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.
Great, that's out of the way. Storing and archiving photos & videos is near and dear to my heart [1] and I believe that cloud storage is one piece of answering yes to the question of "will I have my photos in 50 years?". My entire Shuttleworth Fellowship is based on this.
Here's my $.02.
Cost - we haven't yet but have all the pieces to use Amazon Glacier for storage of high resolution originals. That means storing 100 GB will cost you $1 / month. There's additional costs to keep thumbnails in S3 for immediate access -- my estimate is <$3 all inclusive for that 100GB.
Ownership / Portability - a big part of my fellowship is to see how a hosted service (ala Flickr) can provide 100% ownership and portability. The solution is to let users (optionally) bring their own storage. So you can use the Trovebox software connected to your own Glacier and S3 bucket.
Functionality - I think organization, viewing, sharing and archiving should be merged together. Instead of having your sharable photos in one place and your archives in another --- why aren't they combined?
Raw - we support RAW and do conversion to JPEG.
Open Source - Check [2].
Mobile - Check [3] [4] [5] [6].
API - Check [7].
[1] http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/current/jaisen...
[2] https://github.com/photo
[3] https://github.com/photo/mobile-ios
[4] https://github.com/photo/mobile-android
[5] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trovebox/id511845345?mt=8
[6] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trovebox.a...
[7] https://trovebox.com/documentation