How do you store your photos?

Mac or Windows... makes not an iota of difference, underneath both the same and one is not faster than the other.

There is more than one way to use lightroom same as there are many ways to skin a cat.

My storage... Lightroom imports to two locations, working disk and image backup, the working disk is further backed up to a third HD which is stored off-site and includes a third backup of the catalogue. I am starting to use the cloud and also investigating NAS...
 
I have a Mac, but don't use Lightroom to store my pictures, just to process them. I don't keep my RAWs for any length of time after I've processed them as I have little time to go back to edit them again. I'm too caught up with taking new pictures :). I keep my latest jpegs on Photos for mac, and back up my library on a NAS. Older pictures I store on my NAS and on an external HDD too.
 
BrynBoru said:
Oh well! That puts me in my place as well as demonstrating your fine sense of humour!
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Is it a new hobby of yours to enter a thread, tell someone they’re wrong, that they’re using the wrong type of computer, then be ‘offended’ when they suggest it might be your choice of computer that’s wrong, then make some further incorrect assumptions?

You barged into this with no invitation or good reason, please don’t try to act the victim. You could have explained your point to the OP, but instead you decided to tell me why I was ‘doing it wrong’, I’ve no idea why you felt the need, and nor do I care. But the more assumptions you make the dafter you are looking.
 
Forgive me for having the temerity to dare to enter a thread and question doubtful advice being offered. Isn’t that how the system works? I certainly don’t recall telling you you were “doing it wrong” and you know and understand very well that all comments are automatically referred to the OP. The references to computers was clearly not serious.
Your problem appears to be that you can’t countenance any comment that is even slightly at odds with your own opinion. I’ve read many of your posts over several years, if not more. You’ve helped many folks with a wide variety of problems and that is admirable. However you often show in argument just how “thran” you can be when someone doesn’t agree with you. So I suggest you lay off the bullying and accept constructive comment for what it is.
 
BrynBoru said:
Forgive me for having the temerity to dare to enter a thread and question doubtful advice being offered. Isn’t that how the system works? I certainly don’t recall telling you you were “doing it wrong” and you know and understand very well that all comments are automatically referred to the OP. The references to computers was clearly not serious.
Your problem appears to be that you can’t countenance any comment that is even slightly at odds with your own opinion. I’ve read many of your posts over several years, if not more. You’ve helped many folks with a wide variety of problems and that is admirable. However you often show in argument just how “thran” you can be when someone doesn’t agree with you. So I suggest you lay off the bullying and accept constructive comment for what it is.
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Wow!!
Just wow.

You made a joke, I returned it and you’re mock offended and now I’m a bully. Brilliant!
 
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Returning to the OPs question, working files are on SSD and then moved to internal HD. Both of these are backed up to NAS. What I’m missing is a copy offsite and do need to get that organized, maybe once a month copy on an external drive and left safely somewhere else or copy to NAS at a friends place.
 
Isn't it good there's an edit facility. Stops people making themselves look like complete dicks! :)
 
My method is:

Once SD card is full I put in SD card wallet with a little note of the time period. SD card wallet is stored in a fire proof safety box thing.

Copy all files from SD card (Raw & Jpeg) onto local PC.

Backup files on NAS drive.

Upload images to Flickr.

Folder strucutre is pretty poor & inconsistent, I need to clean that up one day..
 
Western Digital My Cloud. Pretty happy with them apart from speed with disk encryption. That makes them too slow so I switched it off. I guess there would be a similar performance penalty for that with others too. Friends are using synology and happy with those too.
 
You guys that are using Lightroom to import images to two locations. Do you apply the metadata on import, and if so does it apply the metadata to both locations? I ask this because Adobe Bridge only applies the metadata to one location, usually the first.
 
To answer the OP's question, I download images from the card to the desktop and backup to Amazon Drive (Cloud). I then cull the unwanted from the desktop and copy to a 4TB internal drive and to my Server (Windows Home Server 2011). So three copies, one off site with all images from the shoot and the other two copies onsite.
I also copy to a portable drive if I'm away overnight but never format a card till all are backed up to the Amazon Drive.
 
You seem to have forgotten that offensive remarks remain in the notification email no matter what edits are subsequently made.
 
Gil Bev said:
I have a Mac, but don't use Lightroom to store my pictures, just to process them. I don't keep my RAWs for any length of time after I've processed them as I have little time to go back to edit them again. I'm too caught up with taking new pictures :). I keep my latest jpegs on Photos for mac, and back up my library on a NAS. Older pictures I store on my NAS and on an external HDD too.
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Hi Gil, just so you know lightroom does not "store" your images.your images are either on your computer/external hrd drive/or in the cloud. lightroom simply goes to the location the image is stored in and uses it from there.
hth mike
 
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Phil-1 said:
I’m going to look for a NAS Drive in the new year. I have several hard drive of different size at home.

What NAS drives are people using and what would you recommend?
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You have a choice of :
NAS with disk/s. Ready to go. Just plug it in.
NAS without disk/s. Add your own.
NAS with single or multiple disk bays. Add more later.
NAS with a noisy fan. Or no fan, silent.
NAS that have fast or slower data transfer.

I have 2 WD Mycloud NAS devices. Both single disk, ready to go and silent. No fan and sleep mode. They might have slower data transfer, but for backup, there is no hurry. They will shut down to cold when it's all done.
 
OK back to the question.
I use Lightroom on a big, grunty PC with lots of storage. I have all the raws imported into yearly folders by lightroom and any I wish to publish/print are then exported into a similar folder structure on my PC that matches the collections structure under lightroom. Lightroom weekly backups are to a separate internal disk. I have 125K photos in my lightroom catalogue (persoal work), and another catalogue of work from my previous employer of around 60K images which I now have archived off onto several USB drives (2 complete copies).
I have a full recoverable image of my PC disks, which I run about twice a year.
A weekly job backs up the PC to a HP miniserver with 20Tb of disk space and about once a month I remember to take a USB backup which goes to work. I have a number of photos on websites such as my own, pbase and flickr.

Old photos from film days are in albums or loose in cardboard boxes in the loft

Cloud backup I've tried but is too slow for the initial seed now. However a lot of my work is in datacenters and we have space so I may just use some 'development' space in the future as I can preseed it.
 
BrynBoru said:
Isn't it good there's an edit facility. Stops people making themselves look like complete dicks! :)
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Edit facility is good... you should consider it as well.

and YES, the staff do have access to the edit history, and we can see when someone makes a comment, then, a short while later realises that it may have been a little strong and quite sensibly self-moderates.

Byker28i said:
Lets try and have a grown up discussion please without resorting to insults
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I Agree. In fact, i'd strongly suggest that is the case from here in.
 
Byker28i said:
Lets try and have a grown up discussion please without resorting to insults
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TheBigYin said:
the staff do have access to the edit history,
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Self-moderation doesn't change the fact that the original abuse is already out in the public domain and beyond Staff Members control. Just because it has been edited from the forum, doesn't make it any less objectionable.
 
BrynBoru said:
Self-moderation doesn't change the fact that the original abuse is already out in the public domain and beyond Staff Members control. Just because it has been edited from the forum, doesn't make it any less objectionable.
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I’d stepped away from this as it’d got petty and frankly pathetic.

But as you keep digging, I feel the need to clear something up.

Yes I self moderated, because I felt it’d already gone too far (not my remarks, the whole argument).

But you’re using that as some kind of points scoring exercise and alluding to the fact that my remarks were much worse than anything posted previously or since. You think you’re getting away with that lie because you can use words like ‘abuse’ and ‘offensive’. And my post was no worse than anything you’ve posted, and if the original were reinstated, not only would everyone see that to be true, it’d also prove what I’d posted was perfectly correct too.

Now should we all just get on and have a pleasant Christmas, or are you going to keep digging at the mods till you get yourself into bother (I’d not recommend it). Like I said, my ‘joke’ was a simple return of yours, and is there for everyone to see (and others have pointed it out) a million miles from ‘bullying’.
 
Phil V said:
Now should we all just get on and have a pleasant Christmas,
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I'd strongly recommend this course of action for everyone.

and if EVERYONE can stop digging* it would be for the best, I really don't want to have to start throwing banhammers around over Christmas.


*digging... there's an old saying "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_holes.

Could also be construed as "having a dig" at someone... Either way, it stops or the person digging will find they can no longet post in this thread - and perhaps not on the forum as a whole for a while.
 
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Cheers guys. Something for me to look into when I get my external drive sorted...

Now. My next question for this... Duplicate filenames... When I first started shooting I never kept the file sequences running so I may have two or 3 0001 files. (from different memory cards etc... Now I want to rename these so all 3 unique images are kept...
And I also have some stuff which has been double backed up. And. Obviously I don't need 3 images. Is there any software which I can use to automatically sort these? (rename unique images with the same file name) and remove duplicated images?

Would save me an awful lot of legwork and manual renaming / deleting if someone has the answer for this.

Thanks.
 
AndyG123 said:
Cheers guys. Something for me to look into when I get my external drive sorted...

Now. My next question for this... Duplicate filenames... When I first started shooting I never kept the file sequences running so I may have two or 3 0001 files. (from different memory cards etc... Now I want to rename these so all 3 unique images are kept...
And I also have some stuff which has been double backed up. And. Obviously I don't need 3 images. Is there any software which I can use to automatically sort these? (rename unique images with the same file name) and remove duplicated images?
Would save me an awful lot of legwork and manual renaming / deleting if someone has the answer for this.
Thanks.
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Apologies, if you've only just started using Lightroom, it may be a bit of a struggle to understand some of the procedures in the attached article. As I've said earlier, it is well worthwhile to persevere to get a firm grip on understanding LR's import procedures.
Lightroom itself is not so good at differentiating between what is a duplicate and what are different images using the same file name. LR has no feature to recognize duplicates if they have a different file names, as LR cannot recognize dupicates according to image content. I don't think there is any way to avoid having to use some type of plug-in similar to those mentioned in the article. No doubt there are others who can give you more specific examples from their own experience. Fortunately I no longer have these types of problems, as I've learned the benefits of using Lightroom's direct importing facilities.
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/clean-duplicate-photos/
Hope this points you in the right direction and there are quite probably more up-to-date plug-ins than those mentioned.
 
The problem I've got is I've got like say 20 folders all unnamed. Some with duplicate content . So I want every image from them in one folder called 2017. With no subfolders. So i know exactly where everything is from that year without thinking what folder is it in.
 
Quite a few folk in this thread confusing a backup with a copy.

Should your house/office/studio go on fire and get totally demolished would you still have all your images?
 
Byker28i said:
Import by date and Lightroom will put them side by side?
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This.[emoji651] [emoji651] [emoji651]

Import the parent folder, I think you call it 2017.
LR can order them by date.
This will allow you to see duplicate images.
Mark then with X and then delete.

Hope NG forward, in your 2018 folder, consider the options offered and see which one works for you. Importing via LR into the 2018 folder may b a vast improvement and should allow more simple catalogue of files.
 
AndyG123 said:
The problem I've got is I've got like say 20 folders all unnamed. Some with duplicate content . So I want every image from them in one folder called 2017. With no subfolders. So i know exactly where everything is from that year without thinking what folder is it in.
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It's probably possible to have a 'year' folder with no subfolders but that would potentially be huge by the end of the year (depends on how many images you take per year). You could keyword all imports with the year they were taken so it's easier to search for all images taken in a certain year. Another option after editing is to create a collection where you can have all of that year's images in. You can also have an image in several collections (say 2017, family and holidays). Don't forget Lightroom doesn't apply any changes to the RAW files, it knows where the RAWs are stored and although it looks like you are editing the RAW you don't touch it. RAW storage on the hard drive and organisation of edited images can be two different things in Lightroom, and both managed in different ways. Key wording from the very start is definitely a habit to get into. I wish I had better key wording, after 6 years and about 20,000 images it's going to be a huge task to sort it out but something I'm going to have to tackle at some point.
 
Currently keep all my images on memory card, but take copies to hard drive after shooting. I've recently started taking back ups again (of everything) to external (then deleting those off card, but its not regular). I have folders on my laptop with dates and rough names, but I struggle to find images and later find things I forgot I photographed!

I tend to back up everything, then never look at it again, I then end up with 2 or 3 copies, at least, in different places and wasted space on external drives.

Had previously thought cloud was too expensive, but may have to have a look at the options.
 
AndyG123 said:
Cheers guys. Something for me to look into when I get my external drive sorted...

Now. My next question for this... Duplicate filenames... When I first started shooting I never kept the file sequences running so I may have two or 3 0001 files. (from different memory cards etc... Now I want to rename these so all 3 unique images are kept...
And I also have some stuff which has been double backed up. And. Obviously I don't need 3 images. Is there any software which I can use to automatically sort these? (rename unique images with the same file name) and remove duplicated images?

Would save me an awful lot of legwork and manual renaming / deleting if someone has the answer for this.

Thanks.
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Digikam can do this sort of thing well. It is a powerful and comprehensive photo management software, that can search for identical images. Even if they are of different resolutions or one has been cropped or enhanced. It can even do face recognition or perform a search based on a sketch you draw.
Digikam does a lot of other essential things needed for photo management. And is free and open source. Digikam.org.
 
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Mine are currently stored on a iMac internal HDD in Year, Month, Day folders, duplicated to a 3TB WD MyCloud NAS and additional copies on a couple of portable HDD (one of which ha sbecome very slow so will be replaced very soon). Don't have any off site storage in play other than some images on Photobucket (though not put anything on there since the revised subscription model was introduced. If my house burned down, I'd have more things to be concerned about than losing my photos.

Since going over the Mac, I'm using Lightroom to manage the import process, though that can be a bit slow. Prior to that I was using Windows and Canon's ImageBrowser software to import image files.

I've recently started to make better use of Lightroom's file management and metadata functions, having only really used it for adjustments and processing in the past.
 
How does lightroom do this in regards to windows srltorage? Does it put then all in the right folders aswel within their sorted order so I could duplicate it to a hard drive?
 
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