Jaxon Brooks

An Open Letter to SmugMug:
 
My previous images are all already on Flickr. I recenty started
shooting in RAW format, so I was looking for a place to store them and
use them like JPEGs. I looked into SmugMug and Piccassa, because
Flickr doesn’t support RAW formats.
 
After some research and testing, I see now that there is a real “RAW
problem” in that no one has a good solution for RAW images in “the
Cloud”, though I think that the SmugMug solution of using Amazon’s S3
storage for the RAW images is the best so far (SmugMug groups the JPEG
on SmugMug servers and a link to the RAW image on S3 together). The
problem remains that I would have to make JPEG versions of every
image, and I was hoping to avoid that. Here are the workflows I looked
into:
 
* Shoot in RAW, convert on the desktop and upload RAW and JPEGs in
tandem. This creates a decent image, using defaults. The extra step
that is annoying and sometimes means that I don’t get the images
uploaded (human nature).
 
* Shoot in RAW and JPEG in the camera and upload RAW and JPEGs in
tandem. This takes up more room in the card and a small amount of
extra processing which could drain the battery (though possibly
insignificantly). JPEGs are best because they use the camera’s native
settings.
 
* Shoot and post just RAW and convert at SmugMug. No extra processing
means no extra steps. JPEGs rendered by the SmugMug servers are
terrible, which I believe comes from using generic, possibly
non-camera-specific settings. (I understand the difficulty of
converting from the larger data set in RAW to RGB, but that doesn’t
help me as a consumer).
 
I have several friends who love SmugMug and it’s truly a great site.
Picassa is ugly to me, and they charge way too much for their storage
of RAW files, but it’s free for JPEGs.
 
Flickr also allows me to specify permissions on a per-file basis, and
those permissions are password based rather than hash key based. I
just don’t trust a secret URL, no matter how long the hash in the URL
is. URLs are too easily tossed about. But people are much less likely
to give up their Flickr/Yahoo name and password.
 
The per-file technique also allow me to to have mixed access in the
same set, so my family can see more images that the public at large.
 
For now I am shooting in a larger resolution RAW format in addition to
a smaller, low compression JPEG. I am loading the JPEGs into Flickr
and am looking for the best cloud based backup interface to store the
RAW files. Probably something S3 backed.

Posted from JaxonBrooks.com