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Ask HN: how do i move 5 GB of photos?

22 points by jgamman ↗ HN
my friends all have digital SLRs and when we get together for a holiday each of us can rack up 5 GB of photos then head back to our respective countries. any ideas on how a bunch of non-IT people can easily send/download 5 GB from each other? flickr etc won't work since each photo is 3-5 MB and 5 GB is a fair chunk o' space. this seems like a page 1, paragraph 1 use of the net yet i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line - any advice?

57 comments

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jm4
Hmm... Good question... Bit torrent might be worth looking into. It will probably take forever, but once it gets going you can just leave it for a couple days and it's easy to resume a transfer if anyone gets disconnected.

It might even be easier and faster to go low tech. A few DVD-Rs or Flash drives and stamps would do the trick.

tjr
Agreed. I work on recording projects with musicians all over the U.S. For huge data files, a DVD in the mail is way more convenient than the internet, and possibly even faster, if you factor in next-day delivery and less-than-robust network transfers.
brlewis
I have excess capacity on ourdoings.com and no limits yet. I've made a lot of UI improvements lately. Let me know if you encounter anything difficult for non-IT people.
technoguyrob
http://streamfile.com lets you "stream" a file like a movie, so you don't have to wait for an upload to finish. Just zip up the 5GB into 3 packs (browsers won't let you upload more than 2GB), and stream it. Then let it stream until the other party receives it.

P.S. Streamfile is written in Erlang, which is kind of cool.

derefr
You mean like netcat? (Not to say that it's what they should use, but the idea is the same, right?)
jgamman
this looks the kind of thing i'm looking for - thanks
brk
Why not swap photos before you leave and you're all local to each other?

Otherwise, I'd say find a $5/mo web server account. Everyone zips up their images, ftp's them to the server, and you download each persons image bundle as a simple link.

You'd probably have no more than 100GB of aggregate monthly transfers, lots of options in that range. Plus you'd get email accounts and maybe make your own private forum to stay in touch.

noelchurchill
Why non burn to DVD and drop in the mail box?
tlrobinson
Ah yes, the good old fashioned sneakernet.
jgamman
um yeah, we're doing that now but i thought with the whole interweb tube thing there'd be something a little more point-to-point sitting in the mac or xp os's ;-)
noelchurchill
What about using MobileMe:

"Keep your visitors in sync. A mere click in your Gallery allows visitors to subscribe to your online photos, creating an album in their own iPhoto libraries with your full-resolution photos. When you update your Gallery, the albums on their computers update as well."

jlouis
There is a beautiful exercise in Andrew Tanenbaums "Computer Networks" book, of which I own an old 1996 edition. It involves calculating the bandwidth of a truck filled to the brink with tapes if I remember correctly. It also seems my memory serves me, re the Sneakernet article on Wikipedia.
lampy
Microsoft Mesh (in P2P mode, without storing data on server)?
ycseattle
jgamman can you email me at ycseattle (-at-) gmail.com? I am working on this exact idea.
hollywoodcole
One byte at a time! lol

I would sign up a gmail account and upload the photos to it. Then give access to all your friends so that they can download and archive what you all want. It won't be pretty but you will be able to send the account.

derefr
On that note, Dropbox streamlines exactly the process you describe (I'm whoring it out now as it's pretty darn good... now that I finally got an invite. I have a few of my own, too, if you're curious.)
jgamman
thought of that but there's a 20 MB limit and i'd go nuts dumping photos (zipped) 0.02 GB at a time - if i was smart i'd be able to write a script that did it to an entire folder of photos, zipped them into 10MB chunks and emailed them to a gmail account specifically opened for the purpose. hmmm.
joshwa
Do you all need all 5GB of photos? Probably not. I'd venture that:

-- the total number of shots can be edited down to the 'keepers'

-- web-resolution is sufficient for 95% of the photos being traded

Have everyone edit out the losers, batch process down to 800px jpegs, upload to a flickr group, and then transmit the ones you need higher-res versions of individually via email or mediafire or similar.

hhm
I guess they probably include videos too.
joshwa
OP said DSLRs, but for video the same thing applies. Downres to something reasonable for sharing, and limit the output-quality transfers to the ones you know you want.

This is how even professionals shooting 50-200GB/day do things-- nobody delivers a HD with every single outtake, but instead they just post a web gallery of the candidates and then deliver the high-res files of the just the final selects.

jgamman
yeah, that's the obvious first step but seriously, have you met digital photo hobbyists? every photo is precious and they never want to let someone else cull before they get the chance to see your files... trust me, give your (photo nuts) friends all your photos ;-)
bprater
Curious why you head out before you share pictures? If you did it right there, you could burn x numbers of DVDs.
jgamman
khatmandu is not known for it's blistering high tech hub - at least not in the district i was in. besides, my last couple days after hiking everest with friends from around the world and i spend it burning dvd's? i don't think so! ;-)
dominik
Flickr and Smugmug both have unlimited uploading for their photos. Both services are user friendly, even to non-technical users. Flickr's pro service is $25/yr and Smugmug's entry level service is $40/year. I personally host over 50 GB of photos at Smugmug.

My only other piece of advice: upload from somewhere with high upload bandwidth.

raghus
Flickr etc won't work since.. - actually, Flickr is a great solution. Just get an Pro account for $25/yr which comes with unlimited uploads and unlimited sets. You can even set up Flickr uploading to upload lower res files right from your DSLR biggies and get the whole upload done much much faster. You can tag each others photos and pick the best by favoriting etc. add comments, ask questions etc. There's much you can do with Flickr - I'd definitely look into that option.
jgamman
thanks for the tip, i'll spend some time investigating this but still 25$/year...
brlewis
Problem with the tip is flickr favoriting doesn't work so well for letting a group pick a good subset of a large batch of photos. Favorites are more for letting your friends know great individual photos you've discovered as you wander flickr.

More apropos to what you're doing is ourdoings.com's option (on by default) to let anybody move a photo between the "featured" and "more photos" sections for a given entry. Make an unlisted site just for your friends, tell them to click on the "Edit" tab and volunteer. Once you approve them, everybody can upload, etc., so it's a nice group site.

It's integrated with Clickpass (a YC startup), so registration is trivial. You can edit photos after uploading thanks to integration with Snipshot (another YC startup). If $25 is a lot of money, maybe you should make your site public rather than unlisted. That way you could collect tips with tipjoy (another YC startup). Public sites are also the only ones that can use Disqus integration, until such time as Disqus supports private comments. OurDoings is the only photo-sharing site with Disqus comments.

raghus
Hey, you forgot to say that Disqus is also a YC startup ;-)
raghus
If you're ok with not being able to see each others' original out-of-the-camera-full-res files, you can 1) first use Irfanview to batch resize them down to 600x400 or something. Irfanview is so much more lightweight than Adobe CS and does batch resizing beautifully. 2) upload the small sizes to your free Flickr a/c (100MB max/month) 3) still get all the goodies of favoriting, commenting, discussions etc.
grimoire
I'm with the whole DVD thing. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a box of discs in a postal van. The ping time on the other hand...
boredguy8
There's a photo in our office of a couple employees handing hard drives down a chain like a fire brigade. The caption: "The bandwidth is great. It's the latency that kills you."
albertcardona
Don't understimate the bandwidth of of a truckload of hard drives. I.e. fedexing hard drives is the easiest and fastest.

[There is a file sharing society in Japan, by invitation only, whose members ship encrypted hard drives to each other. Not just for bandwidth reasons.]

callmeed
Get an Amazon S3 account and use an S3-compatible client to upload/download the files.

You can also set permissions on the files so that people can download them directly.

ulvund
Wuala, a distributed filesystem, make a group.
jgamman
that's not downloadable till 14 Aug... but it looks very close to what i'm looking for. i'll bookmark it and check it out in a few weeks.
newt0311
Um... Since nobody has suggested it yet, open up an ssh port on a computer and use sftp.
youmon
he said that they were a "bunch of non-IT people"
jgamman
sorry that won't work - those acronyms may be obvious to most of this community and i might enjoy figuring out how to make it work but there's no way any of the rest of the group could do it (or care how to...)
Kilimanjaro
Get a .info domain really cheap for $1.99, get the cheapest unlimited hosting service, upload pics via ftp, get an open source photo manager.

See? less than $5 a month splitted among 5 guys for your own personal photo sharing site, easier impossible.

brfox
Are there any companies where they will send you a 16gb flash drive, you fill it up and send it back, then they host the files (or upload them to flickr, smugmug, etc)?

I'd pay $25 for that service.

aneesh
i can't seem to find a simple solution on-line

Even in this day and age, the off-line solutions are better. Get a DVD or flash drive and send it by mail or FedEx. Even on a moderately fast connection 5 GB is no joke to download.

jgamman
i'm starting to get that idea - seems sad huh?
jimm
www.pando.com