2024-01-24: init

hello, world

welcome to the file.photo blog

our goal is to build the best raw photo archival site for photographers of all experience levels

we think backups are important and saving every photo you take should be affordable

raw photos are the digital camera equivalent of a film negative

any JPG, PNG, GIF, or other image you generate from your raw files can always be rerendered or recreated as long as the raw still exists

if you could archive every shot you ever took, you could:

rerender images in the future with better photography software
track your progress as a photographer by comparing old shots with new ones
look back and find images that take on new meaning later in life
pass down photos that might be interesting to family or publications in the future

some folks only save the pictures they want

some folks build or buy NAS (network attached storage) devices

some folks use dropbox, apple, google, and other cloud storage providers

and some folks mix those options together

cloud providers are providing storage at cheaper and cheaper rates, which is great for us as archivists

on more consumer oriented products, we don't see discounted rates on storage until we're very high into the storage tiers (e.g. google's 4TB tier)

ideally we could start out small and pay as we go

local copies of raw files are important for being able to quickly work on post-processing

in a perfect world an archive could be just as fast local file access on our laptop

no cloud provider can quite give you that as they can't guarantee your internet connection speed

to achieve that you really need a NAS or some sort of large local storage

if you love the NAS idea, we recommend truenas with offsite backups to backblaze

we think the safest backup strategy is a local duplicate (or two) and uploading to a cloud provider that stores multiple copies

the sooner you get multiple copies of your raw photos, the less likely any device can be corrupted and lose them

SD cards fail, hard drives die, servers suffer power issues, and laptops burn out

that doesn't mean you should panic during the time between when you're taking photos and when they're uploaded

it does mean that prioritizing some sort of offsite backup is good if you want to build an archive

if you are like us and love the idea of building an archive of your work over time at a fair price please stay tuned

we are working on a project that we hope will be simple to use, fast, reliable, and friendly to the frugal