Item — HN Reader

The service I am STILL looking for is one that will let me upload RAW, will allow end users to view them, and will let me pay some price (per picture if necessary) for permanent archival. IOW, I worry that about a year or so after I'm dead my last hard drive dies, and my digital pics going all the way back to my first Sony that used a 3.5 inch disk to take 640K photos are gone.

I've thought about doing a mass conversion to JPEG, and then see if one of the public archive servers would take my collection, but I worry about how long it would take me to upload 2TB of photos. Alternately I could self-curate to get the collection size down, but I've learned over the years that sometimes a poor photo of something that ended up to be transitory is better than no photo at all.

1 comments

EwanG, you must already know about SmugMug (as I imagine you've looked at all the image hosting services online multiple times if this is a big pain point), I'm curious why it wouldn't fit the bill?

(I have absolutely no affiliation, shy of writing their Java API)

First off, it seems that lets me "store" a RAW but that I have to attach that to a JPEG. I'm lazy enough to want to be able to upload the RAW and have it do the conversion for me.

Second, and the bigger problem for my use case, is that there is no "forever" or "lifetime" account option. I want something where I pay the equivalent for a few years cost, and then as long as I have someone who has the username and PW and checks in at least once a year, I don't have to pay again. So a $599 account that has the Pro options as a single payment. Of course cheaper would be fine too :-)

Lastly, and this is probably "just me", I'd like something that will let me do at least simple retouches on my Motorola Xoom.

Build the service, or get SmugMug to extend theirs, and let me know so I can sign up!