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?
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On a separate note, how are you doing RAW <-> JPEG conversion on the server?
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.
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.
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?
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On a separate note, how are you doing RAW <-> JPEG conversion on the server?