Am I Out of Control? Are you?

[crunch]

As mentioned above, I'm sitting on about 500Gb of photos. True, they're all raw at an average of 12Mb per file. That's about 40,000 photos!

I've now got to the point where, after I upload my shots, I go through them 1 by 1 in Bridge, and rate them based on quality. For example, a perfect shot (of which there are few) gets 5 stars, one that needs minor PP gets 4 stars, down to those that need some more PP work but can be rescued (like under/over exposed, bad colouration or contrast) getting 1 star.

Anything that's out of focus, motion-blurred from camera shake, or that simply does not work gets trashed. Like this, I manage to cut out just over half my shots.

Then, I go through the 1, 2 and 3 starred images much more critically, and re-rate them based on their usefullness compared to each other. This leaves 3 and 2 starred images requiring some PP work (roughly 10 minutes for a 3 star, 15-20 minutes for a 2 star). The 1 star images get trashed too.

At this stage, I'm down to one third of the original set, and these photos are stored on my external hard drive (500Gb) (which I should store off-site). I plan to also burn them to DVD and store at a second off-site location.

I've gone through the first 6,000 of 40,000 and reduced it to 1,856 photos. Not bad from a space-saving point of view. This process just takes long since I'm starting now and have 34,000 photos to go

[baldmountain]

Originally Posted by Saralonde

I used to keep everything, but now I force myself to be harsh about deleting shots. If I'm unsure about 2 or more similar shots, I'll put them side by side on my screen and delete my least favorite.

I'm relatively new so I don't have thousands of shots and I don't have this issue yet.

Yesterday I went to my son's soccer game intent on learning to shoot sports shots. I shot 250 pictures during the game. After my first run through them I was left with about 30 reasonable shots.

Originally Posted by Saralonde

The only thing I have trouble deleting are pics of family.

Once I move the ones of my son that are not good, but of my son, into the family snapshot album, and another round of critical editing, I'll be left with about 5 good shots from the original 250. The rest will get deleted.

Read any of the books on composition and taking better pictures, they all say to edit mercilessly and I agree.

Originally Posted by Saralonde

Now if I would only remember to back them all up...

I use Apple Aperture and religiously backup to a vault on an external drive.

[waffles]

That's the problem though. As you get better, you'll get more keepers. And there goes the easy way to decide what gets tossed.

[rj_deep]

I dont have that many GBs like you guys but have a lil complicated but systematic approach towards storing pics !!

I have a 250 GB external hard drive in it I have made two main folders named "latest uploads" and "pics"

LATEST UPLOADS folder contains different folders named on the date of transfer !!

PICS folder has different theme named folders and a folder called FINAL

I transfer all the pics in latest transfer, Then go through the pics find the best ones process them and save them in the folder named FINAL.
So the final containts just the jpeg files of the size approx 1024 x @#$. Its just like a gallery folder!!

Then I go through the pics transfered and delete the pics which are repeated or blurred or the pics which are not good at all !!

After deleting the entire folder is transfered to PICS > Theme based folder >


And yea i shoot in raw !!

It sounds lil complicated but it eases out the things in the end !!


Best,

D

www.rjdeep.tk

[morts]

Drobo: good idea.

I prefer Windows Home Server. It does a similar thing to Drobo - presents all your drives as a single volume which is cool.

The thing with WHS is that it does backup very well and compresses data VERY efficiently. This means if you have a drive with JUST your photos, you can compress 300GB into something silly like 80 on the server. The only downside is that you have to ensure the backup runs every night as recovery involves erasing what's currently on the drive and replacing it with the data in the backup.

If you don't use the backup client then you can create a shared folder, which can be replicated across however many drives are in your server, keeping your files safe without needing RAID. Then use something like robocopy to sync your files with the shared folder!

I might post a tutorial for this if there's demand!

[Doc Holliday]

I take photographs for two reasons - creativity and historical record.

I shoot a lot of ghost towns, abandoned buildings, et cetera. There is no particular agency, or even plan, for the preservation of most old mining camps & towns or other historical structures here in Montana. So, I take a lot of pictures to document the condition of the ruins. [And, unfortunately, their continued deterioration.]

The second reason I shoot is for creativity. Some of the images I take for historical reasons are, also, artistic, (I think).

I used to delete a lot of files from each day's shoot. Now, I don't. Mass storage is cheap and I can always buy another external drive or upgrade the HDs in my computers.

Here's how I sort my files:

I have a folder entitled "Canon Digitals" on the hard drive on my iMac. That folder is subdivided into 2006/2007/2008/et cetera. Each year's folder is divided into months. Each month into individual days.

The "day" folders are labeled with a brief explanation of what I shot that day.

There is, also, a folder for edited images I upload to my Flickr site. In the Flickr folder, there are subfolders for specific topics. All the images I upload to Flickr site are, also, transferred to my iPod Touch with the subfolders intact. Only about five or ten percent of my images make it to Flickr...

I have a similar folder arrangement on my MacBook Pro, for downloading images in the field. After I get home, I transfer the images from my MacBook Pro to my iMac.

The "Canon Digitals" folder gets backed up, en masse, to a half terabyte external hard drive.

Additionally, all images are backed up to DVD-Rs for archival storage. The DVDs are then moved to my safe deposit box, because I don't have any way to store them at home that is fireproof. I keep an index of what is saved to DVD.

I keep thinking I will buy a copy of FileMaker Pro, or something, and catalog each image, but - at this point - I doubt I could ever find the time to do so.

[JerBear]

With several terabytes of photos and growing all the time, I have issues with control as well.

1st thing is to be organized. While I shoot for a living, my better half shoots for the luv of it and the same organization works for her as well. When you have a event that you have shot, birthday, day trip, whatever, create a folder with the year, month and day in the description. When you go to look up some old photos, you might not remember when exactly you took them, but usually you will remember the year and maybe the month.

I use a pro software for our work shots, but I also have a program that I highly rate called ACDSEE. This is a great program for keeping all of your shots sorted and edited. It does a lot and I would suggest you check it out on the net.

Now, about shooting…. If you are taking a ton of shots of the same situation, well so what, it just means more post production work for you later. If you want to get away from that, then discipline yourself to think about the shot before hand, what you want to capture and how, then shot. You will find yourself taking fewer shots and more satisfied with the outcome.

I know of some pro photographers who claim to take thousands (that’s plural) at every wedding they shoot. To me, that is just over kill, shoot everything so you have something? Can you imagine what a bride looks like after thousands of shots!!! NO, more is not better in this case, it is just lack of talent.

BACK UP your photos, if all you have is a dvd burner, then back up at least 3 copies to spread around. Two of the copies should be off your premises and maybe one in your safe deposit box. If you can, add a second drive to your computer (they are cheap, 750gig drive for less than $100) create a backup there, then if your system goes down, then at least you can swap the drive to another machine.

I would also look at a external backup called DROBO, I have a few of these and they work great, although a little pricey.

Good shooting……

[craftybunny]

I use elements 6. Each time that I down pictures, each download goes into its own folder. I use the tagging system in elements to catalog the subject. then the favorite indicators rated 1-5 for what I feel are the best.

I have about 12,223 files in 83 folders. 22.6 GB

[Greg Clarke]

I've got about 66,000 photos organized on one computer. I arrange the photos in one main directory with sub directories by date of photos. This helps me find the photo later by checking the date data. I don't profess this to be the best method by any means but it's worked for me so far. I then back up my drive with an external hard drive to protect everything.

[smenzel]

When I switched to digital I got sucked in to the organize by subject method. Several thousand images into the method and I modified the method to yyyy/subject. That lasted until I hit around 10k images. Yes, I keep everything. More on that later.

My current strategy is yyyy/mm (folder for each year with sub-folders for each month) with periodic sub-folders for special events (trips, car shows, etc). Sub-folders contain the images (duh!) as well as the associated PSD and JPG files for each image that I process.

Nearly every image is geocoded using HoudahGeo. It's great being able to look back at an image and view [on a map] exactly where it was taken.

For organization, I use Bridge from CS3. As a folder browser, it does quite well at giving me different views of images, the meta data, assigning keywords and sorting / filtering images.

Bridge does not sort / search / filter across multiple folders. I'm hoping Expression Media solves that part of the puzzle.

iPhoto is cool but I need to know exactly where my images reside. Lightroom 1.0 was ok and looked like it might solve the image organization issue but I didn't much care for the feel. Have not checked out 2.0, yet. Aperture is another possibility.

Someone already mentioned this but (1) be sure to back up your images and (2) be sure that at least one of your backups is off-site.