p.2 #2 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
There are two principles that date from the management of large timesharing sites such as existed at universities and research labs in the 1970s and 1980s:
1. People want to save more than they really need to, “just in case”, or simply because they can’t be bothered working out what should be deleted. If you implement scarcity like disc space quotas (within reason) the amount stored reduces with no actual data loss.
2. You need to provide different levels of size vs. speed of access. For example, there was often an archiving facility where you could queue a file to be removed to tape, from where it could later be retrieved with a day or so’s notice.
While the technology has changed, the principles remain valid. Instead of tape, today’s cold storage is an offline hard drive or AWS Glacier, or maybe a NAS in high volume cases. Instead of quotas, we have high storage prices.
Applied to photography and video:
• Have a clear idea of who the audience for your photos are. This will inform you which ones you actually need to keep. I don’t keep unedited raws around at all.
• Intermediate edits in .psd or .af files should either be sent to cold storage or just deleted after a period of time. I just delete them after two months.
• Raw files for paid jobs like weddings and commercial shoots belong in cold storage once the product has been delivered to the client. Intermediate files could be archived with the raws or just deleted, depending on your business policy.
• Out-of-the-camera video clips go to cold storage once the editing is completed. I know of one YouTube creator with > 3 million subscribers who just deletes them.
p.2 #3 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
johnvanr wrote:
HCB left an archive of at least 200,000 negatives. That’s a lot of decisive moments…
Good point, but quite manageable in the digital realm.
From a personal point of view, who is going to manage your negatives and digital files? I think for most of us, the hobby stops when we do. For those that have made a name for themselves, I’m sure that your will spells out what is to become of your work. Perhaps, burial with negatives and hard drives would mimic the ancient burial with jewelry, weapons and armor.
p.2 #5 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
bwcolor wrote:
Good point, but quite manageable in the digital realm.
From a personal point of view, who is going to manage your negatives and digital files? I think for most of us, the hobby stops when we do. For those that have made a name for themselves, I’m sure that your will spells out what is to become of your work. Perhaps, burial with negatives and hard drives would mimic the ancient burial with jewelry, weapons and armor.
My daughter studies archiving. Maybe she can take my stuff on as a project…
p.2 #6 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
Two years ago, I bought some 18TB hard drives for about $330. Today the same drives are going for $900. On a per TB basis it went from $20 --> $50.
I shoot only still photos and add about 1TB per year to my archive. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup process, then I need basically 3TB per year or $150 to hold my photos. A lot more $ than before, but not much of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
Many of my files are from older sony bodies which I shot with uncompressed raw. I have been compressing these losslessly with the adobe DNG converter to save significant space (it saves about 50% vs uncompressed and maybe 20% if lossless compressed raw were available). I've also typically turn on compression in my TIF and PSB files. This also saves a lot of space at the cost of file open/save times.
p.2 #8 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
EB-1 wrote:
For example an 8TB NAS drive was $325 ten years ago but is now around $350.
Nine years ago an enterprise/high-grade 7200 RPM 10TB drive was about $420 and is over $450 now.
I have dozens of 7-10 YO 8TB He drives that were planned to be trashed, but now it seems like too much value.
I also have a goodly amount of 10TB He drives 6-9 YO.
EBH
There are higher density 12 and 14TB disks available today for the same per GB cost as 8TB. So it's a question of how we measure value. Factoring in 30% inflation over 10 years makes a difference too. An 8TB drive in 2016 cost $425 in today's dollars. That's $0.50/GB compared to $0.37/GB for a 12TB WD Blue today.
p.2 #9 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
March 1st, 2025 I purchased IronWolf Pro 24TB for $500.00 /drive. Now, $999.00. In March, 2026 I purchased IronWolf Pro 28TB for $690.00 Now $1199.00. All purchases from B&H.
In total, populating one NAS with eight 24TB drives and another with four 28TB drives. The M.2 SSD were equally inflated. So, months later, I would not replace my old NAS, but rather ride them to failure. I think that looking to online storage would be the best option. I also have an online service and have used it to recover gigabytes of lost data, but it took forever, or you pay a good sum to have the files shipped on physical media. No free lunch here. One fire, or flood and your negatives can be lost. What backs them up? ..Digital..Scanning/copying..
p.2 #10 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
But in the history of storage, drive prices per capacity actually decreased rapidly even with inflation.
From 1999 to 2022 I was paying about the same for a 20GB drive compared to a 20TB drive. That's about a 1000x price factor. Nobody would have expected at $20/GB a $400 drive in 1999 to be a 20TB drive for $700,000 after 23 years.
p.2 #11 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
How is the price of LTO tape storage these days? We used to use it as long term offsite storage and I can't see that the advantages have become negated. Requires a disciplined approach of course and only really makes sense with large libraries but if we're talking video that's probably enough.
p.2 #12 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
It's not so much the cost of tape, but the autoloaders and library systems are quite expensive per TB unless you have large volumes. The last I used was LTO-8 so I don't know where things stand now, but assume there is some pressure to use more tape since discs are impacted.
p.2 #13 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
Tape needs to be stored where it doesn’t get too hot or humid, otherwise not just the data but the coating itself is compromised. No just putting it in a storage unit like you can with hard drives.
And I don’t know about LTO, but the old 9-track reel drives needed regular alignment (we did it monthly), otherwise the data could get written in the wrong place so that only the drive that wrote it could read it.
p.2 #14 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
Unfortunately, I get to shoot much more rarely now that files are larger and cameras have potential for silent high fps. I use those capabilities and then weeks or months go by before I finish editing, if ever. I don't think compression will solve things as if it is very light and close to lossless so that you get high quality, the compression ratio is not that great, and the files still end up taking a lot of space. If the compression is effective then the quality drops noticeably, and the results become less rewarding.
I think the solution is to be more discriminative and deliberate about shooting and not just take advantage of every remote possibility. Set goals like one really good picture with certain characteristics (or a small set of pictures that would fit on a magazine or book spread) and try to achieve that rather than worrying about what you might be missing, focusing on that goal. Digital video in my opinion is very impractical as a solo endeavor, and it requires a lot of planning and practice and willingness to get specific gear to stabilize the camera, carry and use it, set up field audio recording and synchronization etc. and edit everything to high quality. This is hugely time-consuming and the editing time can easily take the fun away from it.
However, of course, the new kit also can produce very rewarding results, but to manage time (and storage) one has to be selective.
I personally don't think the storage costs are the main limitation but rather the time available. If you don't have the storage, shoot smaller files and be more selective about what you shoot. There are still many compressed options to make the appropriate compromise between quality and storage requirements.
I delete maybe 90% of my raw still files and keep the edited TIFFs and in most cases JPGs, and I try to keep all the RAW files of images I consider worthwhile keeping, which may be roughly that 10%. I will probably end up later changing that target from 10% to 1%. For video, I edit the originals, and export the final edited videos and delete the original files after editing has been completed, as there is no way I could keep the original unedited footage. Regarding audio files, I keep the ones that have value and delete the others.
p.2 #15 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
Tape storage for an individual user probably isn't cost effective given the initial hardware costs and physical storage requirements. You're likely better off paying a monthly service for archival data storage so long as you consider access time lag and associated fees.
p.2 #16 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
jeffbuzz wrote:
Tape storage for an individual user probably isn't cost effective given the initial hardware costs and physical storage requirements. You're likely better off paying a monthly service for archival data storage so long as you consider access time lag and associated fees.
It's not even practical for many small companies to use tape nowadays, much less individuals.
Whatever you use a 3-2-1 protocol should be followed, which is now further complicated as 3-2-1-1-0. The extra 1 is one dataset being offline and the 0 is for data verified with zero errors. You'd think those are obvious already.
p.2 #17 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
EB-1 wrote:
It's not even practical for many small companies to use tape nowadays, much less individuals.
Whatever you use a 3-2-1 protocol should be followed, which is now further complicated as 3-2-1-1-0. The extra 1 is one dataset being offline and the 0 is for data verified with zero errors. You'd think those are obvious already.
EBH
The "2" in 3-2-1 is really impossible for an individual consumer who wants to maintain physical control of their data. Optical storage is effectively dead and tape is impractical. There are no viable archival mediums other than magnetic disks today. The only way to achieve 2 medium archiving is by using cloud storage which is really just someone else's magnetic disks.
p.2 #18 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
I've always taken 2 to mean different brands or models. For example if I have one dataset on Seagate EXOS in a Syonolgy and another dataset on WD Ultrastar DC in a QNAP that's alleviating most common failure modes. If you buy a case of 20 WD HDDs and make multiple data sets from that you are at a small risk of some kind of batch defect that they all have short lives.
p.2 #19 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
So here is my approach in general and definitely for paid client work:
I shoot in RAW, but Canon's lossy CRAW format. That saves about 50% storage right off the bat. The visible image quality tradeoff really only becomes noticeable with extreme exposure shifts. All of the selections are also run through AI Denoise anyway.
I have historically kept nearly everything I shoot, including outtakes. Prior to CRAW I would convert the lossless compressed RAWs to lossy DNGs but then discovered with the advent of Adobe Denoise that it wouldn't denoise those lossy DNGs, but will denoise Canon's CRAW.
As time allows, I'm going through past years and running Denoise on the outtakes where I can and then exporting those as 80% jpegs with a low contrast profile to retain a reasonably wide tonal range. Then deleting the RAW outtakes. So far this has made the biggest difference, with respect to storage recovery, with 45MP outtakes. As I work through those and get to older 20 and 24MP outtakes, the amount of storage recovery decreases relative to the overall amount of effort. The other option I've taken for some high volume, lower value events has been to simply extract the full resolution jpeg previews from the RAW outtakes, keep those and discard the RAWs. This results in about a 90% storage recovery whereas the conversion through Denoise and 80% jpeg output recovers about 60-75%.
Moving forward I've added a surcharge to client work for one year of storage/archiving at $100/TB, though I should probably increase it. For most jobs it only adds $10-$20, but I have one currently that's sitting at about 2.5TB as work in progress...
Currently I'm OK for work in progress NVMe storage with several 4TB and a couple 2TB, so am not too concerned about that area. And I also have a decent amount of memory cards because in the past I'd just buy some whenever there was an attractive sale. It's HDD storage where I anticipate the first bottleneck occurring but so far have been able to delay that by converting 2025 outtakes from RAW to jpeg.
I haven't really changed how I cover jobs/events in part because I have enough memory cards to continue as usual. However I'm skipping an event this summer that I shoot just for fun for a number of reasons, but one minor one is because previous years racked up about 400-500GB of storage demand.
The only things I put in the cloud are final edits, either on AWS or Google Drive.
Anyone else use AWS and received a recent warning that your account was using an unusually high amount of data/bandwidth? I got a bill for over $2M, whereas normally it's under $20/month...
Apparently some got bills in the billions. Fortunately it was 'just' a billing glitch that apparently caused some knee-jerk panic. Hopefully storage never gets to that price range!
One potentially beneficial side effect, if storage prices stay high, is that it will hopefully motivate research and development of next generation storage solutions to come online sooner than later, that either exponentially increase storage quantity or considerably undercut existing storage costs.
But right now it's painful to see that the 4TB NVMes I bought last year for $250 are ~$1500 and the 18 and 20TB HDDs that I bought for around $300 are way higher than that. It's just difficult to accept that that amount of money now might only buy 8TB, if even that.
p.2 #20 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
I actually work for a memory/data storage company.
For me it's not like my existing memory cards expire, so my existing set of cards is still serving my needs. In fact, I had a dual 512GB card, and it stored all the pictures I took from a rather long trip.
I have a NAS server which I store photos on, but the photos occupy less than 5% of the total space, so I haven't had to need to buy any new HDD's.
So, it' hasn't impacted me at all... and even if I needed to add a HDD or a memory card, the cost is still nothing compared to the cost of cameras and lenses these days.
