File Organization for the Photographer

I'm horrible about organizing my photos too. I just got Aperture 3, and I'm not looking forward to going thru all my old photos. I may just leave them as is, and start new better habits from here on.

Erich

 

Ok, so I have a couple of things to add. First of all, I keep all my pictures on my computer. I have one folder and in that folder there is a series of folders marked by the year. Inside each yearly folder I have folders set up by event (wdw trip 2008, birthday float trip, etc). This helps me keep organized and helps me easily find something if I'm looking for it.

I do suggest the external hard drive, but not as a primary. I've had a very serious hard drive crash on my external where I lost it all. Ironically enough, when that was fixed and back to normal, my computer hard drive crashed. This is one reason that I have gotten to the point of keeping my shots in three places. On my computer (primary), on my external hard drive (secondary), and on dvd's (backup). If I hadn't done that last one I would have lost all of my pictures so I really want to stress that. So that's how I try to keep the chaos in check in my mac. Hope that helps a bit. ;

 

I definitely agree with that. I would like to get to the point where I have multiple externals. I think I'm kind of waiting for the price of solid state externals to come down in price. I would love to have a non-moving backup. It would be good peace of mind.

 

Having multiple externals is a really good idea. ; Especially if you keep one of them off site so that if something catastrophic happens and you loose your computer and primary backup, you still have the second backup that you can recover your images from. ; Right now, I store my images on my desktop and backup to a Drobo. ; In the next couple of months, I'm going to get a 2TB drive to put into a portable enclosure to create a ; portable backup that I can easily transport to my office. ;

I'm not sure solid state drives are a good backup option yet. ; From what I understand all flash memory (solid state drives, camera cards, and thumbdrives) will degrade over time with each read-write cycle which will eventually lead to data loss. ;

 

Yet another reason that I want to wait on those. ; But an off site backup is nice. I've also been considering signing up for an online backup. Does anyone else do this? If so, any recommendations?

 

important ; can't be replaced photos, esp family have as many as 4 backups, i have a phanfare site, and i can download full res jpegs, so that's my off site backup, dvd copies here at home, and once again irreplaceable stuff gets a copy offsite to my mothers fire safe. plus a copy here on dvd, plus on the external drive, the only difference i see between mine and others it that i keep none on the internal drive, my current macbook would end up too crowded too soon for that. plus with that many multiple copies i'm pretty comfortable with my recovery options

 

I played around with that about a year ago. ; I was looking into Carbonite to backup my pictures, music and other important files. ; I actually signed up for the free trial and wasn't impressed. ; The problems that I discovered with that test were that those services seem to be geared to backing up smaller files (less than 1MB). ; I would expect the upload time to be proportionate to the size of the file, but it seemed like the larger files took a disproportionately longer time to upload. ; The other problem I found was that you need a really fast internet connection to make it work well. ; I have Verizon DSL at home and I was able to upload about 10GB in 5 days. ; With a photo collection rapidly approaching 1TB it was going to take forever to upload it all. ; Plus, if the online service ever went out of business, you could loose your files, but if you have another external stored offsite, you don't have to worry about that.

I will say that Carbonite is great for backing up word files and small amounts of pictures. ; My sister has it on her laptop and it works great for her.

 

Yeah, I think I'm just going to invest in a couple more externals. One for here and one for off site backup. Maybe I'll look into a double layer dvd burner to save on the amount of discs I have to use for that extra backup. Thanks for the input everyone.

 

Just an update: I've begun to organize here and it's going well. I decided to also ad a short description to my filenames now so I can easily find particular files that I may be looking for, in addition to a unique number.

Thanks for all the excellent ideas!

 

File Organization for the Photographer

I don't subscribe to any backup services, but I do have all of my pics posted on my personal web site, and in a Smugmug account, so they are technically backed up twice.

 

Re: File Organization for the Photographer

I do the website thing as well