Organizing photos

[capturedbybrooke]

I need serious help! I am having a hard time organizing all my photos. Just got a 500gb external hard drive because I ran out of space on my regular computer with all my photos. I wanted to use the external as a backup, but that is turning out to be impossible since I needed to clear space on my regular drive. I had to delete some photos off there and now they are only on my external. I would like to have them all in 2 places, but since I don't have enough room, I can't do that. So now, some of my photos (the most important ones) are on both drives, but some are only on the external. I am worried that I might accidentally delete some pics when moving them and only having them in one spot or forgetting to move them, etc...

I am trying to get more organized...ie..I just started a new naming convention date_subject_number_type (bw, sep, web, etc)

Just wondering how other people go about organizing their photos, backing them up, etc. I have heard Lightroom is helpful with organizing, using metadata...but I don't have it yet- thinking about downloading the Lightroom 3 beta version.

Any suggestions, GREATLY appreciated!! TIA!

[jdepould]

My main image catalog (Lightroom) lives on two 1TB Firewire drives. I work from one, and the other is a duplicate, synchronized using ChronoSync.

[idb]

Hi,
I ran into the same problem so I started moving photos onto flash drives which aren't too pricey. I got an 8GB flash drive for $20 on sale. I also have 4GB and 1GB drives.

This freed up space on my hard drive so that it had better capacity for moving photos around and gave me a buffer for new downloads.
Then I got a 1TB external hard drive on sale ($100) on Boxing Day so now I have all my photos on that except the most recent downloads.
I still use the flashdrives as back-up because they are (supposedly) more reliable due to not having any moving parts.
I will keep moving photos onto the external drive and keep backing up on flash drives.

I use my own numbering system which I developed when I was shooting mostly 35mm slides. It is based on the year and each film is numbered and each frame is numbered, e.g. 9901-01 is the first frame in the first film in 1999. I am currently on "film" #1017 (the seventeenth series of (mostly) digital images in 2010).

I stuck with this system because of familiarity and simplicity but it also works nicely in the computer because the PC automatically lists the images in numerical order, including any non-digital photos I scan into it. It works the same in Photoshop, Corel Photo Album 7 and Picasa.

Good luck!
Ian