Image Mechanics
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Archiving

Image Mechanics Hard Drive Valet System

What do you do with hundreds of raw files after each shoot? Do you quickly get them color corrected, edited, keyworded, processed and uploaded to a web site for the client to see? Are the images safely and redundantly stored for the long haul? Are your hero images easy to find and retrieve or does it take you hours to find a single image in your archive? In todays competitive photography market any failure in your digital image workflow can be costly in terms of time, money and client relationships.

Image Mechanics HDV (Hard Drive Valet) service can help. We will quickly organize by shot or subject, rename if needed, batch color correct, load the shoot into our online archive system and put up a web gallery with photographer and client editing and retrieval access. The Valet part is how we deal with current bandwidth limitations. It is a combo of sneakernet and traditional online services. Have you ever tried to load a 35mm dslr shoot of raw files to an online storage facility? How about P45 files? The average commercial photo shoot today is around 50 gigabytes. Even if both ends of the internet pipeline were dedicated t-1s it would take you approximately 4* days to upload the average digital shoot!

Instead, just drop off, FedEx, messenger or have us pick up your archive drive and we will load it into our secure redundant system. We will convert your image files into Adobe DNG files, a safe open standard archiving format, and give you web access to edit, search, and download** your full-resolution RAW images. Getting your images into our system is a flat rate of $.25 per image ($25 minimum charge). For the typical shoot averaging out to 800 images, that equates to $200, which is less than the cost of two external backup drives.

Online access to your archived images costs:

  • $25 per month for up to 250GB
  • $50 per month for up to 500GB
  • $100 per month for up to 1TB

 

*Assuming 160K per second upload/download on each end with no interruptions, packet loss or any other activity on either end of the t-1 lines.

**Due to the previous mentioned bandwidth limitations, downloading high resolution files of whole shoots is prohibited. 25 DNG files per session is recommended.

Image Mechanics LLC makes no warranty of uptime for online access to client images. We will do our very best to ensure that your files are always available to you but since this is not an e-commerce site like Amazon there are no uptime guarantees.