How to host large amounts of creative commons imagery?
Asked by
bpeoples (
2551
)
October 15th, 2009
In the coming months, I’m going to be creating large amounts of high resolution maps, panoramas, and images that I’ll be releasing under creative commons BY-NC license.
I’m considering flickr—at $25/yr—which has built-in CC licensing options & search capability, but is limited to 20MB images. (We’re talking about 50–100 MB Jpegs for some of these).
I currently have a zenfolio account, but that’s even more limited on a per-image basis at 12MB, or 24MB if I upgrade to $100 a year.
Any other suggestions? Doesn’t have to be photo-site specific, as I can build my own front end, mostly I’m looking for lots and lots of online storage. Amazon S3? Rackspace?
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2 Answers
Amazon S3 is what first came to mind. It is about your best bet for cheap storage.
If you own the stuff and it is that big you could use torrents. Say if you used http://openbittorrent.com/ as the tracker and used something like http://www.slicehost.com/ to always be seeding the torrent. This would be a pain in the ass but it might save you some money.
Of course a lot of people don’t know how to use torrents so you would need to provide both options. A torrent and direct download.
Cool, thanks!
Started digging into it, and Amazon S3 + CloudFront is quite the awesome combo for unreasonably cheap & easy storage/serving. (Cloudfront lets you have simple HTML access to things in your S3 buckets, including providing cnames for that access).
I think my plan is going to be to have the low-res stuff available on zenfolio (since I already pay for that access, and can provide most resolutions of images necessary). If someone requests the highest resolution, I can upload them as-needed to S3, and just build the hosting as it’s requested. Also—apparently S3 supports downloading of content via BitTorrent , so I can fairly easily just provide bittorrent links to content that’s already there. (Particularly, downloading 1GB+ in one go is not always terribly sucessfull, which bittorrent deals with nicely, even if transferring from only one seed)
Some actual examples: This photo (not CC) for instance, is 8000 px wide on Zenfolio, but the full resolution version is a 36MB JPEG (or 422MB tiff) at 15700 pixels wide.
That’s about right for most of the panoramas from the upcoming project, but some of the mapping will be larger. I have a 13k x 20k ortho image that’s 54MB as a Jpeg or 1GB as a TIF.
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