I am wondering what is the most effective data-protective way to ‘keep’ your photo collection.
I would call myself a photography enthusiast. I have a Canon EOS 30d with an 8gb extreme iv sandisk CF card.
Because if it’s size I have so far not emptied it and ‘stored’ the pictures.
I am considering offloading them onto my new [almost]-terrabyte raid-0 hard drive(s) and then mirroring this folder structure onto one or more external HDS.
I have no confidence in the longevity of photos stored on electronic media. How likely am I still to have those photos in thirty years time if I don’t get them printed professionally? And if I do do that it can get quite expensive (especially as I would probably be a bit of a resolution snob and get them printed in at least 10x8inch size)
If you are a pro, semi-pro, or just enthusiast… how do you organize your digital photos?
My photo organisation method? Boxes in the closet. It would be a major project to scan them all. I’d like to scan my aunt’s photographs as well; many of them go back a hundred years.
As for the few photographs I have on my computer, I just sort by date, mostly. My friend has thousands, and I think he sorts by date as well. We really need to do the metadata thing as well, so we can document who’s who in them.
I have copies of all my photos on my two computers (I might buy an external hard drive just for this btw). I also have a Picasa web album with the best of the best. Every year, I print a book on blurb.com with the best pics. This is my only hard copy. Not the ultimate in future proofing (which I think is the main concern of the OP), but enough for now.
I think I should remind myself of the point of DIGITAL photography: That it is easy to discard the mediocre/unwanted photos.
I have just realized that I am effectively hoarding the photos electronically. If I was more organized then I’d go through and remove the ones not work keeping… thus getting the library down to a size where paying for prints might become reasonable…
And keeping track of them would become easier too.
As far as orginizing, when I empty my card, I dump it all into a folder called pictures. From there I move them into sub folders based on what I was shooting. I have folders called Juliet first Bday, Thanksgiving 2006, Lake Delavan 2007, Sunrise 110707, Dog A, Dog B, Dog A and B, Dog And Lizard, etc etc. It’s pretty easy to break them up based on the date. If the baby’s birthday was 12/07 and that’s the only thing I shot that day, I can grab everything with that date and move it into that file. This makes if VERY easy to find the pictures I want. If I want a picture of the Dog A and the Baby, I have a folder for that. A picture of Dog B and the wife, got it…I also have a folder called “Small” with pictures I’ve resized to be uploaded to various parts of the web or to be emailed. Random/Single photos just stay in the main part of the folder.
As for backing up, I have a free program from Microsoft called SyncToys. I have it set so that when I run it, it checks my photo folder against what is already on the external drive and adds anything that isn’t there. There’s other settings, but that’s the one I like. When not backing up, I physically unplug both the USB and power cord, so there is no chance of anything happening to it.
Almost exactly the same (including SyncToy) but I also upload full-resolution images (keepers only) to my website. I’ve learned the bitter hard way that even two copies of all images isn’t enough sometimes. (Got mugged; laptop got stolen and the backup hard drive crashed before I could get a replacement laptop and copy the images back on). Having a backup online is useful. Picasa does a good job of keeping track of multiple folders and also automatically updates images when you move them from one folder to another, so I use that for tracking and minor editing of images.
I’m actually in the process of trying to get ours organized a bit more. I really with there was a common digital photo format that supported tagging like MP3 files do. Sure I can tag with an external software program, but that isn’t really what I want to do.
One of the things I’ll be doing this spring is taking all the photo’s that aren’t already in digital format and sending them off to a photo scanning service. I’ve seen several online that offer pretty reasonable rates. Something like $.39 a picture. Send them the shoebox, and they’ll go through them all and scan them in.
I organize my photo files geographically, with folders off the root of the hard drive being the countries, then state/province or city if state/provinces aren’t well-known to me. At that level, it becomes by event or location. At some point, when all the organization is complete, I’ll insert a text file with a brief description of the contents of the folder, including subject’s names.
For backing up, I copy them to DVD’s and other external hard drives periodically. Sometimes I remember to send a backup to a friend. [scratches note on calendar…]
All my digital photos (which means ALL my photos from past 10 years or so) are on my home PC, currently using a RAID 0+1 array. I mirror the contents to an external HDD every couple of weeks. I also have one or two sets of backups on DVD-R.
I just dump all my photos into one folder per year. For folders from past years, I’ve generated parity files using QuickPar. This should guard against minor data corruption.
I do have a box of printed photos in the closet, but otherwise I have thousands of photos on my computer. The only photos I ever delete are in-camera when I need space on the card.
I have a few years’ worth backed up on an external drive, but as I take more and more pictures at greater resolutions, that’s filled up. I plan to get a 1TB drive in the next few months and back stuff up on that.
Additionally, I have about 7,000 touched-up, “finished” photos up on Flickr, which acts as a backup as well. And if there appears an easier way to copy my stuff from Flickr to Zooomr, I’ll keep everything on both of those, in case either service dies or Yahoo dumps me from Flickr without notice again.
I want to keep everything, but it’s really those 7,000 on Flickr that would be a big loss, since those are a) the ones I’ve deemed worthy of sharing and 2) I’ve touched them on entirely on-line, and therefore would have to re-touch all of them. (Maybe I’ll back these up on that new drive, too.)
I store my by event/time. I have a folder called “Las Vegas07”, one called “Baseball game”, etc., and things that aren’t related to trips/events go in either “Pets” or “Fall2007” type folders. And I never delete any photos. No reason to, really. But you reallyreallyreally need to do something, if the pics are only on your camera! What if it were lost or stolen? :eek: I have a copy of all pics on my laptop, and a copy of all pics on an external hard drive, and a copy of selected folders on my work computer (just for accessibility).
I am not trying to change anyone’s mind, but there is a reason to delete (or at least archive) photos and keep only the prize winners. If you do so, you will find yourself looking at your pictures more than you did before. Going through a short stack of great pictures is a lot more fun than going through a brazillion repeated photos. Just as flipping through a book (or looking at a screen saver on a big screen) is more fun than fishing a dusty shoebox out of the attic and fumbling with loose prints.
Ugh, all those pictures and what to do with them… I seem to be the family picture repository.
(I prefer printed 4x6 pictures.)
Many years ago, I bought a large lot of matching photo albums from a disount store. I bought many more than I thought I would need because I like the styling of the albums which held three 100 picture books in a matching bookcase.
Then I spent a day or two filling the albums with all the loose pictures I inherited from the family in random order. There was something like 1,200 of them- way to many for me to feel like sorting and ordering them. I distinctly recall having sore fingers after that job.
That took care of all the old photos.
At that time, I also resolved to throw the new packs of pictures into a designated drawer and place them all into the albums about twice a year or so, so I wouldn’t have to spend a day or two doing that job again.
The good: The newer photos are now in a somewhat chronological order and the stack that needs filing is not so dauntingly huge.
The (not so) bad: The albums are all alike so I can’t tell what time frame is in what books just by looking. I wound up writing notes on the outside of the albums with a marker.
Here’s how I do mine. I have an Incoming directory. Photos stay there for a long time when I copy them from my camera. But when I get around to organizing them, I make folders named like this:
20061225 - Christmas
20070213 - Lisa’s Party
20070319 - Trip to FL
20071013 - Tina’s BD
Create the appropriate folder name, then move the photos from the Incoming directory to the approprate folder in batches. You can sort the Photos directory by name and they’re all chronological. If I want other categories like Clouds or Aunt Mary whatever I can make a directory and copy photos into it.
I never delete photos unless they are completely bad, like a photo of the floor or something. Storage is cheap.
And of course be sure to periodically copy your Photos folder to another hard drive, DVD, or USB drive. Something.
OK, I am pretty anal-retentive about my photos. I have two cameras, and sometimes both cameras are in use, and I had my old camera…
All photos go in a folder structure like YY\MM<event*><subevent*>
Then I use renrot (a tool written in perl) to autocorrect the rotation and rename all the files to YYYYMMDD@hh-mm-ss-{xxx} where xxx is a sequence number. This gets all the photos in time sequence. (I spent hours adjusting the times in the photos I took in NZ last year - one camera was on UK time, the other on NZ time, and both had daylight saving time offsets :smack: )
Then I use DigiKam (on Linux) to tag the photos using ITPC tags (until DigiKam runs on Windows there is a free MS Photo Tagging tool - not great but functional. Picasa didn’t do ITPC tags last time I looked, but it was a while ago). These tags are stored in the photo, so are OS and application independent. I tag location, event, subject, people etc. I have a huge multi-thousand photo backlog to deal with, one day. I add comments, and I also tag the photo quality, so in Digikam I can just pull up the great photos, or the photos of my daughter or cats or anything, really.
The photos are on a share on my server. I use Gallery2 to serve them to the web, symlinked to the original photos for efficiency. Gallery reads the tags and captions from the photos, so I don’t need to do anything more.
Of course, I have several backups, and a local copy on my laptop to tag and copy back.
This may be obvious to many, but if you use a thumbnail (small pictures) view of your photos it makes sorting through them much easier. You don’t even need software to do this, in Windows while viewing the files pull down the View menu and pick Thumbnails.
It would be a major project to scan them all. I’d like to scan my aunt’s photographs as well; many of them go back a hundred years.