> but I've probably got something like 120GB of photos
> I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby
At a generous 5 MB per photo, that's 24,000 photos. You would have to take 65 photos, every day, for a year straight to reach those numbers. That's 1 photo every 15 minutes of your waking life for a year (assuming 8 hours sleep).
That's considerably a bit more than a 'hobby'.
At your levels, I consider $200/year rather reasonable for that level of obsession. The amount a traditional film camera user would have had to spend in developing and film costs alone for that level of usage would be astronomical.
The only quasi-reasonable complaint there is the long term storage costs of your high level of need. However, you're also making a special case of needing those photos 'everywhere'. Comparing to traditional photography there would have been no way to lug around 24,000 photos. They would have been stored, with the negatives, in an album somewhere. Kind of like sitting on a harddrive - which the going rate for 120GB is $25 (250 GB external for $50) as a one-time purchase cost.
I understand your desire to have everything digital available at all times and backed up against disasters, but there is going to be a cost associated with that.
And that cost is MASSIVELY cheaper, even at today's rates, than someone with your 'hobby' would have been spending trying to do the same thing, 10-15 years ago.
Your generous estimate on size is way off. I'm not sure exactly how many pictures I've got in total.
However, I do shoot in RAW which means each photo is in the 15MB to 18MB range. I also have JPG versions of each for sharing to friends and family.
As I intimated, last year was a bit of an aberration in that I took 4,500 (actually I took far more, I kept 4,500). I'm also a nerd which mean I am shooting in RAW, editing in lightroom, require access from lots of devices.
This isn't an unreasonable request, flickr allows me to upload, store, and organize all of these photos for a mere $25/year. I'd happily pay them a bit more to give me a great way to sync a local library to their servers in a seamless and understandable way.
However, YES I want them do the same for photos coming from phones, from multiple family members. I then want to be able to curate them natively on an iPad or PC and have that be represented elsewhere. Flickr is already doing the expensive bit, I'm looking for services on the client side to pair with them.
I'm not saying that people like me are a huge market, but almost everyone is taking more photos these days and it does need to be easier for people to manage their libraries. The solution I'm asking for ALMOST exists today, but nothing is quite there.
> At a generous 5 MB per photo, that's 24,000 photos. You would have to take 65 photos, every day, for a year straight to reach those numbers. That's 1 photo every 15 minutes of your waking life for a year (assuming 8 hours sleep).
Is that generous? A RAW file from my SLR is about 20 MBytes. Many SLR's have larger RAW files. But using my "conservative" estimate that's 16 photos a day.
Considering the average photographer can snap 10 photos in about 3 seconds during a photo shoot this seems very reasonable to me.
Yeah, my RAWs are 29 MBytes. Assume a conservative 1000 photos per holiday (it would actually be higher if I wasn't in the habit of discarding some shots immediately), then you're looking at 28 GBytes.
If I were a pro photographer, shooting events like weddings or sporting occasions, I could easily hit 1000 shots in a day. I believe my company has about 10 TBytes of photography directly related to what we do, and that's from older DSLRs with smaller RAW files.
It sounds like you haven't done digital photography in a while... File sizes are much larger than your "generous" estimates--if you have a Nikon D800 your RAW images come off the card north of 75MB (over an order of magnitude greater than your estimate). You do get a ton of resolution for that (7,360x4,912), but those files add up quickly. That would be 1,638 photos or less than 5 a day.
That's shooting one frame at a time, if you're bracketing or capturing sports, you'll be shooting many frames a second and the math gets all that more complicated. Of course you can delete photos, but it's extremely easy to fill hundreds of gigabytes even keeping only your best shots.
> I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby
At a generous 5 MB per photo, that's 24,000 photos. You would have to take 65 photos, every day, for a year straight to reach those numbers. That's 1 photo every 15 minutes of your waking life for a year (assuming 8 hours sleep).
That's considerably a bit more than a 'hobby'.
At your levels, I consider $200/year rather reasonable for that level of obsession. The amount a traditional film camera user would have had to spend in developing and film costs alone for that level of usage would be astronomical.
The only quasi-reasonable complaint there is the long term storage costs of your high level of need. However, you're also making a special case of needing those photos 'everywhere'. Comparing to traditional photography there would have been no way to lug around 24,000 photos. They would have been stored, with the negatives, in an album somewhere. Kind of like sitting on a harddrive - which the going rate for 120GB is $25 (250 GB external for $50) as a one-time purchase cost.
I understand your desire to have everything digital available at all times and backed up against disasters, but there is going to be a cost associated with that.
And that cost is MASSIVELY cheaper, even at today's rates, than someone with your 'hobby' would have been spending trying to do the same thing, 10-15 years ago.