Feeling a bit overwhelmed with both digital and printed photos. I'd like to remove a group of photos from my hard drive (about 35,000) but external harddrives can fail. Any suggestions about where to put them?
How do you choose your favorites and keep track of them? When I am asked to provide some photos, I have to go through many folders. Must be an easier way. I took a class once and the teacher made an annual folder of favorites, but do you keep one in the original file, too?
Any and all suggestions are welcome. I have photos all over the place!
I know the feeling - I have thousands upon thousands of photos. I have only two years worth on my laptop - the rest are on hard drives - I have a multitude of them too :) I usually keep my copies on at least two hard drives. I print out favourites or have them made into photo books.
As for finding them I know people use Light room to tag and organise - I have it but have not yet got around to it. I organise my photos in folders by Year/Month/Date and now label them a bit better so I know what is in them.
Good Luck!
I keep a running update of my 100 best photographs on Dropbox. At the end of every month I keep it updated, and to hold only at most 100 shots there. I keep all my images updated on a USB external 5 TB drive. Again at the end of every moth, copy the folders them over. You can buy such drives for 150 dollars or so. If you are still running out of room, then burn the old ones to DVD and free up space on the drive. i really haven't gotten to that stage, having 5 TB of storage on my external drive. Millions of shots can fit there, even raw, before I will have a problem.
Yes, there is still the issue of being able to retrieve them, but If you are careful to keep your best shots, those that are worth doing post processing on, labelled with metadata, carefully thought out, usually have at most 25 keywords, and then work the combinations, Lightroom or probably better, at least for my workflow, Adobe Bridge, you can retrieve them pretty quickly.
I see in your photo Exif section Danette that you don't rename your files on import. I have set my files to be renamed automatically to " yyyymmdd_number". Not sure what software you use, but most importing software gives that as an option. I use Lightroom & have set each day to import to a unique folder that is named automatically yyyy-mm-dd and then it is automatically dropped into a yyyy folder. In Lightroom I often add a description to the end of the daily folder name so I can see it it from the LR library & quickly find what I need. The descriptor word is searchable in its yyyy folder in Explorer or Spotlight if I forget the date/ or even year!! If I save as copies for different purposes I use the same start of the name and add to it (eg wo for working on; final; web etc). I don't do much of that so those copies usually are saved in the day folder because If I find even one image from the shoot I can readily relocate the whole folder by folder date/descriptor.
I also use keywords in a hierarchy in LR, but that is getting more specific. I use star rating (& occasionally collections ) in LR to filter for anything / metadata.LR is good as it is is a catalogue - you only keep one copy (of RAW) if you wish, but can store the 'directions' to that file in several different ways.
I would start by automating file names & location, but everyone has their own different approaches, find what makes sense for you & is easy to maintain! You can even re-name existing image files - but make spare backups just in case!
@ltodd I appreciate your thorough response. I probably should rename the photos upon import. I do have specific folder names so I either know which folder to check or at least get close. I have a former teacher who is pushing me to publish some photos for her and I am finding it to be torture to think of going through all those folders to choose favorites. There is so much more to LR than what I use. My real dilemma is what to do with photos I want to keep, but not keep on my laptop. I just found a bunch of very important photos I thought I could no longer access.
I "use" the organizer from PSE14, but I have yet to find the ideal way of tagging all the photos that I have. I will say that I had PSE6 prior the upgrade, and had the habit of making sure that I had location, subject/event and people tagged, so questions of where are all the photos of younger grandson, I can find. All the photos take on the last trip east is answered with a thumb drive with all the raw images taken during the time period (physical organization is year>month>day.)
@danette You give me way too much credit. I am not a very organized or "anal" person at all. Just the opposite. But this informal structure helps me to keep some semblance of order among my hundreds of thousands of shots, and perhaps the thousand that have been worth working on and actually indexing.
Buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit and connect it to your wireless router.
I have a unit with two drives (2 x 3TB disks). It is set up as a RAID 1. This means that the unit will "mirror" the two disks (it will automatically make a copy of the first disk to the second disk).
NAS units for home use usually have a web interface and are easy to set up.
Having said that, my photos are not organised at all ;-)
365 is helping here. I am being ruthless in deleting files that haven't made it to the project. Well, that's not quite true - some days I might take 5 photos that I like, 2 might be 'artistic' ones. 3 might be 'family album/snapshot' ones. And at the end of the month they go in a monthly folder on an external hard drive. If I have been somewhere special (a special occasion or holiday) - then I am keeping more than just 5 a day. But I don't think I will miss the ones that I am deleting, even though they are sometimes decent photos.
I've not started to give them keywords as I save them. I really should do that!
And I'm hopeless at printing them out. CHallenge this summer is to print out my sons baby photos in an album for him - he will be 7 this autumn...
I always back up my photos on a DVD. However, they can fail over a long period of time, as well. My IT hubby says use the cloud. I don't really trust the cloud either, but he says it's safe and secure and will last forever.
I am using Amazon Cloud Photos for storing my images. They great privacy policy, they are not owning your images. It is unlimited photos for $12 a year. You can create folders and subfolders to keep your images organized.
I can take up to thousands of photos a month and I keep all of them organised by month in a folder on my computer. (So a Photos folder, which contains a July folder, which contains a 14th July folder etc)
At the end of every month I transfer that month's worth onto 2 separate hard drives, keeping any really special 'finished' photos on my main laptop as well for easy access.
I'm sure there are many holes in my organisation though... Hope you find something that works for you!
Great. While I do not follow a good consistent method, I really think tags are very important (you can tag upon import even). It's an essential step. I have tags for competitions, places, processing methods, even words like "favs". Now, on things I have bunches of photos, big trips for example, I tag right away, then I create a host folder in my computer after import that names the bulk of photos (Bali, for example). Then I create two more folders for exporting after editing in LR5 (one is Balipreview and the other Baliedited). The preview one is a smaller file for sending to folks for preview and the other is the one for my final edit). You can store these all on an external file to save space on your computer. I'm going to send you an email with my phone. Would love to discuss because I feel like my system has a bunch of holes, but lately it is getting better.
@chapjohn I do this as well. I have amazon prime in the UK which gives free delivery and TV if you want it plus music. But the real bonus is unlimited cloud storage for photo's it also does a pretty reasonable job of organising them by dat as well. Having recently had a hard drive fail I am very happy that I had used this option :)
@rjb71 I am surprise more people are not using this service. I don't order enough to make prime a good investment for me, but $12 a year for unlimited photo storage is a great deal.
@homeschoolmom I had a CD labeled Photos 2005. I was beside myself trying to find my son's photos from high school debate tournaments. When I put in the CD, I thought the photos were gone but I found them. I have everything else backed up.
Hi Danette,
I agree with your point that there does exist a way to drop going through many folders to find one image or several photos. The usual way is to get help from some handy image viewers, and most of them do carry the feature of finding photos in the PC.
You have a choice. Let me explain...Amazon Cloud for Photos does not remove the image from your computer when it uploads. Amazon Cloud does not delete the image if you download it to use it, it is still in Amazon Cloud.
After you have uploaded images to Amazon Cloud, you can delete images from your computer or from Amazon Cloud if you want to.
Uploading large images takes time. To get all my images uploaded the at first took a week and was using two computers to upload. Amazon Cloud is unable to show a RAW image but it does upload them and they are stored. It will show jpeg's. You can still download RAW images to use them, all that information is stored.
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As for finding them I know people use Light room to tag and organise - I have it but have not yet got around to it. I organise my photos in folders by Year/Month/Date and now label them a bit better so I know what is in them.
Good Luck!
Yes, there is still the issue of being able to retrieve them, but If you are careful to keep your best shots, those that are worth doing post processing on, labelled with metadata, carefully thought out, usually have at most 25 keywords, and then work the combinations, Lightroom or probably better, at least for my workflow, Adobe Bridge, you can retrieve them pretty quickly.
I also use keywords in a hierarchy in LR, but that is getting more specific. I use star rating (& occasionally collections ) in LR to filter for anything / metadata.LR is good as it is is a catalogue - you only keep one copy (of RAW) if you wish, but can store the 'directions' to that file in several different ways.
I would start by automating file names & location, but everyone has their own different approaches, find what makes sense for you & is easy to maintain! You can even re-name existing image files - but make spare backups just in case!
I have a unit with two drives (2 x 3TB disks). It is set up as a RAID 1. This means that the unit will "mirror" the two disks (it will automatically make a copy of the first disk to the second disk).
NAS units for home use usually have a web interface and are easy to set up.
Having said that, my photos are not organised at all ;-)
I've not started to give them keywords as I save them. I really should do that!
And I'm hopeless at printing them out. CHallenge this summer is to print out my sons baby photos in an album for him - he will be 7 this autumn...
At the end of every month I transfer that month's worth onto 2 separate hard drives, keeping any really special 'finished' photos on my main laptop as well for easy access.
I'm sure there are many holes in my organisation though... Hope you find something that works for you!
I agree with your point that there does exist a way to drop going through many folders to find one image or several photos. The usual way is to get help from some handy image viewers, and most of them do carry the feature of finding photos in the PC.
After you have uploaded images to Amazon Cloud, you can delete images from your computer or from Amazon Cloud if you want to.