Is storage really that expensive?

kwalsh · July 2, 2005

So here's the crunch, the major problem with digital photography is safely archiving the data. Smugmug provides a reasonable way to do this, but it is becoming rather intrusive with converting everything to JPEG and sRGB.

Now, I've heard all this la-tee-da about "we're a photo sharing site" and "we don't print, that's not our purpose that's why we point you at EZPrints and mark it up". And yet, as I read all the forums everything coming out of the SM guys' mouths is about molesting my photos so that they will print *easily* (notice I didn't say best). Even if I have fricking printing turned off for the gallery!!!!

Now, smugmug kicks some major booty, no doubt, for thousands of reasons. But I've yet to hear a rational and consistent explanation as to why we can't store our digital negatives on the site.

At your lesiure, could someone from smugmug please explain for all to hear why we can't have a very simple thing:

A non-priniting gallery that allows any type of image file (including RAW formats) to be uploaded. You (i.e. smugmug) can put any sort of restriction you want on it - not printable, not public viewable, etc etc. If we could link RAW files to viewable JPEGs well that would be cool, but by no means necessary. Heck, maybe it is pro only option. Given most broadband connections are very asymetric I doubt it'd be abused. And it'd have no processing impact since you wouldn't have to process these images. I'm sure you guys can come up with other more intelligent methods that fit your infrastructure than me. But I think I'd like to take advantage of that 8MB per photo and currently I can't.

Anyway, I'm not trying to flame anyone, I really love the site and the constant improvements by the SM team are wonderful. But reading the press on the website and the comments here has me confused. I think you guys need to think about the business model a bit, what you state and what you do are very different. It's starting to sound like photo storage and sharing are playing second fiddle to being a front for EZprints...

Ken

Richard · July 2, 2005

kwalsh wrote:

So here's the crunch, the major problem with digital photography is safely archiving the data.

...

Ken

Archiving is a problem, but I would never look to any third party to solve it. Not even Smugmug, happy as I am with their services. Cool sites like Smugmug tend to be bought out eventually by less cool companies, and policies may change.

Maybe I'm just a paranoid control freak but I like to know that I have all the bits and bytes in my possession. I am currently burning to CD and plan to start doing secondary copies to DVD as well. I think of my stuff on Smugmug as a disaster recovery site, only to be used if my house burns down and all my CDs have melted.

Khaos · July 2, 2005

I burn to DVD which I leave at my office at work.

I also back up to an external hard drive that gets placed in a fire proof box.

You alone should be responsible for archiving. Personally I'm not going to trust my data protection to anyone else but myself.

I'm an IT guy. I know what can go wrong and the myriad of issues in dealing with electronic data.

Smug Mug decided to be a photo sharing site with decent print pricing through third party partnership. Data storage can be done with other companies, at a price. It's not the cost of storage as much as it is 24 hour access as well as guarantee of protection of the data.

Baldy · July 3, 2005

Jacques Lowe, famed for his photographs of the Kennedys, was extraordinarily careful with his negatives. Before he died, he he placed all 40,000 of them in the fireproof vaults of J.P. Morgan.

6 months to the day after his death, planes flew into the building where they were stored, in the basement of the World Trade Center, and they were lost.

We've looked carefully at the possibilty of becoming a good archival site and have heard suggestions from people we highly respect like Andy to say, "like Ft. Knox for your photos."

The reasons we don't go for it are:

1. Storage is that expensive when you talk RAW. Our rates would have to be much higher than they are now.

2. All the nice features we build on top of storage that are costs regular ISPs don't have aren't really useful for archiving. Full-screen slideshows and features like that won't work for files that can't be displayed on the Internet, like RAW files.

3. We don't feel comfortable with the legal aspect of making claims about archiving.

We think Bruce Fraser, Andrew Rodney, Scott Kelby and others who confuse people into believing sRGB isn't a good color space believe that from the way they thought of color in their prepress days of CMYK. sRGB is the only space for displaying on the Internet for very good reasons and a better space than Adobe 98 for printing photographic prints. It's why the sRGB tide has swept all the best printers.

I'll do a blog entry on why we believe that, but look what happened to Apple when they clung to prepress ideals and swam against the sRGB tide:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/great-prints/

Thanks,
Baldy

Mac Write · July 3, 2005

Thanks for the info. I changed my Profile from Monitor to sRGB and now need to convert my Photos (JPEG 995/D70) to sRGB and also my NEFs I defaulted to Adobe98.

kwalsh · July 3, 2005

Sounds reasonable...
Thanks for the replies everyone.

If storage space really does significantly add to the infrastructure cost then that alone makes it a looser for the smugmug business model.

I personally am not hard up about sRGB, it seems to cover 99% of what you'd want. I am however less excited about 8-bit. Though truth be told if you've processed your RAW file and recovered the highlights and shadows 8-bit isn't all that bad - but then you have to process everything. Any chance PNG will ever be supported?

I do backup to a USB hard drive that is stored somewhere else. I never incrementally backup, always recopy everything to keep the media fresh. A third copy (at smugmg) would be nice. For the reasons stated by others I certainly wouldn't consider it my only backup.

Oh, and a word to the wise, DVD and CDR are a joke when it comes to archiving. Neither media lasts reliably beyond a couple of years. Could last 20, could last 2. You never know. There are a few dyes that are better than others, but bottomline it is always a crap shoot. Given how cheap magnetic storage is it is a better option since it can be constantly refreshed and is *much* easier to migrate to newer media. Anyway, just my $0.02.

And of course after decades of archiving work when I die people will just look at it all and think, "Why'd he bother saving this?"

Thanks for the reply Baldy et al. Keep up the cool site!

Ken

Khaos · July 4, 2005

I know about the DVD media. I actually replace every 2 years and keep multiple copies.

Is storage really that expensive?

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