Organising digital photos

I

imamartian

Anyone got any ideas? and i don't mean folders i mean hardware.

My problems is i am filling my laptop up quite rapidly.... i don't take very many pics, but i've started shooting in RAW too, and they can be 3,4,5 times as big as a jpegs.. plus movies obviously.

So how do you photographers store, and protect your pics.... do you use external hard drives, and copy regular? Or do you store on-line on photobox etc?

I'm thinking i need to buy a couple of ext hard drives....
 
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For the kind of volumes of data you'll be generating hard drives are really the only viable solution but be aware that they do fail. A basic setup would be a couple of large external drives that hold exact copies of your data. You have a backup if one fails or decides to suddenly find a few bad sectors.

The ideal would be a NAS device. If you get one that can take four drives you can set them up so that if one drive fails you don't lose any data and even go as far as having an online spare drive if you decide to spend a bit more. This is the more costly option and works better if you have a home network but it will gain you a larger storage space than a single drive and the redundancy means you can increase the drive size later without losing data or having to try and copy it somewhere first.
 
flickr pro account for my jpegs, they all go up by default,

Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
Unlimited storage
Unlimited bandwidth

raws go onto the 2nd card in the camera, i select the good ones save them on to dvd then into the firesafe
 
I wouldn't rely on someone else if I wanted to ensure those photos were around for as long as I wanted them.

Cloud storage is good but what happens if they delete your files/account by accident (happened before on Flikr). It is reliant on you having a decent upload speed on your internet connection if you need to move lots of pictures about at full size. Offsite storage has its uses granted.

Don't think I'm a luddite, I write software for a living, maybe that makes me more cynical :LOL:
 
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I wouldn't rely on someone else if I wanted to ensure those photos were around for as long as I wanted them.

Cloud storage is good but what happens if they delete your files/account by accident (happened before on Flikr). It is reliant on you having a decent upload speed on your internet connection if you need to move lots of pictures about at full size. Offsite storage has its uses granted.

Don't think I'm a luddite, I write software for a living, maybe that makes me more cynical :LOL:

thats why i dvd and firesafe the good ones, flickr is mainly for ease of access and sharing

speed wise i can get a photo from the camera to flickr in under 2 mins @ 16mp if the 3g signal is good

ahh a programmer your the sort of person that fills my servers up and forced me to go disk>disk for backups leaving me with an empty large firesafe lol
 
I have been to lectures on this and I think the guy was going OTT. He even wrote to DVD and stored in mate's house just in case he ever had a fire at home.

I do write the important one's to DVD but not the normal run of mill. I find too easy to end up with duplicate after duplicate of same image. So I leave the original camera name and add to it. So "IMGP6732 Wepre Woods" is the norm. I also retain the camera folders so "169_0511 Coed Nant Gain" typical name so they stay in order and I have date (the 0511 means 5th of November) I used three hard drives a 250GB, 500GB and 1TB I use the 250GB and 500GB as long term back-up the 1TB I use day to day.

I though I could use the Samsung Story as a slave to the Maxtor lan drive but found it will read from it but will not write think wrong type of format.

I every couple of months start a new folder so about 4 main folders per year. I use "Bridge" to organise but know many use "Lightroom" the latter is better as organisation but the former works better with Photoshop.

I was told to take in Photoshop RAW which is supposed to be future proof, but I find it takes up more room and does not have side car generated with Pentax RAW so have reverted to using Pentax RAW then I can return all to orignal by deleting the side cars.

As I have improved my Photoshop skills I have returned to the old RAW files and re-processed my pictures. To be able to remove all old processing is important. So now I don't use Photoshop RAW.

So I normally end up with three images. RAW, Full size Jpeg, Reduced size Jpeg sized for my TV 1366 x 768 pixels. With combo pictures I normally delete the Photoshop image once I am satisfied and have made a Jpeg as if I re-process I prefer to start from scratch again.
 

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