2026/04/27 – Shoot, Sleep, Download, Repeat (and stress about the cost of storage)
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Welcome to The Weekly Frame newsletter forum, discuss the ideas and answer the question I pose at the end.
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As always, please be beautiful, polite and respectful people 😉
Here’s this week’s letter and question:
It’s been quite a busy week. My life seems to have contracted to shooting, eating, sleeping, downloading and editing (not necessarily in that order!). In fact, the number of images I’ve shot this week alone sent me on a journey to buy more storage and, subsequently, to ask myself: Do I want to buy groceries this month or buy another SSD?
But back to the shoots. This week included photographing several end-of-term performances at Berklee College of Music (always a treat because the quality of these students is awesome), a music video shoot, and a music-technology conference, including documenting a silent disco. Yes, it was exactly as weird as it sounds!
Those of us working at the event didn’t get headphones, so we couldn’t hear the music that the audience was dancing to. Instead, it was a very quiet room, punctuated only by the odd shout and the squeaking of sneaker soles on the floor!
Of course, all of these shoots have been pretty heavy on the data, particularly the 4K video files. So back to the storage issue. You might have noticed that the cost of external storage in the form of hard drives, SSDs, and memory cards have surged in price recently. It’s actually no joke for those of us who rely on these things for client work. And of course, you have to have a backup and a backup for the backup.
So why have the prices of these things increased so dramatically? Well, we can put the blame on AI (yet again). It isn’t just guzzling water and stealing artists’ work; it has also created a thirst for flash memory and related components. It’s not super straightforward (a bit chicken and egg almost), but the result is a severe supply and demand problem, which is causing a spike in prices for consumer-grade memory cards, SSDs, hard drives and RAM.
Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to get resolved anytime soon, so the advice is to buy now (if you need to) before prices go up even more.
I have to say I find all of this rather annoying, as I can think of a million other far more exciting things I’d rather be spending my money on. To say that I am irritated by the existence of AI this week would be an understatement, and Dunja gave me even more reason to hate it in this excellent article. However, I have been putting the new Lightroom AI culling tool to good use this week, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too hasty to condemn it just yet.
So tell me: Have you panic-bought new memory cards and storage recently, or would you rather pay your mortgage this month? 😜
But seriously, let us know what you think about the effect these AI data centres are having on your wallet.
Have a good one!
Alex
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Not recently. Fortunately, I managed to get enough storage last year before all the prices went up to see me through for the next few years, hopefully. I wouldn’t want to be buying today, although prices are starting to dip a little. They’re nowhere near mid-2025 prices again yet (that’ll be a while, still, I think), but some of them are starting to fall a little.
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ProGrade announced they are raising memory card prices on Friday…
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