How do you save yours....

kassie

... photos at home that is.

Just curious as to how everyone saves their photos on their computers/hard drives... do you make folders for i.e. scenic, cars, family, pets or do you save in date order or another way?

Kenny Logins

Lightroom.

DNG files saved to my PC and backed up to an external drive every night.

Paulw

Folers -
Year
Month
Event.

eg - /2012/09 (Sept)/Connacht-Leinster

That would be for the game of Connacht V Leinster on 28th Sept.


Catalogued in Lightroom.

Backed up to two identical external drives.
Backed up again to NAS.

dinneenp

Picasa 3, sort them into either events 'football match X' or bunch together (my kids Jan-April 2012 etc, macro 2012)
And tag a lot of them

Backup to external HD not often enough.

dirtyghettokid

i import all images into aperture
arrange into appropriate subject folder

i then make a vault backup on an external disc. i have a copy of that backup on a 2nd disc.

i also have time machine backups of my mac on an external disc.

oiii i'm running out of space.....:pac:

Gregor Samsa

Import everything into Aperture.

Then I have folders for each month, inside folders for each year. Photos live in there.

Photos are then keyworded by subject, and smart folders pick up the keywords, so that I can display them in groups based on subject matter if needed. I've other Smart Folders for camera model, lens, focal length, etc. (Smart Folders in Aperture basically automatically pick up photos based on specific keywords or other metadata, but the photos don't actually move from the place they reside. Lightroom has an equivalent.)

Everything backed up after each import onto an external drive. Every month or so, I make another backup that's kept at work.

kassie

I just have mine saved in folders at the min corresponding to what the photo content is i.e. dogs/moon&skies/kids/weddings etc but i fear that as my photo collection gets bigger (its small at the moment, long story!) i don't want to end up wasting time searching for a certain pic. Paulw, i like your way of saving things, i actually did that with photos of my daughter 1st year, i wanted to compile a photobook of her first year and i had to save all the photos from phones and cameras to my pc and then break them down into months so that i could get the pics in some date other to show her growing over the year... took me ages!

magicbastarder

sorted by subject mainly (though broken down by date under subject), saved as LZW compressed TIFFs, and stored on computer and on a backup disk, usually stored offsite.
running at about 150GB at the moment. must do a good prune.

vic20

Picasa.
Folders sorted by date (YYYY-MM-DD).
Tags (not enough, must trawl and add more)
Weekly backup to external HD.
A few backed up to Dropbox also.

trooney

Folders with different subject (named for subject) matter within.
Within folders: numbered folder\date\short description of contents.
Backed up every night to ext HDD
Have space on and remote access to a mates NAS, but need to sit down and try writing a script to create a backup via ftp to the NAS. That's an 'ongoing' project.

DaireQuinlan

Cut into strips of 6 (35mm) or 3 (120) and sleeved in glassine holders and stuck into folders in chronological order. Sleeves themselves have exact date/location or event/film/camera written along the top. Polaroids & LF currently just tossed into a box. Must do something about that ...

EyeBlinks

Total mess (still !) ... long story :mad:

Tallon

Adobe Bridge

jpb1974

Lightroom

Year
Month
Day

And keywords to describe the photos e.g. Event, Place, Person etc.

For film scans I would often tag the camera, lens, film, developer etc.

One copy of the computer hard-drive, one copy on 2 synch'd external hard-drives. Typically after a year I will remove the computer hard-drive version.

trooney

Tallon wrote: »

Adobe Bridge

Whats the benefit of Adobe Bridge over, say, a train, which I can also afford windows explorer?

Tallon

trooney wrote: »

Whats the benefit of Adobe Bridge over, say, a train, which I can also afford windows explorer?

RAW support and editing, folder organisation, Multiple exif data input, export to sites (Flickr etc) and I generally like the layout of it

The preview is really nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZs1yO8MOfo

DaireQuinlan

Tallon wrote: »

Adobe Bridge

That's a piece of software, not an archiving strategy

dakar

Lightroom

Raw files saved as DNGs

Year >
Folders named for events >
Photos tagged with keywords.

Backed up on mirrored HDD's at home and every so often copied to another at Dad's house.

Also pix.ie acts as my cloud backup for a selection of photos

Tallon

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

That's a piece of software, not an archiving strategy

Nope, it's an archiving program too

FoxT

My current method is :

- All my photos are on a laptop, I back them up to an external HD from time to time, along with my lightroom catalog files.

My new method will be:
- Am building a PC with 2 x 1TB hard drives, just for photos.
- Will use 1 HD as main, the other as backup
- Will back up to an external HD from time to time, or, if the photos are important, immediately after capture.

The method after that will be:
- Get my home wifi network running at 50Mbps+
then either
- Build a NAS box & use that for backups
or
- use a cloud-based solution.

-FoxT

Leftyflip

Upload from camera,
Process,
save to C drive,
back up to external drive,
back up again to second external.

flyingsnail

Saved to a storage drive in raid 1 on my main computer and backed up onto an external drive about once a week. Planning to change the external drives to a nas soon.

joeKel73

I don't like it when software imports to their own library. I use ACDSee Pro, it works with the images where they are.

Drop photos into folders in the "My Pictures" folder, named;
"YYYY-MM-DD Subject"

For example;
"2011-12-31 New Years Eve"
"2012-03-17 Paddys Day 2012"
"2052-08-05 Holiday on Mars"

Then sorted by name the folders are in chronological order. I dump all the files in, then usually create an "Edit" folder where I run through them and delete shots, then process the remaining ones. Unless they're of little importance I uploaded the edited versions to Flickr, doubles as a backup (hmn should really be backing up originals).

If they're going on the likes of FB I'll add a further "Upload" folder with downsized copies.

mehfesto

Same as a lot of you guys - independent folders, dated folders and yearly dated folders. Backed up on a hard-drive (on occasion!)

I add anything of particular importance to my Flickr steam fullsize and then make it invisible to everyone but me.

pullandbang

What? You're supposed to save them somewhere.........

monkeysnapper

Mines a knighmere , it's a complete mess, sometimes I go into 4 folders of inside to find a folder that has 6 folders in it, and find pictures I can't even remember taking and I'm like,wow! thats a fab picture.

I seriously need to employ a assistant .

Nebezpeci Mys

Similar to J o e; folders in format YYYY-MM-DD Subject/Location, subfolder with edited photos inside. Any digitally watermarked and re-sized photos in a completely different folder organised by year. Backups between a number of external HDDs. Majority of photos from the past 12 months are tagged with keywords.

Good luck with sorting yours; hopefully, it won't be too much of hard work.

OldGoat

Oh god, I need a stratagy.
Currently I download, edit, enjoy for a few days, occasionally print and then delete.
I can't shake the old habit of conserving memory space at all costs. If the image is not a 101% keeper it gets deleted.
I have the keepers burnt to CDs.
...
This is why I 'lost' the images I intended using for the People Photography things this year.

dakar

OldGoat wrote: »

Oh god, I need a stratagy.

1,500-odd CDs worth of storage for less than a hundred quid delivered...

http://www.memoryc.com/storage/externalharddrives/1tbseagateexpansionexternalusb3.html

ablelocks

after finding photos i thought I'd lost on my work pc under an old login, I feel it's time to put some order on my photos. Is there a way to rename a current folder, that will automatically rename it's contents? And for future, budget concious saving, what's the best programme to use?

the_syco

Number, date, name of event. EG; 130... 29-09-12 Dublin Doom Days

Back them up to an external every so often.

Snowie

Dump data on to my computer, computer to ext hard drive...

Every couple of months I burn all the stuff I keep to a cd... Try not to hold on to too much crap....

magicbastarder

i would not consider burnt CDs to be a trustworthy archival medium. i've seen too many fail.

dirtyghettokid

i was thinking today about storage (because my external drives are nearly full) and i was wondering if it'd be worth getting some cloud storage? say off google or something. i don't have the big money required to get the storage i really want.. i've so much data, i'm paranoid about losing it.. but it's too big for burning to discs!

magicbastarder

dropbox is $100 p.a. for 100GB storage.

Gregor Samsa

If your upload speed can handle it, cloud storage (or FTP, as it was called in my day :pac:) would be worth looking at. My broadband speeds are atrocious, so it's a complete non runner or me. Just be careful who you go with. There's going to be loads of start ups getting into this space, and the business failure rate is going to be high before the market consolidates. Of course, you should be fairly safe with the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. they're not going anywhere in a hurry. All that said, I do like the idea of being in physical control of at least one copy of my backups.

Regarding hard disks, you can get a 2TB Western Digital Elements for about 99 euro delivered from Amazon. The 1TB is the same price. I have four of these in various sizes knocking around. They're super quiet, and I've always found them reliable.

I wouldn't regard CDs or DVDs as being a reliable archiving solution at all.

dirtyghettokid

we're out in the sticks and mobile broadband is all that's available to us (and it's atrocious!!) it's something i thought of with cloud storage. guess i'll just have to buy another external. wish i could afford a big raid storage system! haha

OldGoat

dakar wrote: »

1,500-odd CDs worth of storage for less than a hundred quid delivered...

http://www.memoryc.com/storage/externalharddrives/1tbseagateexpansionexternalusb3.html

€100, thats like...(counts fingers)...4 cigars! Getdafugouttahere. I still have a load of 5 1/2" floppies to use up.

Telchak

I've about 100GB of photos on Google Drive. At $5 a month, it's worth the assurance it gives me from my fear of having hard drives fail and having everything immediately accessible from any PC, my phone, or my tablet

With regards to folder structure, I import everything as DNGs into Lightroom, with it set up something like:

>Archive
. >2012-09-27
>Processed
. >2012-09-27 Ploughing Championships

Keeps my obsessive compulsive side happy

vic20

FastStone Image Viewer will batch rename for you. Experiment first to get the hang of it. It's freeware.
For managing your images have a look at Google's Picasa. It will batch rename too. Also free.

ablelocks wrote: »

after finding photos i thought I'd lost on my work pc under an old login, I feel it's time to put some order on my photos. Is there a way to rename a current folder, that will automatically rename it's contents? And for future, budget concious saving, what's the best programme to use?

magicbastarder

OldGoat wrote: »

I still have a load of 5 1/2" floppies to use up.

you must be REALLY old. they even predate 5.25" floppies.

OldGoat

magicbastarder wrote: »

you must be REALLY old. they even predate 5.25" floppies.

Senior moment.

I still have an IBM286 up and running that uses 5.25's.

the_syco

Snowie wrote: »

Every couple of months I burn all the stuff I keep to a cd...

How much do you spend on the CD's? The cheapo 25 cent CD's don't last that long.

alb

I import into Lightroom converting from raw to dng.

I use top level dir of year yyyy. Below this I have yyyy-mm-dd shoot-name. The file names are yyyy-mm-dd-shoot-name-number-a.dng. the postfix 'a' at the end means it's the original. Edits are saved in the same dir but with different postfixes 'b', 'c' etc. I know it's duplication to have the date also in the photo name but it makes it easy to quickly find the dir any photo came from.

e.g.

2012
   |- 2012-07-23 Iceland Reykjavik
       | - 2012-06-21-iceland-reykjavik-5159-a.dng   (the original)
       | - 2012-06-21-iceland-reykjavik-5159-b.dng   (an edit)

Sometimes I'll add an extra term after the shoot name in the photo names for certain photos to identify specific photo locations or subjects.

keywords for locations, people and ratings etc are added in lightroom and written into the metadata of the image itself, so it will always be there even if I change editing application.

Internal/External harddrives are still the most cost efficient, and perhaps the most practical form of backups. The major downside is it's a pain to keep a distributed copy somewhere. But I keep one at my parents house, though it's usually missing the last 6 months or so of data.

the_syco wrote: »

How much do you spend on the CD's? The cheapo 25 cent CD's don't last that long.

The relatively expensive Memorex ones don't necessarily last that long either. From back in the day I had a backup of my music spread over about 100 CDs. None of the ones I checked can be read at all any more. I'm done with optical media since then.

Strawberry Swan

I'm not as fanatical about it as I should be but it's working for me so far:

I upload to my computer and immediately delete all the crappy ones and highlight the promising ones. If a photo is being processed, I save it first as a Photoshop file. Once I am finished processing I save it as a Tiff file, if there aren't too many layers in it. Then I flatten it and save as a high res Jpg (for printing) and finally I save as a low res Jpg for uploading to the web. I never ever delete the original of a photo that I have processed.

I keep them all stored according to year and in sub folders according to type of photos ie Dublin, Nature, People, etc. I save them way too irregularly to an external hard drive.

the_syco

alb wrote: »

The relatively expensive Memorex ones don't necessarily last that long either. From back in the day I had a backup of my music spread over about 100 CDs. None of the ones I checked can be read at all any more. I'm done with optical media since then.

Good to know. Have a spare HDD, but if someone really wanted long term backup, they'd use tapes.