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A post earlier this year by CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland pondering how he should store photos while traveling got me thinking about the same question.

I can't claim to have come up with "the answer," but I've thought about the issues, read through some discussions about what people consider best practices, and have tried to roughly quantify relative failure rates. What's right for you will depend on priorities and circumstances, but hopefully the following will offer some food for thought.

Real-world failure rates are hard to come by. However, having been the owner of a variety of laptops and other devices with hard disk drives, a 1:100 drive failure rate in a portable device over the course of a month's vacation doesn't seem out of line. Flash memory fails too. Anecdotal information from a couple of dealers (based on product returns) suggests that a 1:1000 rate is a reasonable stake in the ground--10x the reliability of disk. Further complicating the story is that some errors are recoverable, but you'd probably better stop using the card when you have a problem.

That's the hardware. Then there's the wetware--i.e. you.

This one's even harder to quantify. However, speaking for myself, I'm always misplacing loose memory cards. Furthermore, procedures that involve a lot of multi-step copying, editing, and so forth offer lots of potential to erase something that you thought you backed up or for an operation to otherwise fail without your knowledge. Or you might, like me, sometimes just do something really dumb. Also, consider theft and other forms of loss beyond your control.

Add it all up and my guess is that, for most people, minimizing the possibility of human error is more important than incrementally reducing the impact of a potential hardware failure.

With those reliability estimates and human realities as a baseline, here are my thoughts for some reasonable practices:

• If at all economically feasible, carry enough flash memory to hold all your photos. Flash has a good 10x the reliability of hard disks, more when you consider that it's probably going to be OK even if you drop it or run it through the washing machine.
• Common wisdom is that name brands are, in the aggregate, more reliable, and some higher-end cards also come with data recovery software. This seems reasonable. However, I've never seen actual data to bolster this belief--only random stories about crappy off-brand cards purchased on eBay. One data recover company notes that differences in build quality are indeed part of the reliability story but goes on to say it doesn't correlate in any consistent way to brand.
• Because photos can sometimes be recovered from memory cards after they've had a problem, it's a good idea to have at least one backup card. That way, if there's a problem, you can take the card out of the camera and work on it when you get home. Messing with it in the field is a recipe for losing data that could otherwise have been retrieved.
• A lot of people advocate putting fewer eggs in one basket. That is, they suggest using multiple smaller cards rather than one or two larger ones. This is hard to argue against so long as you develop a good system to ensure you don't lose the spare cards or accidentally erase or otherwise mess something up while you're swapping them around. Given overall flash reliability, I don't see this as a particular win--and may even be a net loss if taken to the extreme of some complicated scheme of rotating cards in and out of the camera.
• Although I tend not to bother, making a periodic hard disk backup of your memory cards is good belt-and-suspenders practice. If you're traveling with other people, a hard disk is also a good way to trade pictures. A computer is one possibility. Hard disk-based media players or portable devices specifically designed for the purpose are others.
• If you can't keep everything on flash, then you obviously need to copy it somewhere. Based on the numbers I threw out above, I wouldn't trust a single hard disk backup as my only copy of anything I really cared about. In this case, I'd want either a second hard disk or a way to burn a copy to DVD. (One advantage of making DVDs is that you can potentially mail a copy to yourself at home. (Laptop and DVDs were the solutions that Shankland eventually decided on.) If you have a bunch of spare thumb drives of reasonable capacity laying around, that may be another possibility.
• Cameras break too--maybe more so than any of the other parts we're talking about here, especially if you're in harsh conditions. I'm not sure of the final digital camera mortality rate on the Grand Canyon boating trip I took a couple of years back, but a fair number bit the dust. So definitely consider a backup camera. Sharing memory card format and/or batteries between main and backup is nice, if feasible.

Ultimately, it's all a matter of playing the odds of hardware failure, while keeping in mind all the dumb things that we can do to sabotage ourselves.

There are a lot of image editors out there, but few of them are designed with professional photographers in mind, and even fewer are designed by photographers themselves. Capture NX 2 for Windows and Mac is one of those rare editors designed by professionals but is easy enough for hobbyists to use, and Nikon has just given it a major overhaul.

Capture NX simplifies and enhances common photo editing tools in a customizable layout.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Available for purchase at $179.95 or upgrade at $109.95, the program introduces a revamped interface, closer integration with other Nikon programs such as View NX, and a battery of new tools that simplify and enhance the photo-editing work flow. This should make any photographer seriously consider making the jump for nearly every kind of edit.

Although Capture NX's improvements on the photographer's work flow are undeniably helpful, the most unique new tool in the program are Control Points. Based on proprietary Nikon technology called U Point, the control points allow the user to make selective changes instead of global ones. From sharpening to color changes, the points can affect image-wide edits, but their true power lies in the ability to narrow tweaks to a user-defined space.

There are several control point-based tools. The Black, Neutral, and White Control Point tools, which look like eyedroppers in front of circles on the toolbar, are used to manage color. By clicking on one and then clicking on the image, a small circle appears with sliders extending from it. Moving the sliders adjusts both the desired effect and the diameter of the circle that radiates from the control point. If you don't like the positioning of a point, but are happy with the effect, click and drag the point to a different location on the image.

The Selection Control Points eliminate the need for editors to manually mask off the part of the image they want to change. They function the same way as the color control points, except that they can be used to sharpen, reduce noise, adjust contrast, saturation, and more. Once a point has been created, the control panel that natively lives on the right of the editing window can be used to select the desired effect.

Control points and sliders make Capture NX's photo-editing workflow easy to manage.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Another excellent new tool is the Auto-Retouch brush, which does exactly what its name implies. What's impressive about this version of the popular tool, found in many programs, is that it can accomplish with one click what other programs take four or five. This may not sound like much initially, but when repeatedly removing dust or skin blemishes the saved time is noticeable.

Other improvements to the program include common hot keys and further compatibility with Nikon's View NX software, making batch edits and creating common settings a cinch. The Quick Fix menu also cuts out repetition by offering up a selection of standard changes ranging from curves to lens correction. The Quick Fix wouldn't be as useful as it is if it were inaccurate, but clearly a lot of work has gone into making the algorithms controlling the tool flexible and effective. The Soft Proof tool that lives at the bottom of the open image window makes accurate printing pain-free.

One of the subtle improvements of the program is the manner by which layers have been worked in. Called Steps here, they are woven seamlessly in the work flow, making control of previous changes as simple as unchecking a box. Most of the changes are made via sliders, controllable both from the image and from the Edit List, which is where the Adjustment Window lives.

However, the layout of the various components is malleable--users can hide, minimize, and drag windows around at will with no delay in processing time. This happens, in part, because Capture NX 2 is much smaller than Photoshop, which needs to appeal to designers as well as photographers. One drawback of Capture NX is that it's not capable of creating an image montage easily. However, since those are rarely high resolution images because they're made up of many smaller photos, it's not a glaring oversight.

Capture NX 2 combines multiple editing options into one manageable panel, cutting out extraneous mousing around.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Capture NX supports TIFF-16, TIFF-8, JPG, and Nikon's own proprietary NEF format. It does not support Canon's CR2 or other RAW configurations, which should decrease the appeal of the program to non-Nikon photographers. Images can be saved as TIFF, NEF, or JPG, metatag information can be kept or destroyed as the user sees fit, and changes saved to a NEF can be easily undone by unchecking the changes from the Edit List.

Overall, as a lifelong Photoshop user for my personal photo editing and printing needs, Capture NX 2 is nothing less than spectacular and should be considered by any photographer looking to enhance their work flow by cutting out tools that they never touch and emphasizing the ones they always need.

UPDATED: The relationship between Nikon, Inc., and Nik Software has been corrected. Although the Japanese division of Nikon does have an equity stake in Nik Software, Nik is an independent company. View NX and Capture NX are owned and published by Nikon, Inc. Also, Capture NX 2 and View NX do not support non-Nikon RAW formats, as previously reported.

Apple's tool for media management, Final Cut Server, is now available, the company announced Tuesday.

The software application is meant for managing the production of large-scale video projects. Final Cut Server enables automatic cataloging, viewing, and annotating of video, and is available for both the Mac and PC. It is integrated with Apple's video-editing software, Final Cut Studio.

The product was announced a year ago, was originally supposed to ship last summer, but was delayed.

Final Cut Server pricing starts at $999 for one server and 10 licenses, and $1,999 for one server and unlimited licenses.

Every once in a while we say goodbye to a technology that has been replaced by a demonstrably superior successor, yet we still hold onto a bit of nostagia for the old way. One of those about to go extinct is Polariod instant film. Even though I hadn't used it for years, I was sad to hear on NPR's All Things Considered that the film is going out of production.

Digital photography is our efficient, truly instantaneous modern standard, but there was something magical about a Polaroid picture. Even if the final prints were not as good as standard film, Polaroid had its own mystique.

The whole process had a satisfying, ritualized nature to it. You composed the photo, clicked the shutter and heard that distinctive whirr. The seemingly blank film shot out. You'd fight to see who got to grab it, shake it (for no real reason--it just seemed like it needed to be shaken like a mercury thermometer), and watch as the image teasingly developed before your eyes. The film was expensive; about a dollar a shot if I remember correctly. You'd have to carefully parcel out the ten shots in a pack to make it last through a whole party.

A few artists had clung to the medium for their work. They are mourning the end of the Polaroid era, saying that for some applications, nothing compares to the look they could get from this film.

For me, it is strange to see something that I remember as cutting-edge technology as a kid become so thoroughly obsolete. So while digital photography may be superior in almost every way, let's say one final "click, whirr" farewell to Polariod.

Yahoo-owned photo community Flickr has launched a new program today called Flickr for Good. The site will be a place for nonprofits or other photojournalists to pool together their photography. In order to get the ball rolling Flickr has teamed up with non-profit organizer TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships (which normally cost $25 a pop) to nonprofits and public libraries to let them upload as many shots as they want to the popular photo hosting community.

Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed to use their Flickr memberships are a little nebulous, but in its blog post about the new site Flickr pointed to several high profile organizations like YWCA and Camera Rwanda have been using the photo host to create photo exposés.

If you're a nonprofit looking to get in on the action, you can do so on TechSoup's sign-up page.

Update: I should note the memberships are not entirely free. Participants must pay $6 for two one-year accounts or $15 for five one-accounts. The fees are administrative, and go towards running TechSoup. In comparison, purchasing either of the accounts from Flickr directly would cost $50 or $150 respectively.

Flickr Good will be a place for nonprofits and other organizations to show off their humanitarian efforts.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug's physical infrastructure.

During my conversation last week with President Chris MacAskill, he made some points about using Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) that may not be widely appreciated. (S3 is Amazon's "storage as a service" offering that users pay for based on the amount of storage space used and data transferred.

Like Amazon's EC2 compute service, it falls roughly into the "Hardware-as-a-Service" concept.)

SmugMug was one of the earliest S3 users. As Chris tells the story, SmugMug was buying a "mindblowing" number of Xserves from Apple. The Silicon Valley-based company was running out of power and space--the usual story.

However, Chris raised another point that bears mention. The company was having to buy all this gear up-front, in advance of the revenues (i.e. user subscriptions) that it would hopefully generate. This was difficult from a cash flow perspective--especially for a company that wasn't venture capital-backed. But the reality is actually worse.

Not only were the expenses up-front, but they were capital expenses. From an accounting perspective, this means that the depreciation on the systems hit the P&L in a given year. The result? You may look profitable, but cash flow is tight and you could end end up effectively "prepaying" taxes.

Then Amazon called out of the blue, after a conference, and told the site about S3. At Amazon's initial target of 50 cents per gigabyte, it was intriguing. When Amazon ended up pricing its offer at 15 cents, Chris says the company's "jaws dropped."

Initially, SmugMug used Amazon S3 for backup while keeping all of its primary storage in-house. At the beginning, it wasn't thrilled with uptime, but it said that it wasn't disappointed, either. More troubling was that Amazon wasn't so transparent about the time and length of outages, which seems to remain a big issue.

However, over time, SmugMug started seeing better uptime from Amazon than it could deliver in-house. It now has more than 400 terabytes of photo and video storage on S3, and it can add as much as 1TB on busy days.

Now that the company has switched much of its primary storage to S3 as well, there's another economic point worth making. Were SmugMug to host all this storage in-house, it'd actually have to buy more like 1.2 petabytes because it'd need enough to support any growth spurts and enough for backup, as well as primary storage.

With Amazon S3, the company effectively gets backup for "free." (Of course, that assumes that you trust Amazon not to lose data, but as far as I know, there has been no data loss associated with any Amazon outages.)

SmugMug is also a heavy user of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), even though the service is still in beta test mode. One of the most appealing features of EC2, according to Chris, is that it can handle load spikes without paying for the capacity all the time. For example, loads go way up after a three-day holiday weekend, when people upload all their pictures on Tuesday.

All that said, the company does maintain some of its own servers. It does this, in part, to provide a sort of cache for "hot" photos. (Chris estimates that 10 percent of the photos on the site get 90 percent of the traffic.) Related is the fact that SmugMug runs its MySQL database servers in-house (so it'll be physically close to the hot photos.)

Amazon's recently announced SimpleDB could potentially offer an alternative, but it's missing some features that SmugMug's software, as currently written, requires. (See some technical discussion here.)

I suspect that we'll see these hybrid architectures--even at aggressive Cloud Computing adopters--a lot. You sometimes need that little bit of customization or specialization that you can't get from a service that has to be relatively standardized. That said, SmugMug is an aggressive adopter, and it gives us some good insights into what can be gained by making the infrastructure largely someone else's problem.

I apparently ruffled some feathers among Flickerites (of which I'm one by the way), when I suggested last week that maybe it wouldn't be so terrible were someone else, even Microsoft, to take a shot at upgrading a service given that Yahoo has shown so little inclination to do so.

Now, I'm by no means convinced that Microsoft is the right company for this particular job. At the same time, I can't help but feel that Flickr has largely stagnated--even if that stagnation feels safe and comfortable to a lot of current users.

There's no doubt that Flickr has some good things going for it:

1. It's a "best seller" in a world where network effects are important. The reasons why it got here aren't especially important. What is important is that it's become the obvious go-to photo-sharing site for much of the world.
2. And, as the mail I've received confirms, it's not just a large community but an often passionate one. A lot of people like not so much Flickr itself, but the network of people who use Flickr to hang out with each other.
3. Flickr has a decent application program interface (API) that allows developers to extend the site in a variety of ways. For example, companies like Zazzle, QOOP, and MOO now offer to print photographs on Flickr using those APIs. Indeed, there's more variety from these third parties using Flickr than is available on many of the sites like Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish, whose main raison d'etre is printing.
4. The free membership option is fairly limited but it lets you try out everything on the site. And the price of the $25 per year "pro" membership is hard to beat when you consider that it doesn't come with either upload or storage limits.
5. Finally, it has some nice extras. CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland recently gave Flickr the best grades for its ability to "geotag" photos with location information. It also has hierarchical sets--that is, it lets you put sets within larger collections--a nice organizational aid as the number of photos you have online grows.

If it sounds like I'm generally positive on Flickr, that's because I am. But it does have some non-trivial shortcomings--especially for users who want greater control over the use of their photos.

1. Today, there are limited mechanisms (essentially one hard-to-find global setting) to control which resolutions of photos the general public, your friends, and your contacts can view and thereby download. This is a serious issue for photographers who are happy to put photos up on Flickr but want to control access to higher resolution versions.
2. No archiving of RAW/DNG originals. This is related to the item above. I see Flickr as serving an off-site archiving function in addition to a share-my-photos one. PhotoShelter is one site that provides this ability. It would even seem like a good incremental revenue opportunity for Flickr.
3. No integrated security watermarking. This continues on the protect-photo-use theme. There are workarounds using APIs external to Flickr but this is a common feature on sites that cater more explicitly to pros.
4. A largely "Web 1.0" look and feel. This is a general observation that Flickr hasn't changed much over the past few years. New settings get buried deep in tabs within tabs. And there's precious little of the sort of interactivity that characterizes many newer sites. (In other words, you largely have to click through to see anything rather than getting a preview when you mouseover a location, for example.)
5. You can't export most of your data. This is part of a much broader Web 2.0 problem that I won't deal with at length here. Suffice it to say that, although photos can be exported through APIs, nothing else (comments, descriptions that aren't part of the photo itself, contacts) can. It's a complicated issue. What data belongs to you? What does information like contacts mean outside of a Flickr context? Suffice it to say that Flickr may not have done less than others to resolve some of these issues but it hasn't done more.

I like Flickr. I do. But it could be much more than it is. Yes, the wrong kind of change could ruin it. But it also can't continue on in essentially a stasis field for the long term.

Adobe Creative Suite users will soon have to turn to other Web-based or local stock photography services to get their stock photo fix.

Adobe on Monday quietly announced the end of its stock photography service. The Stock Photos service has been a part of the popular Creative Suite since the introduction of Adobe Bridge in version 2. The cutoff date is March 31st, giving users a little less than two more months to use the service to acquire legal shots to use in design work.

According to Adobe's FAQ on the matter, the company is getting out of the stock photography business to "concentrate its efforts in other areas." The service acted as a go-between to other stock photography services without a markup. It's easily comparable to iTunes for stock photography, as it offered users a one-stop shop with live previews that could easily be put into Adobe's various design applications right after purchase.

Since the front end for the photo service is part of the Creative Suite software, Adobe's created a special uninstaller that gets rid of it in Bridge. Current users of Bridge are greeted to the below message, telling them how many days are left before the service cutoff, along with links to Adobe's customer service center.

To curb any latecomers, Adobe is also cutting off the search function of the stock photo tab on March 4, which will keep new users from even being able to get to the photos that are for sale.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the past several years, the rise of Web services that offer stock photography has been speedy. With Bridge, it appeared that Adobe was taking notice and making it easier to parse through them.

However, between this and Adobe's foray into publishing to other stock services, killing off the intermediary (Stock Photos on Bridge) to save some hours to work on future products makes good business sense.

There are probably too many electrons already being spilt today on Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo. Rather than delving into the $45 billion aspects of the deal, I'm going to specifically discuss Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service.

Flickr hasn't been a big part of the general online buzzing about this proposed deal. In part, this is doubtless because it's a small part of Yahoo's financials. It's probably also because most people have at best a vague awareness that Flickr is even a part of Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and has largely left it alone.

However, as Josh Gilbertson notes over on Wired, many Flickr users are "freaking out"--as indeed they also did when Yahoo acquired the company originally.

Josh goes on to write:

One the reasons for concern is that Microsoft's Web properties, while they have their share of adherents, are not exactly leading the pack in terms of UI design, functionality and ease of use, which form the cornerstones of Flickr's popularity.

Another interesting aspect of Microsoft's proposed deal is that Microsoft does not typically go after consumer services like Flickr, which creates a lot of uncertainty for Flickr's future should Yahoo shareholders agree to the acquisition offer.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, I suspect that the situation for Flickr will be different from their original acquisition by Yahoo. Under Yahoo, Flickr was largely left to go its own way. As photographer Dan Heller noted in a lengthy post about Flickr and Yahoo just a couple of days ago:

In any event, the conversation went pretty simply: Flickr is really regarded as a completely autonomous tech group with no orders or objectives to do anything other than be a fun place for people to come and socialize about their photos. They have no financial responsibilities back to the mother ship, and Stewart is free to do whatever he wants, with no long-term objectives. When I asked whether there (were) any plans to ever get into licensing or other forms of monetizing its content, he said that Stewart has thought about it, but they are enjoying what they're doing too much and such a move has dubious financial returns in a market already dominated by other very successful companies.

So what I think the various Flickerites are so upset about is that Microsoft might not leave them alone as Yahoo has done.

I think they're right. The question is whether that's such a bad thing.

Contra Josh Gilbertson above, I'm not inclined to give Flickr all that much credit for "UI design, functionality, and ease of use." For example, as CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland notes:

For a Web 2.0 powerhouse, Flickr feels awfully Web 1.0. At least that was my conclusion after spending a few hours in the chat rooms of Photophlow, a start-up that grafts a highly interactive experience on top of Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Flickr has been equally plodding at integrating any number of commonplace features to selectively control access to high-resolution versions of photographs or to institute security watermarks in any form. The shortcomings (and strengths) of Flickr are matters for another post I've been meaning to write. But, suffice it to say, one shouldn't confuse the fact that Flickr is popular in large part because it built up a big community for largely historical reasons with the fact that Flickr is a platform that's objectively great.

(Much the same could be said in spades for del.icio.us--Yahoo's social bookmarking service.)

None of this is to say that Microsoft won't mess things up if they acquire Yahoo and Flickr. But Flickr needs work and Yahoo hasn't helped much either.