UKC

Hi,

I am trying to organise how I will save and edit my photos in the future. At the moment I have all my recent photos (RAW and jpeg) stored on the D: Drive of my computer which are cataloged by Lightroom.
On my external Hard-Drive I have a second copy of these photos plus the rest of my older photos. The photos on the external hard-drive are not catalogued by lightroom.
Finally I have a copy of everything on CD.

I don't really need to catalogue all my old photos. I am happy that they are there if I need them and they are all jpegs so I don't need to view them in Lightroom. I am really planning for the future.

What is the best way to upload and back-up my images?

Today: Make a back-up catalogue on my external Hard-drive for existing images

Then from now on when I want to save and edit photos:

1. Preview photos on the SD card in Lightroom
2. Initial cull of unwanted images
3. Import to my D: Drive and External Hard-Drive
4. Edit
5. Back-up catalogue at the end of an editing session to external Hard-drive
6. Export jpegs "as-and-when" and save them to D: Drive and External Hard-drive
7. Make a CD of photos (including exported jpegs) once a month

Does this sound like a logical way to do it?

Any advice appreciated!!

Tom

In reply to tnj:

I keep my Lightroom catalogue in the same folder as my photos, which are in turn organised by /year/month/day/ on importing. That way I just have to keep a back up this one folder. For this I use http://synchronicity.sourceforge.net/ - just remember that a 'mirror' backup will delete files on the backup drive that have been deleted on your main drive.

My only suggestion would be to import everything, backup, then cull. That way you have 3 copies of images until you format the card, whereas deleting from the card before import will be permanent.

In reply to tnj:

I know my dad backs up his RAW files onto an external drive about once a month which he keeps at his office the rest of the time. The whole computer is also backed up on a network RAID drive which I believe re-scans once a day.

I think he did backup onto CDs initially, but the RAW files are big and its a mighty faff to keep it up. I'm pretty sure he doesn't do that anymore.

So he has a backup of all the RAW files, within 1 month up-to-date, in a separate location, and 2 copies of the RAW and jpeg files, within 1 day up-to-date, in a separate room in the house.

Personally I think he's overdoing it a bit, but for him its many years of irreplaceable photos including ones taken by his father(and a lot of scans from slides) and he started doing it when a box containing some of his favorite slides got destroyed so it makes a certain amount of sense.

He also doesn't do any initial culling, but I guess that's based on his budget for external hard drives (money vs time!)

I'm not sure if he wipes the SD card though, I know a lot of people who don't and therefore have one extra backup stored on solid state.

In reply to due:

Thanks for the advice. That seems like a simple way of backing everything up.

I think that when you preview the SD card before import you can de-select any photos you don't want to import, rather than delete them off the SD card. So the "cull" doesn't actually delete anything, it just doesn't import some photos.

Tom

In reply to Bob_the_Builder:

I totally agree the CD copies are a faff! His plan seems like a good one although I don't really have cash to buy externals that I know I will fill with images I don't really need. I guess I will have to find time to do delete unwanted photos

Thanks for the advice

Tom

In reply to tnj:

Aye cost is an issue for me too. I back up my photos onto my external but only the one and maybe once a week.

The other,slightly cheaper option is to upload your photos to flickr or similar. I started to avoid the dubious facebook copyright issues while allowing friends to see the pictures. You can upload a fairly large size image, and i believe set it so only you can download them. You can deffo make it so only you can see them which I guess achieves the same result. The free option limits the size of your upload, the paid version is by year and not expensive. I think you're limited to uploading jpeg but I guess the ones you'd miss most would be edited jpegs anyway.

Flickr seems to be pretty protective of your copyright in a legal sense, but apparently newspapers and similar have stolen photos from it in the past. I'm not too worried about that personally because my pics are mostly rubbish. Lots of features on the website though, kinda cool.

Looks a bit like this (mine):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unascended/sets/

In reply to tnj:

I'm still confused by the concept of a catalogue in Lightroom and if it is needed at all. May I ask what a catalogue is for, and if I should take advantage of it?

I only really use a small proportion of Lightroom for levels, contrasts and mainly for tagging all my images. I find that I get more benefit from tagging.

As for my own back-up preferences.

A file structure is the starting point for all my images. I start off with folders for each year. And inside those annual folders are individual folders of events, holidays and projects which are given a title and a date. This way the folders are in alphabetical order. My mate prefers to put the date befor the title so that his folders are in date order.

Once I have my images in a recognisable file structure, I then use Synctoy from microsoft to ensure that my photos are backed up to specific locations.

I keep a set of images on my PC and use synctoy to contribute any new images and alterations to an external Hard drive and a Network Storage device. The Network Storage Device is set up in such a way that it duplicates my images onto two hard drives. The plan is that if oner hard drive fails in the Network Storage then I can replace the damaged drive and the device will then re-fill it with my images.

My external hard drive is kept in a fire-proof safe, which I bought from Argos.

From time to time I dump all my images onto several sets of DVD's and then give copies to my mates to stick in a drawer in their homes.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=15155

In reply to The Lemming:

Doesn't the catalogue remember what you have done to the images so that when you look at them again in Lightroom you see them in their finished state? If you always just use lightroom to tweak images and then immediately make new jpegs of them then I suppose the catalogue isn't necassary. But, most of my photos are RAW files that I have edited in lightroom but haven't made jpegs from so the catalogue remembers what I have done to the files. Or have i got that wrong?

Tom

In reply to The Lemming:

I had no idea so I looked it up. Surprisingly cool, dunno how useful though.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/george-jardine-on-lightroom/the-lightroom-catalog...

In reply to tnj:

I back up my Lightroom files to an external drive and into Dropbox on a weekly basis. Bit of a faff, but worth it.

In reply to tnj: I wouldn't bother with the CDs, if you are that worried you'd be better off getting another external HDD. Problem with CDs are that they will stop working after a random period of time which will depend on the CD itself but some won't last more than five or ten years whereas others will last far longer. If you really wanted to secure them for the future save them as .dng on the second hard drive as it is a more universal format than canon and nikon's own versions of raw.