Storage solutions for 2 photographer business

My partner and I live on opposite sides of the city and it often takes a couple of days for both of us to get a complete set of images. For example, the wedding we just shot had over 20 gbs of RAW images and I brought all the cards home, loaded them on my computer, then I will get the cards to him in the next couple of days for him to load onto his computer. Then of course we each do our own edits and we combine them at some point. As you can see, this is not very efficient at all. I use Mac and he uses Windows, shouldn't be an issue, but wanted to be thorough for my questions later..

Ideally I would like to bring the images back to my house, load them onto a storage device that we can both access remotely and edit/save images directly from that device without having to download them, then later upload the edits.

Obviously...my question is, what's the best way to accomplish this. I have a WD MyCloud drive now, but it is not very user friendly and is very slow. I am looking at Synology and wondered if anyone has experience with that system and could comment.

I imagine we would each have a sign-on to access the images, and would be able to work directly off of that device and save the edited images on the same device. That way when the other person goes in to do some editing, we can see what has already been done.

Thank you in advance for your input!

I think it'd be too slow to edit off a remote disk. Why would one person not edit everything? You want a consistent look. You edit one wedding, he edits the next. I outsource editing, super boring.

If I had to do what you wanted it'd be with BitTorrent Sync, and use XMP files. Runs off your internal hard drive. Encrypted/private.

Why not back up at the event to a portable Sanho Hyperdrive? This way you have back up and one person can take the cards and one person take the drives. Much faster than trying to do anything over the Internet with that much info.

We have a WD My Passport wireless HD with an SD card reader that usually works fine for portrait sessions. But for weddings, it was just taking too long to load 32 gbs of images.

Wireless will always be quite a bit slower. Get the Colorspace and put in a SSD and you're in business.

Maybe something like Dropbox would be appropriate? You can setup a shared folder between two Dropbox accounts. One of you would load all the photos from the cards into the Dropbox folder, and Dropbox would send them to the other person's computer over the internet for you. Any time one of you edits a photo and saves it, Dropbox would sync it back to the other person's computer.

Pros: Editing is fast, because you both have a copy of the photos on your local computer. It's also easy to setup.

Cons: Waiting for Dropbox to send the initial photo import from one computer to the other before the second person can start working on them. Depends on how fast your internet connections are.

You shouldn't use the same Lightroom catalog over Dropbox (at least not at the same time), but if you are using sidecar files, you could probably store referenced Lightroom photos in this way.

Dropbox is $10/month for 1TB of space, so $20/month for the two of you.


* Make sure you backup the shared photos folder. If one of you moves the photos out of that folder, then they are removed on the other person's computer as well.

Think about companies that provide editing services. How do they get your images? They don't. They edit using your LR catalog. I believe that's the way you need to think. Uploading/downloading raw images, regardless of storage mechanism, should not even be considered.

I'm not sure an SSD would help much. Copying files is sequential, spinning hard drives are fine at that, and are fast enough to take the information from a CF card. SSD use less battery is all.

I just setup a Synology 1815+ and am very impressed with the system. Remote access is very easy to configure. The ability to use the system for remote edits will depend on your uplink speed for your internet connection.

I installed a Synology DiskStation DS416 a few months ago. It is used with an East Coast partner and other periodic contributors. We can also send secure links to clients for uploads and downloads. The File Station or Cloud Station packages included will solve your issues about file sharing and remote access to each other's edited files. You can set up group shared folders too, but I don't think there is a way to share raw source files for editing by multiple users. Pretty sure this is a limitation by Adobe. Still, you can edit on your respective computers and the edited files can be shared automatically from a common folder.