With nearly all photography digital, how you manage your images has become something of an issue. I’ve taken over 110,000 images in the last 10 years, and have some methods that work to stay organized. I want to first discuss some of the general concepts and then share the software tools and work-flow I’ve been using.
One of the first things you need to decide is what format you want to shoot in and thus save your image files as. Most point and shoot cameras are capable of shooting .jpg and .mov formats. If you have a D-SLR yours might also support a Raw format. Since .jpg files are much smaller than Raw I primarily shoot .jpg in the highest quality my camera supports. I will shoot Raw files, but only if the project I’m shooting requires it.
The mathematics of your storage requirements compound based on the file sizes your camera creates. My main camera is a Nikon D300, which generates a .jpg file of about 5mb and a Raw file of 15.5mb. To save Raw images consumes 4x or more space since when I shot raw I also have the camera create a .jpg.
To calculate your storage requirements for a year you need an estimate for the number of images you might shoot. To make the math simple we’ll use 10,000 images a year. 10,000 x 5mb requires 50Gb of storage for the year. Over time the size of your image files will increase as camera capabilities increase. With drive sizes ever increasing and prices falling; what used to be a terrifying prospect of storing 1Tb (1,000Gb) is no longer a problem with 1Tb drive prices just above $100 US.
Because your image files are now your “negatives” I strongly suggest backing up your files. There are several ways to accomplish this; one simple way is an entire backup of your computer. I use Acronis backup software to make a full backup of my entire drive (Acronis does incremental backups too). I store the backup files on an external hard drive for ease of access. I also prefer that my backups are NOT online during normal usage since if that were the case a virus or other incident could damage both my computer and backup together.
Next time I’ll share the way I organize the images and how I file things so that they can be found years after the images are created.
Here’s a link to learn about Acronis software:
http://www.acronis.com/promo/ATIH/true-image-2009.html
Here's a link to part 2 of this Blog:
Photo Management with your Computer. Part 2
Here's a link to part 3 of this Blog:
Comments
Like you, I shoot a D300 and use Acronis for backup. My strategy is to keep my OS and applications on one half-terabyte drive, and my photos, music, and other documents on a second drive. You can configure Windows (XP or Vista) to set locations for your profile's document directories to any drive (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147). I use Acronis to keep backup images of both drives on an external drive connected to another computer on my network.
One beautiful thing about Acronis is that you can restore drive images from one drive to a newer drive of any larger capacity. That means that as my storage needs increase, I can swap out the old drive for a bigger one and restore the image from my backups very transparently.
James, great ideas keeping your OS and data on separate drives. I normally do that too but on my current primary system I decided to take a terabyte raid drive for a spin. While I like the speed of the raid I'm not sure I utilize it enough to make it worth the hassle. Even with my data on the same drive I also use the ability to change the default directories and keep my data in a single root folder "MyData" to make sure it's easy to keep track of.
You point about Acronis backing up one size and restoring to another is very true and I've used that to upgrade. One other thing it can do that's useful is it can restore a "boot" partition to any drive even if you've plugged it into your system via a USB adapter. I use this technique when restoring drives for other systems. It's much easier than trying to run the boot software and using that abbreviated version of the software.
Thanks for your comment.
I also use Acronis for several machines on my home network. I've been using a NAS that I built with a D945GCLF2 Atom board, a 1.5TB Seagate drive, and a hotswap SATA bay. All the computers on the home network run image backups to the NAS, and then once a week or so I rsync everything to a 1TB drive and put it in my flipper cabinet at work. So I always have three backups of everything over the last few weeks. I couldn't afford the Acronis license for my Windows Server 2003 box (also running on an Atom board :) so I use Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com) instead.
Thanks for the tip on Macrium Reflect.
I used Acronis for years and then tried Macrium. Now I gave up disk image backups completely for the same reasons as you cite above. Photos are jpeg files and I don't want to dig for acronis CDs ten years from now to get access to it.
Plus, I don't burn them anymore they're far too many.
After completing a trip around the world last year I am left with more than 100GB of hi-res jpegs and nef files. Drive imaging just became impracticable. I settled for BackupChain (http://backupchain.com) a little tool running in the background that sends new pics directly to the external drive.
On a server I also used it for backing up live virtual machines, were it wouldn't make much sense either to pull images of the entire server just to store the VMs.
There is another thing about the calculation above. The number of images per year actually increases (as it appears;-) and the avg file size does too. Luckily storage is getting cheaper as well in the meantime.
Well, let's hope we don't lose our photos and that 10 years from now we can still open them!