Am I Out of Control? Are you?

[crunch]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Only 45GB?

Ive almost half-filled a 250GB Harddrive.

Almost half-filled a 250?

I unpacked my 2nd 500Gb external yesterday, the first one is full (of photos).

I win (so far)

[jdepould]

300GB FireWire drive, 500GB USB drive, 250GB portable FireWire drive.

Lightroom 2.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

The 300 is getting full, I'm toying with the idea of a mirrored 1TB drive. I'd really like a Drobo, but I don't think I can swing it.

[prince]

Originally Posted by jdepould

I'd really like a Drobo

Sorry if its a stupid question. What's a Drobo?

[crunch]

Originally Posted by prince

Sorry if its a stupid question. What's a Drobo?

www.drobo.com

It's an external casing for internal drives. Also makes data redundancy and all such similar wonderful things (auto backup, etc) really simple.

IIRC, the current incarnation support 4x 4TB drives, for a maximum of 16TB (or 8TB if you want redundancy).

I could really use 8TB of storage!!

[Time Shot]

My wife an I are both avid photography hobbyists and had the same problem you are talking about. Very quickly our hard drive was being consumed with photos and it became a problem using the computer for work instead of our hobby.

Our solution was to search the local Craigs list for used external hard drives. We found two at a very modest price and have dedicated them to photos only. It only takes seconds to access them and it keeps them a little more safe then on the computers main hard drive anyway. It works for us and the cost was minimal.

Good luck. If you find a better solution please share with me.

[TAWW]

I use Lightroom to help organize my photos. I import them from my compact flash card into Lightroom and store a copy them on an external hard drive a folder for the current year. I look through the pictures and delete the bad ones right off and add keywords to the pictures that survive the initial purge. Over time, I continue to delete pictures that I do not like. Lightroom makes it very easy to organize and find pictures. It eliminates the need to organize the pictures on the hard drive since I do not care where the picture is located on the disk.

[GothamCity]

I just have a bunch of folders named after a particular place or picture in the set I'm uploading. So right now my folders consist partially of "Smoke, Adventure, Texas, Florida, Canon" etc. However, if I have a folder that seems like it doesn't have a lot of pictures, I'll put another set in and name it something different. So my Texas folder has pictures under the name Texas, and Fair, and Balloon. It's really messy =\.

My biggest problem is on the actual camera. I tend to keep favorites on my card and won't delete them no matter what and they build up.
I should try getting an external hard drive like a few of you =].

[dannyrod]

Originally Posted by maxharvard

I've said it before and i'll say it again.

The easiest way i've found is:

Main folder (Date:Location:What i took pictures of)

3 sub folders
- Raw images (never edited, always uncut and unPP'd)
- Good ones i keep after editing from RAW
- Internet Versions (resized and watermarked)

That easy.

*high five*

I use a similar system . . . keywording / tagging would be awesome, but not until some sort of highly easy and efficient system emerges (like Picasa Web Album's face recognition, but more consistent). Keywording is such a pain in the butt for now!

[mahree]

I'm not a professional but I have a lot of pictures so I thought I'd weigh in. I download everything that is not obviously trash. I catagorize everything in to folders by place and date, subfolders are of file type. Then I burn them to DVD and keep them in those big DVD books.

I lost a whole week vacation when I crashed my computer so I automatically burn my pictures to disc whether or not I want to keep them all. "Just in case..."

I'll load a 'set' back on to my pc when I want to work on it but I'm more selective of the pictures I put back on. When I'm done with everything I want to do. I convert everything to jpeg and burn them to CD (cheaper).

Question: I notice most of you store on hard drives or external drives. What are the risks of losing them by crashin pc or whatever?

Thanks

[PRH]

I have to agree with the yyyy-mm folders for organising. This is the system I use.

I also separate according to which camera I used because they output the same filename (Canon's ubiquitous IMG_xxxx or CRW_xxxx filenames).

I generally remember to within a couple of months when an image was taken. Though I seem to have less than half the images (~9500) some of you have taken. I guess if I had 22000 I'd think of other means of organisation or a serious kulling. The latter would probably be my preferred method (do I really want to tag 9500 let alone 20000 shots?)