At the end of 2009 I ran into a photographic workflow issue that I’ve never had to deal with before: I ran out of disk space.
A common phrase you’ll hear in articles about whether or not to keep digital photographs is that “disk space is cheap”. Heck, I’ve said it to a number of people. But something has bothered me about this statement.
Yes, disk space is cheap – but every time I need to buy drives I find myself spending about the same amount of money. It’s cheap, but it’s not getting cheaper… Why is that?
Well one reason is that I’m shooting a lot more than I used to. Here’s a plot of my (retained) image counts the past few years:
(and yes, that does mean that I shot almost as much in 2001 as the entire decade of the 90′s — technically 95 through 99, ’95 is when I started shooting with digital cameras).
So overall, pretty stable till the jump in 2008 when I switched to photography full-time, but 2009 wasn’t that much of an increase over 2008. What is interesting, again in a geeky way, is how much storage those images consume (in gigabytes):
Not exactly the same graph is it? The difference can be traced to technology changes — you are seeing the impact of me using a variety of cameras over the past 10 years and the sensor size (in megapixels) growing. I started with 0.3-megapixel Kodak cameras, switched to a 3-megapixel Canon D30 in 2001, and continued upgrading from time to time over the years (10D, 1DMk2, 40D, and finally, for now, 5DMk2 in 2009 which shoots at 21 megapixels).
Fun fact: A single image from my 2009 Canon 5D Mark 2 consumes the same amount of disk space as 140 images from my 1999 Kodak DC260.
So while my image counts aren’t going up exponentially, my disk storage is because my cameras are generating larger files every time I press the shutter release button. But this is where the “disk space is cheap” part comes in. Here’s a graph of how many gigabytes a US dollar gets you (more or less):
This, as you can see, somewhat closely tracks my disk space usage graph, which also tracks to my impression of near constant expenditures on disks over the past decade. To which my checking account can only say “thank goodness”.
So disk space is cheap – no doubt about that. But for the past 10 years the growth in sensor sizes in digital cameras has been almost a perfect match to the “density/dollar” ratio of disk drives. This means that unless you haven’t upgraded your digital camera, disk space is cheap but it isn’t cheaper.
But, when it comes to the cost of storing your digital photographs, things are looking up for most owners of digital cameras. The camera megapixel wars are pretty much over. Sensor sizes are beginning to plateau as the technology now meets or greatly exceeds what folks really need in terms of image capture. Disk densities continue to climb and so there’s a pretty good chance now that disk space will actually get cheaper for digital photographers.
That is unless, like me, they start shooting video too… 
