The Cost Of Taking Your Photos.

There is lots to say on the subject of the cost to run a photography business so I thought I would share the cost of what I have in front of me.

I am running out of space on my storage and need to buy some more hard drives.  Now the problem is I can not put any more storage in my main PC so I will need to purchase an additional storage unit where I can move the images from my main PC to.  Doing some investigation the unit to do this will cost me anything from 1,000$ that will hold 8 hard drives or around 1,800$ for one that will hold 12 hard drives. The cost of hard drives is around 500$ each.  Yes I can by cheaper drives and a cheaper unit but I value your images more than that so I buy the best equipment to ensure your photos are safe. 🙂

Lets run the figures – If I wanted to buy and fill the 1,000$ unit it would then cost me 4,000$ in drives that makes it a 5,000$ purchase, for the 1,800$ unit it would cost me $7,800. Yay!!!!!!

So when you ask me how much are my photos are, I hope this will gives you some understanding as to why I do not do it for free and why my services do not cost the same as your mate Joe who has a camera and used it once.  🙂

 

I think I need more hard drive space.
I think I need more hard drive space.

47 Comments

  3. Sadly some people don’t realise this. I voted for external hard-drives that I store photos on. That way the computer doesn’t get bogged down either. I also only hold photos for 6 months unless they are of personal value (ie my own shots)

    1. The problem for me with external drives and even ones across a network is speed. The amount I process is quite high so what take me a 4 hours to process after an event would go out to days if not local.

      External drives like USB also di t guve me the extra security of a drive failure so I use things like hard disk RAID to reduce the risk of this. Now having said that I have and do use external drives when on assignment out of town and as a way to back up data for storage.

      I might spend some time and go through and do a clean up as it has been about a year since the last one I think which should by me some time. 🙂

    6. Sir that is insane!, not up to that speed yet, do have some back to back gigs coming up end of next month though that require probably 1000 shots per photographer per night :/

      I do have a week to get them processed though. Good luck with that major event 😀

    7. Yeah it is the crazy event in my annual calendar. I am so lucky I have excellent people to support me and the company that hires me is also fantastic to work with. The look after us while on location with food and supplies which is nice when we get a chance between the different parts of the schedule.

      So if I dissappear for a few days you will know why. Lol

    1. I did think about this ans the cost of the hardware was almost in line with getting a dedicated NAS and given my lack od free time to mess around with a NAS along with the extra feature rhat come with the Synology units I figured they would be a nice system that would give mw that and more. Power consumption and noise is a big one for me and also joining Nic together to increase throughput.

    3. Money is not really a problem as such now having said that time is. The time it would rake me to update them when I run out again would cost me more in time lost than the cost od the larger drives if that makes sense.

      I also don’t like to do things twice. Hahahahga

      So I guess to answer the question I would be looking at least 10tb.

  8. Brendan – I’m actually about to get to the point where I split my LR catalogue into ‘current’ and ‘archive’ where the ‘current’ will live on the laptop and sync back to my server and the ‘archive’ will only live on my server.

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