I spent some time today contemplating the two biggest issues that face photobloggers as their photoblogs 1) start to grow and 2) more people find out about them. The first problem is the space requirements associated with storing all your images on your hosting account. Simply put, photos take up space. This isn’t a problem when you are getting started, but as you continue to add images to your photoblog space can quickly become an issue. Add to this that there seems to be a “size arms race” when it comes to the sizes of images people are publishing and you can see how this is going to become a problem for quite a few folks in the near future.
The other issue I started to think about was the costs associated with the transfer of these images. Most hosting accounts have some soft limit on the amount of bandwidth that you can use on a monthly basis and if you have a popular photoblog with increasingly larger images you may be able to hit that soft-limit rather quickly.
So what’s a photoblogger to do?
Is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) a viable solution?
In my opinion it is a solution that some photobloggers should be looking at. It’s very easy to get started with Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use and there are no contracts. So if you don’t like the service you can easily stop using it.
Why S3 over Flickr?
Don’t get me wrong, Flickr is a great service and I do have a Flickr account. I think of Flickr as more of a community than a way to store and serve images to my photoblog. I know that you can do it, but for some reason I just don’t think of Flick in that way. Also, Flickr has been in the news a few too many times lately for copyright infringement issues. The Flickr API just seems to invite folks to misuse the it and that makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
My own little experiment
I am in the process of signing up for an S3 account as I write this, and all new images that I publish to my photoblog will now be hosted by Amazon’s S3 service. I will continue to post on how this little experiment goes and what it ends up costing.
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6 responses so far ↓
Good point about G3. I haven’t had been bitten by the storage/transfer issue but, as with other possible “professional” solutions, this seems like something that all “serious” bloggers need to investigate and consider.
Thanks for being the guinea pig. I’m looking forward to the benefit of your experience and advice. That kind of experiential feedback is why a blog like this is potentially important for all of us. Thanks!
Flickr is a topic that is altogether different and needs to be featured here. I would welcome a healthy discussion.
My main reason for going with S3 was redundancy, I have a hard drive dedicated for photographs and a backup thereof on a 2nd drive. When I finally made the switch to digital I was very concerned about the longevity and archival qualities of digital media, especially optical media. With Amazon S3 I’m finally able to sleep at night
S3 is a great service for offsite backups, I’m using it since about a year and have 5+ years (about 200GB) of digital photographs on there. The data gets synced automatically overnight and the cost is reasonable for my volume at about $20 per month.
@Markus: Thanks for the comments about using S3 for backups - you’ve hit the nail on the head about finally being able to “sleep at night”
What tool are using to access your S3 data?
@Bob: As always Bob, your thoughtful responses make me think! Thanks for taking the time to comment.
jungledisk on OS X
There’s also steadyoffload.com which does exactly what it should: offload images. this is very good because if steadyoffload goes down (like it happened with s3) your site would still have the local images available. and the main advantage is that it can offload anything except HTML files.
[...] mentioned in an earlier post that I was planning on using Amazon S3 with my photoblog. Well I am happy to let you all know that I have finally managed to get everything switched over [...]