sense to me than trying to store it all in the cloud.
Slightly off topic, but since no one else had mentioned it, just wanted to say the rest of his blog is incredibly well done (at least on mobile.) Clicking through to his "Greece" link (http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/greece/two-weeks-in-greece/) was a great decision. Great photography, great layout/design, and good UX overall (I love how it tells a story, and keeps track of what you've seen)
The thing that kind of jumped out at me was the RAID5 configuration - I can't imagine doing that with 3TB drives unless he really does have everything on there also backed up to another location.
Culling is an important part of the photographic process. However, far be it from me to tell another photographer what they should and shouldn't keep. We all have our quirks. Good luck convincing me to delete even a blurry photo of my daughter :) Storage is still a huge problem for photographers. There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process. It's still outside the realm of a lot of photographers' skillsets.
>> Culling is an important part of the photographic process.
It is indeed important, but it is hard. I was a pack rat until about last year.
I think I must have culled about 50% of my library's images, and then I converted whatever remaining RAW files I had to JPEG, which shrunk it to about a third of its original size. I realized there was no point in keeping the RAWs after I did my post -- I'm not that serious a photographer, and I was never going to revisit the images for editing again. Of course, every person has their own requirements -- I'm only speaking for myself.
I also tried to be my own harshest critic, and each image had to meet only -one- of two criteria:
1- Am I be willing to print it and display it?
2- Do I have a strong emotional connection to the photo? (this is how a lot of less-than-perfect images survived the cull)
These days, I spend more time culling after a day of shooting than I do in post on my keepers. More often than not, I will delete up to 80% of my shots in a day, and a lot of the deleted shots are perfectly fine.
>> There has got to be a better/easier solution than even this process.
My own process is relatively simple - I point Crashplan to three targets: the cloud, a mapped drive (NAS) and a local drive that's designated for backup only.
I also periodically burn my library to BluRay discs (thankfully my library is now small enough to fit on 2x50GB discs). I also intend to use Google Photos, but just haven't found the time to do it yet.
For any photographers looking to self-host their collections, I strongly recommend taking a look at Koken. Paul mentions it in his article. Unfortunately, they're looking to sell the company - so I'm not sure how long their product will be around, but it's a great solution for self-hosted photos. http://koken.me/
If you're willing to pay for Amazon Prime, you get unlimited cloud storage for all your photos. RAW included. The only method to upload/download is via the clunky web UI, but if reliable storage is what you're after, it's a pretty hard bargain.
problem is they don't support syncing folders. You'd have to keep track of what you've uploaded already. Also I haven't been able to get it to successfully upload all my photos, seems to always stall out after a few hundred photos or eventually hit some sort of rate limit that goes to a crawl
A "real" cloud backup (That is, not just cloud storage) like CrashPlan is just a few dollars per month. I pay less than $3 per computer per month for backup of several TB with history for each file. I just couldn't imagine it would be worth buying the hardware or configuring my own backup to make a non-cloud equivalent.
Crashplan recently removed it's multi-year plan and increased prices. Gone are the days of 4-year plans that average out to a few dollars per month. Crashplan's prices have nearly doubled in the past three years alone. Disappointing.
How I reach as low as $3 per computer per month is through the family plan which is something like $12-13 but allows up to 10 computers. Not only does it back up my photos, it also solves the "I clicked OK in some dialog and now the computer behaves funny" of relatives.
Are you able to access the files of your relatives with CrashPlan's web restore feature?
That feels very much like easily violated privacy/personal space to me, and is the one thing that continues to bug me whenever I consider switching to the family plan to get better value.
Yes, I think everyone can see everything within the family plan (though haven't checked if just my account is admin). To me this is certainly fine for me/spouse/children/parents but wouldn't use it for other family and friends, which I assume is what actually makes this license work without being abused.
I love the detail in this article! Recently, my uncle passed away, and I started thinking about the legacy of my photos (27k). The system the author describes works for him and he understands it in detail, but I wonder if anyone else in his family does. If (when?) he passes away, his heirs will not have enough free time in rest of their lives to evaluate his stored media. Likewise, does he have enough free time left in his life to view each of his media objects at least once more? One reason why our generation will "go dark" historically, may be that our heirs, facing terabytes of our data to review, on top of their own data, will simply walk away from the task and delete our data.
I think it would really be great if services like Google Photos, Amazon Cloud Drive, Smugmug and others with unlimited paid plan for pictures and videos had self service stations on major tourist spots where people could easily transfer the data from SD cards and leave the place certain that all the content would be on their cloud account in less than 30 minutes. They could even receive a notification. This way people wouldn't need to worry about data storage while far from home. Too many backpackers have to carry a computer only because they have to unload their memory cards. And also Hotel connection are mostly very slow to upload hundreds of Gbs of pictures and videos.
This makes my brain hurt just reading it. I honestly don't see any significant functional upside to all this complexity.
My recipe: External 2-bay removable SATA, an order of cardboard boxes, esd foam, and esd bags, a desk drawer, a closet at work, your SO, family member
Block level clones are fast and easy when you do them frequently on dedicated drives. I've successfully recovered from serious simultaneous failures (Deskstar disaster of 2008), and haven't changed the setup, managed settings, or paid any bills in years.
I don't think I agree with any of this. There's no need to be storing anywhere near that amount as a hobbyist.
1) Learning to be more selective in the pictures you take forces you to be a better photographer. Shoot film for a month and you'll learn this.
2) Learning to edit (in the sense of choosing your best) photographs also forces you to be a better photographer. In realising what makes a better picture, you'll learn what looks good and what doesn't.
If you read my post you'll see that I ruthlessly edit and cull before posting any of my photos. It's not about that, it's just about keeping the original set. I want to keep everything on hand as I sometimes go back and make videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fR4MjImSU0
Or now that I imported them to Google Photos it creates a bunch of GIFs and other fun things for me. If I didn't have the 5 shots of that same thing, etc ,etc, I wouldn't have any of this.
WD Red drives do not have head parking disabled. In fact this is a matter of some annoyance in the NAS world, because the default settings (8 second timeout) lead to astronomical SMART Load_Cycle_Count numbers when used in a typical NAS. Google around and you'll see.
Run smartctl on your drives and check the value of Load_Cycle_Count. That's the number of times the drive has come out of head parking. Most of my WD Reds were over 100K before I noticed - the duty limit is 600K. idle3-tools on Linux comes with idle3 tool, which can read and alter the head park timeout.
I remember reading about this issue when I was setting the NAS up and I kept monitoring the load cycle counts but saw nothing out of the norm. Wondering if this was updated in recent drive firmware? I will take a look at that tool though, thanks!
Hey again, so I just checked the Load_Cycle_Count on all the drives. I've been running this setup pretty much 24/7 since February and they all have a count of just 108. It looks like WD fixed this in recent Red batches.
Cool, good to know. I have 11 4TB WD Reds, 10 of which are all in the 100k range (the other one is a warm spare). I was pretty upset when I saw the numbers.
> Ever since my first iPhone in 2007, I've been keeping every mobile phone photo and video I've taken.
Have you ever considered deleting some of the photos or videos? I shoot headshots along with my personal projects (RAW files are 20MB+), and I don't generate anywhere close to 1TB of data per year. This is primarily because I only save what I need or think I will need later.
I have a little i3 NUC with 2TB HDD. I quickly go through my photos when I upload them and then they go directly into my OneDrive folder which will sync while I sleep. 10TB (soon to be unlimited) storage because I have Office 365 means I never worry about running out of space.
Wondering why a custom built solution was such a pain to maintain to the author - he mentions updates, but once you have a working system, no real reason to update unless there is a feature or security issue that needs to be addressed.
How about taking fewer photos? Do you really need two nearly identical photos of a hand reaching for food in a Japanese restaurant, or three photos of a bowl of miso soup?
On my last trip, I shot four rolls of 120 film (645 format, so 64 photos total), and maybe 500 digital photos, of which I deleted 90%. I still save about 5,000 RAW files per year, or about 100GB/year, but this is a relatively manageable amount. I'm approaching the saturation point on my iMac's hard drive, but should be able to last for another several years by shipping the oldest RAWs off to Glacier and keeping high-res JPGs around locally for reference.
edit:
also, next time you're up here in Seattle, you should visit the Jose Rizal Bridge at sunset, and the observatory on the 73rd floor of Columbia Tower.
Thanks for the Seattle tip! I'm up there somewhat often as part of my team is there. I have done the Columbia Tower but not that bridge.
As for taking fewer photos, I like to capture as much as possible and then I distill that down later into my photo sets/stories. I want a big funnel to choose from and not have to do that on the fly. This is my hobby and passion and I love it. :)
As for the nearly identical photos aspect - I always take a few shots & similar compositions of the same thing to make sure that at least one shot is super in focus.
I always take a few shots & similar
compositions of the same thing to
make sure that at least one shot is
super in focus.
I get it, I do the same thing when I shoot digital. I'm just recommending that those photos never make it past the Previous Import section in Lightroom. If you're aiming for tack-sharp focus, it should be quite straightforward to do a very quick culling then. Also, please say hi to Chris Burrows for me; I haven't seen him since we worked on Visual Studio together about a million years ago :)
>> I shoot a ton but 95% of it never makes it past import
If you've got a computer friendly game controller, one neat way to speed up your culling is to use some key mapping software (Joy2Key on Windows, Joystick Mapper on Mac) to make the controller's buttons map to rating or mark for deletion commands for LR/Aperture/Other. You can then sit back and zip through your shots very quickly.
I occasionally get the "culling" bug and spend an hour or two doing it. Then I realize that time is better spent on making new images, postprocessing images, or doing my day job to pay for the next photo trip. Most professional photogs I know spend very little effort or time on culling.
My storage solution is Blue-ray discs + External HDD + AWS Glacier. Once I use the RAW files, I rarely need them, that's why I store them in Blue-ray discs as a backup.
For those who don't need quite as much storage (12tb!) I recommend trying Apple's new iPhoto library. It has been pretty close to a dream solution for me.
Now I can take photos on a trip, upload them via my iPad. Make edits to RAW files, curate, and it syncs every time I can connect to wifi, backing up my originals and syncing across all changes to any Apple device (and web).
Do you backup the library to something outside of iPhoto? I've been wondering if there's a nice automatable way to backup that library onto a home Linux computer.
Yes I also keep my own backups. I use Crashplan for the iphoto library, as well as a local SSD backup.
Fortunately iPhoto libraries are just folders so by backing it up you can always take out the folder of originals and put them in Google or anything else.
i'm so glad i wasn't born with the digital hoarder gene. apparently my absolute-zero proclivity to hang onto photographs and other media is extremely rare. i'm just not into it. i'll snap some stuff on my phone to share with my close friends, and then let it get deleted or whatever. i don't upload it to socialmedia. i just don't give a shit, to be honest.
we're surrounded by this stuff day in and day out on every screen we have, i make no effort to keep any of it longer than a few weeks. in fact i have a problem getting rid of old photos, somehow they seem to follow me around on device to device through no fault of my own! they're almost like viruses.
You should never ever ever store every shot you take. Your job as a photographer is to delete 95-99% of the shots. Select the best, delete the rest.
The exception to that is the commercial client photos, but that's not what he is talking about.
If you're going to save 275GB of photos per trip, it's guaranteed you will never look through them again. Look at his photos - I don't see a single shot I would have saved (well maybe the fisheye one from Hawaii). He has 3-4 nearly identical copies of each shot. Tons of boring stuff.
I keep everything, cull down to the best and post those online. I still like to keep the original set. Maybe down the line I'll be more rigorous here but sometimes I will make little movies out of every individual still, so that's where it comes in handy:
Yep, makes for an online gallery that isn't any fun to look at.
Perhaps common sense, but I recommend remembering to print photos (say 4x6") you really care about (works especially if you lose your backup) and also hang some of the stuff you really care about it (because you're unlikely to look at them electronically).
Take advantage of your walls, if you have a event decent camera, seeing your stuff 10x14, 16x20 or even 20x30 is also exceptionally worth it.
I agree 100%. Printing your photos really helps elicit a more visceral response. That said, what is mpix? I looked at it, but it wanted me to go through an approval process to create and account to see the prices.
As for posting the online galleries - oh I absolutely ruthlessly cull! You should take a look at some of my travel sets: http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/ :)
If a photographer is deleting 95-99% of the images that he takes, that photographer should either take fewer images or improve his skills. I know and travel with a number of serious amateur and professional photographers (not shooting for clients, but shooting on spec for images that they hope to sell) and they delete very few, if any. First, the technical and artistic quality is good to begin with. Second, the time required to do so can be better spent on post-processing or shooting more subjects.
So this may be true. But if it is it is still a skill that is not widely held. So there is either a need for a simple-to-use curation utility, or an inexpensive curation service. I don't have a specific idea how to create or implement this, but I think there is a market for it
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)