phonic pol said:
Wow wow wow, steady on there. Bit of a generalization don't you think. This is one issue that is very prominent with a lot of photographers I know, including myself.
I think it's the Aperture developers who need to catch up i.e. with the ability to support multiple libraries on multiple drives. This is an area that Lightroom has already sorted.
Not trying to hassle you (or myself) phonic pol.
Of course Aperture has to get it's act together in many ways. While 1.x has problems with multiple drives it has to sort out, I suspect that the underlying problem is it's DB design, which is my main frustration. Slow and clunky! But these will hopefully be solved over the next year or two. My post was more about the macro view of photographers and computers.
Since we're both posting as members of a quasi-technical computer rumors site, we have to realize that we're the "early adopters" who embrace rather than fear technology.
But my point still stands - that photographers haven't really come to terms with the STORAGE demands of digital images, and I include myself in that bunch.
If you think about film, there was a simple margin cost to shoot each shot that we all had in our heads - probably about £10 per roll for the film and developing (whether through a lab or an in-house lab tech). So we knew that each shot was about 30p. This either got billed to the client, or was included in the cost of a bid.
Fast forward to the digital age. We buy our expensive digital backs (often out of the money we anticipate saving from reducing these film/processing costs), and then splurge for some expensive workstations to process these images. But the actual storage / backup hard drives are also marginal costs per image. And I think that this is what we are neglecting to calculate, assuming it's "free", or pretty darn close to free.
Assuming a photographer takes about 50,000 images a year, that might work out to almost a TB per year per photographer. While hard drives are growing in size, I suspect that sensor sizes will continue to grow even faster, so this is probably a conservative estimate.
One would expect to have a primary HD for daily use, an in-house BU, and then an off-site BU. Hence 3 TB of storage / BU per photographer/year. Fast forward 10 years, and even using 1 TB drives one now has to juggle 30 drives for a single photographer. Not to mention that earlier ones (like in 2006) might only be 500 GB drives, so this number will increase. It's not just the expense of the HD's, but also the complexity. Scale that studio up with multiple photographers, and this begins to get pretty daunting. One solution is to permanently trash a high percentage of images, but that really depends on the type of photography that you do.
Hence my main point about Apple. Assuming they can get their act together with Aperture, they may have decided that they want to target this market. By focusing on high end workstations AND storage solutions for the smaller photographers who don't have full time IT people, there will be a LOT of money floating for the computer hardware company that helps to sort this out. Far more money than from software.