OK, here's the issue, my friend from out of state is a photographer, she is trying to send me 90 raw pictures to edit and she does not want them resized. We've tried using Dropbox and its a great little program, but because the photos are so big it's taking over an hour to download them all. Both of us have pretty fast internet connections. I don't think there are many other options at this point other than sizing the pics down a tad. What do you all think? Dropbox is super quick once the pics are resized, but she wants to keep them in raw form. HELP!!!

A couple of options come to mind:

 

1. Yousendit.com - You can send files or folders up to 2GB and they arrive in a recipient's email inbox. They have a 14-day free trial, annual membership is $49.99. I've used this to send large print files, and it worked well.

 

2. Burn them to DVDs and FedEx or UPS them. I don't recommend US Postal Service for that; for some reason when I've mailed discs (even first class) they've almost always been delayed, sometimes for weeks, or lost. I don't know if priority mail would eliminate that problem.

We tried yousendit.com, but it was taking forever to upload (we tried the $9.99 version). Any idea why it may have been taking so long to upload?

Maybe Google Docs.

Did you try compressing the files before you sent them? 

Not to be stupid but won't compressing that many files take a long time? and remember she wants them kept in raw form. I'm not the smartest computer person so could you tell me if that will work and how?

Adobe DNG (Digital Negative) Converter yields files that are smaller than my original Camera RAW files and that retain all the original data and can be opened in Photoshop's Camera RAW and manipulated just like the NEF files written by my camera. DNG converter can convert all the files in a folder without requiring file-by-file user intervention. You might try that on a few sample files to see how much it reduces the file size. It's a download from Adobe.

 

The time required to upload large files over the internet depends on the speed of the receiving server as well as the speed of your connection, and uploads are almost always slower, often a lot slower, than downloads. If you're working with a lot of large files, I don't know of any way around that. That's why I suggested burning them to DVDs and shipping the physical discs. Disc mailers are inexpensive at Staples or Office Depot, and if you put those in a box or bubble pack there's very little chance of damage to the files.

Aside from what Rob said about DNG, I think your only choices are compression or dealing with long upload times.

 

If you don't make the files smaller (either by compressing via ZIP/RAR/etc. or by developing the images and saving in a compressed format like JPG), then the upload times will be slow no matter what you do. No way around that!

 

Also, Rob's DVD solution is a possibility, of course.

If you're uploading files to Dropbox, the receiving server's speed will not matter (it is fast), it is your upload speed that will be the limiter (both cable and DSL give you much faster download speeds than upload speeds since people download much more than they upload).  The only way to speed the process up is to make the files smaller.  There are a couple ways to do this:  lossy and lossless.

 

A lossy compression means data is lost which cannot be recovered.  Examples of this are shrinking the physical size of the image or saving in a compressed format such as JPG or GIF.

 

A lossless compression means the file is shrunk, but all of the original data can be recovered.  The most well known example of this is ZIP.  If you want to keep the files in their original RAW format, but make the transmission faster, this is the way to go.

 

Yes, ZIPping the files takes a little bit of time, but it saves much more time in the upload, so it's worth it.  For example, it may take 2 minutes to compress a very large file, but in turn cut the time it takes to upload it from 40 minutes to 10 minutes.

 

If you don't have a program to ZIP files (or don't know if you have one), I suggest downloading the free 7 Zip program.  In addition to being able to create normal ZIP files, it can create files in its own format (7Z), which usually come out even smaller than ZIP files.  Of course, the person receiving the files would also need to have 7 Zip in order to restore them.

 

Well, the time compressing an image may not be worth it, since the gain from compression on image formats is often very limited. StuffIt is probably one of the better compression tools out there, and it works okay with JPEG file types, but not so well for DNG/RAW.

Thanks guys i'll pass this info onto my friend and let her decide what she wants to do, i appreciate your time. :)

 

Well, the time compressing an image may not be worth it, since the gain from compression on image formats is often very limited. StuffIt is probably one of the better compression tools out there, and it works okay with JPEG file types, but not so well for DNG/RAW.

 

I'm pretty sure you have that backwards.  JPG is a compressed format, which means other compression algorithms have very little left to "squeeze out of the file", whereas RAW files have had no compression applied (kind of like text files, which usually can be compressed almost 16x).

I have had no luck compressing RAW files. Maybe Adobe DNG is different, but I saved only a nominal amount of space compressing the Nikon files, versus the amount of time it took to do so and the amount of storage on my RAID.

 

Nikon does offer compressed RAW "lossless" and RAW lossy compression formats, but both still make no difference when compressed using an external program. And you still lose some data with their "lossless" format.

 

TIFF format can compress down much better if you export a RAW into that format, much cleaner than JPEG and much smaller than a RAW. TIFF is true lossless and features built-in compression.

 

I also found, that if you are shooting RAW and want true compression without loss of data, try http://www.rawzor.com/.

Good point on TIFF, Sherman.

 

Has anyone used Rawzor?  It supposedly has the best lossless RAW compression algorithm out there.

Could she just save them to a thumb drive and send that? From my experience you can transfer data through USB a lot faster than you can burn a DVD, especially if you're talking about a handful of discs. (But I do have an old DVD drive)

Original Image Files

.NEF, 15.64 MB / 16019 KB

.DNG 31.88 MB / 32650 KB, includes original .NEF

.JPG 10.03 MB / 10269 KB 100% quality (although it is still lossless), AdobeRGB

.TIFF 69.00 MB / 70652 KB No compression, 16-bit, AdobeRGB

 

ZIPX

.NEF 0 KB saved

.DNG 40.54 KB (1%)

.JPG 1.85 MB (18%)

.TIFF 11.04 MB (16%)

 

RAWZOR is no longer supported and no longer works :(

NEF files are lossy, correct?

Not typically, but it depends on the manufacturer.

 

On my Nikon D700 (same with the D3), there is Lossless Compressed with promised savings of 20-40%. It is supposedly reversible, but you lose some highlights and shadow data. There is a Compressed, which is not reversible, with savings of 40-55%. And there is Uncompressed, which is what I use.