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Comment by Obi_Juan_Kenobi | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> internal storage isnt the solution for laptop users > go and buy a $500 nas + drivers

you know you can buy a cheap desktop for $400 and use it for nas and more? like a backup computer when your laptop is dead?

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.

anything that limits you, like a shelf NAS solution do, will cost you more time as you adapt to it. instead of the other way around.

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."

This is the exception to the rule. Not normal.

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.

I think it's because of the mindset "I can revisit what I have taken and make my selection later. I don't want to lose any memory. Storage is cheap."

Over time, it becomes a burden to maintain all that.

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.

>it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here.

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.

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