How often do you back-up your photo's
 

This past year I've not been very diligent in backing up/organising my photo's.

So my New Years Resolution is to get organised :) :)

I have a dedicated H/drive for my photo's and 2 portable H/drives for all my raw images, so now I have the mammoth task of bringing order to chaos, and I'm already in a totally confused state. Oh well things can only improve, I hope.

I've started by transferring all my Raw images to DVD-Ram, 40 Gbs should take me the rest of the day.

Then will come major job of sorting out all my Tiff images, for this I have either Picassa or PS Album. Can someone suggest anything better.

I'm considereing creating a database using MS Access, as anyone used Access for this type of thing?

No doubt I will be very occupied for the next week or so.

Maybe my chaos will motivate others to avoid the total mess that I have achieved.

Harry

Hi Harry,

I really need to do some serious organising and transferring of many of my image files. I have most on CDR disks but I know even they need to be sorted. Early this year Im hoping to install a DVD writer onto my system, and certainly look into a portable hard drive.

I wish you well in your endeavour :)

When I got into digital photography in 2003 I soon realised I needed a 'system' to keep organised. Until last year 2005 I shot JPEG so disk space was never a problem, organising them was.

I created two folders named RAW and PROCESSED. In raw I transfer all images from CF card(s) into a subfolder named with the date they were shot. The Raw folder contains unprocessed images in both JPEG or RAW format. The processed folder contains more subfolders again named with the date. If a raw image is processed I save it to the processed folder and date subfolder. I then make a note in an A4 jotter pad with the date, new filename and notes where it was taken and about the shot such as aperature priority, RAW convertor used or sharpening method employed.

When it comes to backup I transfer by year from both RAW and processed subfolders to a portable hard disk(s) having two copies of every photo I take.

I store a copy of all of my images on my external hard drive. I then immeditly organise them into folders in my pc manualy. I will then go through them and get rid of the bad ones.

You sound very organised Ollie, something I aim to be by the end of the month. The problem will be when I get back from holiday mid Feb with 20-30Gigs of Raw images to process.

No doubt I'll be totally disorganised again

I often do that. But my images are jpegs. I then go through and resize everything for foroum useage, and my site.
I spent years just throwing all my photos into one folder but then realised i realy did need to organise them.

LOL - Not enough I lost 6 months worth when a harddisk failed, but do I learn no. As they have no commercial value to me I am not that worried. A few shots of family days out I wish I still had but thats all. When I look at some shots I backed up to CDROM a few years back on a second look I think why did I bother.

Rob

I know what you mean Rob, I've got some real rubbish saved on my PC, maybe nows the time yo get rid off it all.

Harry

I go through mine fairly often and clear out some photos. It is suprisiing how much some aeroplanes get into your photos.

Especially if you attend a lot of airshows:) :) This one of the area where I need to be ruthless.