Photo Storage Advice Request

[frayne]

I'm using a Mac mini with a 1 terabyte HD and since I started using LR and shooting RAW I'm using up my HD capacity pretty quick. I also have a little portable HD with about 500 gigabytes of JPEGs. I will admit my picture file storage is a mess and needs serious attention. I'm thinking about getting 4-5 terabyte external HD and putting everything on the one drive. Any suggestions on an external HD and/or a process to organize my photo library ? Appreciate any and all responses in advance.

 

[hnzw_rui]

Don't really have a recommendation on specific HDD. As the joke goes, there are two types of hard drives, one that's failed and one that's gonna fail soon.

If those photos are important to you, I highly recommend having at least two backups with one offsite.

I'm on Windows so for organization, I like Picasa. For OS X, wouldn't iPhoto or Photos do the job?

 

[Ronstar]

I have my LR catalog and photo files on a 2tb LaCie external drive that I attach to my iMac and MacBook. I only have about 6,000 photos in LR so far, but I'm going to dump my whole iPhoto library into LR soon. I still have 1.59tb available, and I'm anticipating adding 12,000 photos.

As to organization, I use collections and weed through my files frequently and delete photos I no longer want.

 

[marko]

I use Google Photo. Never worry about where they are, backing up or how to find them. Nice search functions too. Plus it uploads from my phone automatically no matter where I am as long as there's a Wifi connection.

 

[walkinwood]

Get an online backup service like crashplan in addition to any external drives.

There was a good discussion on this thread:
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/backing-up-to-the-cloud-75898.html

I use a folder organization based on month, so my folders look like
..\pictures\2015\2015-01
And I use tags to tell me what's in a picture.
I don't have the discipline to do the tags every time, so the date based folders help me find stuff when I've forgotten to tag them correctly.

 

[Cobra9777]

I have a Windows 7 desktop PC with 2 physical drives, both 500GB. I also have a 3TB external drive. We have about 300GB of jpegs that are kept on one of the internal drives and backed-up to the external. No fancy cameras and no LR, so photo sizes are reasonable.

I organize everything by year. Within the main photo folder, there's a subfolder for each year back to 2001, which evidently was the first year we had a digital camera. Inside those "year folders" are any number of topical subfolders for events with more than about 30-40 related photos. Otherwise, general photos are just stored in chronological order within the folder for the year. I find this to be the easiest way to find stuff later.

 

[photoguy]

Here's what I recommended to my brother regarding LR organization:

Put all your photos in a folder structure like:

~Pictures/LightroomMasters/2014/20140113-Honduras/
~Pictures/LightroomMasters/2014/20140421-Family-France/
~Pictures/LightroomMasters/2014/20140422-Family-France/

Rename all your original captures by day and sequence. E.g., when they come out of your camera you have a bunch of pictures named something like:

dsc_4321.RAW
dsc_4322.RAW
dsc_4323.RAW

Use the batch renaming capability in LR (under menu Library >> rename photo) to change this to

20140421_0001.RAW
20140421_0002.RAW
20140421_0003.RAW

If you make multiple versions of the image append a suffix. E.g.

20140421_0001_BW.tif - black and white version
20140421_0001_Master.tif - version with final photoshop edits on top of lightroom

It's generally recommended to avoid special characters other than a dash (-), underscore (_), and a single period (.). This is for compatability if you ever need to move your files to a different OS.

Put all metadata into captions and keywords and avoid putting them into the filename. You can batch keyword, so it's very quick to enter this information for a shoot.

Regarding an external drive to use as a working drive, my preferences from least to most would be:

(1) large external 3.5 drive running USB 3.0
(2) external SSD on USB3 or thunderbolt
(3) external multidisk raid on USB3 or thunderbolt

Avoid all USB2 peripherals (too slow) and NAS (goes over ethernet and is too slow). If your mac mini only has USB 2.0, I wouldn't use an external working drive.

As you go down the list it costs more but you gain speed. You have to decide where to draw the line. In terms of hard drives, I prefer HGST as they have by far the lowest failure rates.

You should also have at least 2 backups of your working drive. A cloud backup like crashplan can work as a secondary or tertiary backup if you have the bandwidth to upload your photos in a reasonable time.

 

[RonBoyd]

I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my image files. As such, I have two separate Catalogs -- a "legacy" catalog (34,648 images) containing all images prior to about 8 years ago and a "current" one (72,038) images).

My storage setup is this:

2) Seagate 4 TB "Backup Plus Desktop Drives" (Amazon or B&H) that are "cloned" -- one connected to my Desktop Machine and the other to my Laptop. (Explanation on Syncing below) These drives contain both image catalogs and ALL Lightroom files (program, plugins, presets, etc.) This way I can be "on the road" and not fear losing everything. These are "Synced" just prior to any road trip.

3) 2TB External Hard Drives. These each contain backup copies of the images in the two Lightroom Catalogs. These are Synced at the end of any Lightroom session (or sometimes several times during a session).

I Sync all of these drives with a program called Compare Advance. (There are several other such programs that are equally easy to use.)

Is that too much? Not for an eternal Pessimist.

 

[BobW]

Two things:


As others have already said, have a backup drive for your photos, in addition to the primary storage.


If you are using lightroom to manage your photos, make sure you move the photos from within lightroom, rather than from the operating system. Otherwise, Lightroom won't be able to find them.

 

[dadu007]

I have a secondary 1TB drive on main PC.

Photos are backed up to an NAS (network attached storage), another PC's secondary drive, and I also use BackBlaze as an online (cloud) backup service. How is that for redundancy?!

I edit using Lightroom and Capture One Pro for editing, but I use iMatch for cataloging.
Nothing beats it in my book. I have 30,000+ photos in the database...family archive scanned photos and digital photos.

photools.com - Digital Asset Management software.since 1998.

 

[ERD50]

Along these lines, DW has LOTS of 'snapshots' that she wants to keep. They are all very high rez from her big Nikon DSLR, and the fact is, she would NEVER, EVER want to make a high-rez 8x10 printout of 99.9% of these snapshots. A decent quality to display on a computer monitor, or 'digital picture frame' is all she needs for these.

So is there a simple way to tag the few she might want to print, and then run a batch compression program on the rest? This is in iPhoto.

Thanks, and I hope this isn't too off-topic from the OP, I'll move it if you wish. And I think the original topic has already been covered pretty well.

-ERD50

 

[frayne]

ERD50, no problem at all and a good point. Are the photos in JPEG or RAW format ?

Thanks everyone else for your input.

 

[ERD50]

ERD50, no problem at all and a good point. Are the photos in JPEG or RAW format ?

Thanks everyone else for your input.

They are JPEG, ~ 1.5 ~ 1.8MB generally. I just compressed one to ~ 120KB as a test, and I'm sure the quality was more than good enough for the kind casual use DW would want these snapshots for. Again, anything we might even think of having printed would be kept in it's original JPEG state transferred from the camera.

So a 10x reduction of 99% of her photos is actually very feasible, and sure makes the multiple backup process easier to maintain, and would free up a lot of space on her laptop. And the smaller photos would open faster as well.

I recall that DW's sister gave her a digital picture frame a few years back, and pre-loaded it with pics from a family album she put together. She used the original hi-rez pics, but the picture frame actually had a fairly low pixel count (but still looked great for this kind of use). I used a batch re-sizing program which was easy to apply, since these were all just in a folder, not in a iPhoto library. I re-sized the pics (keeping the originals though) to the exact pixel count of the display. They were so much smaller, and loaded faster and without any glitches as each frame played in a slideshow. And that left a LOT of space for more pics. There's just no benefit to having more pixels than the device can display, and maybe even a downside if it has to process the larger pixel count.

But the key is, I'd like to do this by just tagging in her iPhoto library and applying a batch change. Exporting and re-importing would be way too tedious, unless there's some trick I'm missing.

-ERD50

 

[photoguy]

But the key is, I'd like to do this by just tagging in her iPhoto library and applying a batch change. Exporting and re-importing would be way too tedious, unless there's some trick I'm missing.

Once you do the tagging, batch export/import shouldn't require more than a few user clicks (i.e. you need to bring up the export dialog once and the import dialog once). However, this will probably take a lot of machine time to resize and save new jpegs.

Note that the export/import process may not save all the meta-data associated with the image. Typically exporting would only save EXIF and IPTC fields (e.g., caption, keywords, location, etc). Information like which photos are in slideshows, collections, book projects, detected faces may not be preserved (this is what happens in LR and I'm guessing iPhoto as well).

 

[donheff]

ERD: how about compressing them all after running a batch process to export copies of the few you want to keep pristine. Having a redundant file with the .1% you need to work with doesn't sound like a problem.

 

[ERD50]

Thanks donheff and photoguy - I'll try playing around with this. I was thinking that by exporting and importing, I'll lose all the groupings she has (albums, rolls, 'event's, etc - I forget what all these groups are offhand). But maybe they will get reconstructed on import as well? I guess 'events' are just time-stamps that are close together, so it it looks at the EXIF times, and not the import time, that should be maintained.

I'll experiment on a small group at a time. Oh yeah, it would probably re-do face recognition, that could take days! But I can let it run at nights, I think you can pause it. Maybe donheffs suggestion of exporting only the large ones to keep, and processing the others 'in place' will retain all this. Something to try for sure.

-ERD50

 

[easysurfer]

I've realized that ever since photography became digital that I really don't take care of photos as well as the days of physical photo albums.

My pictures now consists of a folders (main folder called "digital photos" then subfolders describing the events) on my hard drive and a couple of backups. I don't use any photo album software as I find them more cumbersome then just browsing through a folder.

 

[ERD50]

I've realized that ever since photography became digital that I really don't take care of photos as well as the days of physical photo albums.

My pictures now consists of a folders (main folder called "digital photos" then subfolders describing the events) on my hard drive and a couple of backups. I don't use any photo album software as I find them more cumbersome then just browsing through a folder.

You might want to consider 'Digikam' (cross platform, open source, free $):

https://www.digikam.org/about

What I like about it is, your pics are just in folders as you describe. IIRC, you can move things around in the folders manually, and it just reflects the changes on next start-up. But it still gives you the power to tag and organize things in different ways.

-ERD50

 

[RonBoyd]

I don't use any photo album software as I find them more cumbersome then just browsing through a folder.

What could be less "cumbersome" than a single folder and keywords (metadata) identifying the contents (subject?) of each image? That is my "system" in Lightroom.

 

[RonBoyd]

Here is a well-written (caution, very lengthy) article:

How to Significantly Reduce Your Backup Needs

One of the biggest issues many of us photographers face is the gigantic size of our photo libraries, which creates a lot of issues for backing up and restoring images. While we have written a number of articles on properly backing up images, with a recent article on a backup workflow, we have not spent much time on managing the backup size and reducing it. After-all, if the backup size itself is significantly reduced, the time it takes to back up those images improves drastically as well! Let’s talk about some of the tips, techniques and potential changes to your workflow you can administer today in order to reduce your backup needs in the future.

There are two primary strategies for reducing the size of your photo library: one involves potential changes to your current workflow process before images are transferred to your computer (which will address the growth of your photo library in the future), and the other one consists of steps you can take to reduce what you have today.