Best Practices for Archiving Photos

[mw2006]

I'm in the process of getting a new external hard drive and have set a huge goal for myself to organize my pictures more efficiently. I'm interested in what the best ways to archive your photos for easy access is. I realize most people have different approaches, but thats what makes this thread interesting!

So here it is:
What's the best way to backup/archive photos? What kind of folder structure do you use? How often do you back up? What program do you use to back up your photos?

Thanks all, I love this forum!

[acedrew]

My folder structure is YEAR/DATE/RawFilexxxx.raw
Sorting by date works great, then I use tags and collections in lighroom for any other organization.
I backup all my files to external storage, and then remove them from my laptop as they grow "stale," 6-8 Months. Works pretty well. No complaints so far...

Andrew Rodgers
Perfected Perspectives -- Photography by Andrew Rodgers | Andrew Rodgers (acedrew) on Twitter | Login | Facebook

[Nicole]

I second that idea about moving them off my laptop when they "go stale" as it were.

My current plan for how I plan to archive my photos is this (soon to be implemented). 1 HD for all photos. A second HD with all photos and the Lightroom Catalog. On and offsite general backups using Apple's Time Machine.

At least I think that's what my plan is going to be when I get it all set up.

[mw2006]

Makes sense. I just dusted off my 1st external hard drive and put all my photos on it. I'll get a second one to run time machine and see how that works.

But what kind of folder structure works best? I guess once you get it set up in lightroom catalogs it doesn't matter. I'm thinking of mimicing the iTunes folder structure. Maybe like this:

Location/Event/image.raw

[Nicole]

I use a year / date setup that I've got Lightroom managing. So things go into folders by days, labelled 20090211 for example. Then after a while I usually change those to subfolders of years just for ease and convenience.

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by mw2006

II'm interested in what the best ways to archive your photos for easy access is.

Peter Krogh's The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers is widely considered to be the best reference currently available on this topic. Krogh covers many different systems and techniques, and discusses their strengths and weaknesses.

[mw2006]

Thanks for all the info, just to follow up and round out this thread, I found a great resource online called "dpbestflow.org". Its a great site that really gets into the best practices of digital photography in general. I provided a link to file management and directory structure below.

Directory Structure | dpBestflow

[PeterP]

Hi,

one addition, you may find useful. I rename all my photos right after I downloaded them to following format: yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_ss.jpg which is the time of photo was taken.
It's much easier to sort them when you have big bunch of unsorted pictures in this format than in imgxxxxx.jpg format. I've found a very handy free tool for it: jhead, just google for it.
It can read the exif info and rename the file according to that. You save a rename.bat file for example with proper parameters for jhead, and it's just an "Enter" from now on and all photos get renamed in the destination directory.

rename.bat file content for the format I use:
jhead -nf%%Y_%%m_%%d_%%H_%%M_%%S pictures\*.jpg

(jhead can do lot of other things with exif, for example can increase the time in exif with n hours if you forgot to change your camera settings when moved to another timezone, worth to look at it, very useful)

Peter

[wulf]

That isn't a very human-friendly file name though. I do include the date in filenames (although not the time) but I also use a short, meaningful name at the start. Where I have a series of pictures of the same subject taken on the same day, I also add a sequence number, which keeps the order. These get ordered into a series of directories based on subjects, sub-categories and, in some instances, date.

A typical file name would be something like yellow_flower.20100313.jpg or crows.20100313.02.jpg. I can very easily use a file system search to find all pictures taken on a given year, month or day but I've also got some other information to help when browsing.

Wulf

[cleamon]

I have 3 external drives (500GB). 1 drive is my primary work drive, while the other 2 are used as backup. 1 of the 2 backups is kept in my safe deposit box at the bank. This one gets swapped out every month or so.

I keep a folder (under a single root level folder) for each session which starts with the date, plus an optional short description i.e. 2010-01-30 Parks Mill. In that folder are the (raw) files directly from the camera, plus the photoshop project (if any) from the editing session(s), plus the finished, full sized, highest quality, jpgs. I'll also store notes and any other related files (like the saved settings from Photomatix) in case I need to know later how I processed the image(s).

I use Lightroom or organize, tag, etc.. The Lightroom catalogs and backups are also kept on the external drives.

None of the images are kept on the notebook computer's internal drive unless I'm taking some "on the road" to show or edit.