How To Archive...

specialman

specialman

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8,193
Name
Pat MacInnes
Edit My Images
Yes
Right,

In a bid to get myself more organised, I've just picked up a bargain Lacie 160GB D2 drive for £25 off ebay.

Anyway, my old hard drive is a bit of a mess, with folders named for each shoot but finished TIFF and original RAWs and JPEGs spread all over the shop.

I'm wondering just how best it is to archive?

I currently have these folders set up:

* Albums containing the originals (.JPEG or RAW, the latter with the .xmp files)

* Folders with all my finished/edited .TIFFs in from each shoot

* A folder with all print-ready TIFFs that I can use when I get orders through my site (these are specific dimensions)


How does everyone else archive? I know where most things are after a bit of searching but it's not a fluent system by any means. Is there an easier way?

I'm using CS2 so should I be using Imageready/Bridge to sort things (how?) or manually label and sort?

Also, I've never paid attention to attaching copyright info to the shots; is there a system within CS2 for doing this with a droplet-style action?

I'm shooting an increasing number of RAW (.NEF from a Nikon D200) shots these days so should I be keeping the .xmp files created when I edit in Photoshop CS2 alongside the originals, or putting them into a seperate folder so when viewing RAW images int he folder, I'm not having to bypass eevery other files as I scroll down? Will placing the .xmp files elsewhere 'fool' the computer if I happen to want to re-edit the original RAW file?

Just interested to see what types of systems people use.
 
Mine is a mess, images everywhere, all over my desktop, in random folders etc, I've still got about 800 on my camera!

Today I brought my spare PC into my office, I'm going to format it and use it as my image server.

Since I'm a software engineer I may even write an app to store them accordingly for me....... if I ever get organised enough to do it :LOL:
 
Know what you mean BOM - I'm currently int he process of scanning all my images from university, can't remember for the life of me what's what so I'm gonna scan EVERYTHING (about 2000+ 35mm, 6x4 and 5x4 negs and trannies). Think this is gonna be a major task and I can see another HD being purchased before the week is out :)
 
I'm toying with buying a terrabyte drive, they are getting so cheap now. But then I worry about having so many images on one disk, should I burn them to CD for safety, or buy two drives and double back-up?
 
2000+ images, your gonna need beer and DVDs to keep you going (y)
 
:LOL: I know what you mean,I've taken images I love, then looked at them only months later and wondered what the hell I was up to!

Anyway, lets hope someone can fix our archiving problems :)
 
It's not an easy question to answer and it's one of those things which is 'each to their own' but this is what i do:

Everything copies off the camera and into a folder called "WIP" (Work In Progress). The folder names in WIP are the date and a reminder of the area or subject I was shooting, e.g. "2008_0422_london_night"

All the low-reses i process (from all shoots) go into a comunal "lowres" folder (with appropriate names e.g. "2008_0422_pic01"). Sometimes shoots will have sub folders in the lowres folder if I've shot a lot of the same subject (e.g. Gregs Wedding).

When I've finished processing all the pics I'm going to from the shoot the RAW files are moved into a folder (e.g. 2008_0422_RAW) and burnt to a CD or DVD (as well as copied to another archving drive) and deleted from the main drive. The folder from WIP (containing just high res processed files) is then ready to be archived. My Archive folder is sorted like this:

Camera (e.g. "30D")
- Catergory (e.g. "Urban")
-- Dates and subject (e.g. "2008_0422_london_night")

I haven't gone into backup really only to say that I have 2 copies of the WIP folder on different internal drives, the main archive folders are mirrored on 2 drives (one internal and one external) and the RAWS I've finished with are on both DVD and the external drive. Once the external drive is full (nearly is) I'll archive that off (back of the cupboard) and get another.

Sounds complicated but isn't really ;)
 
Everyone has their own system. The one I used before Lightroom came along is to start with a root folder for the year in question. Then subsequent folders with the name of tv shoot. I would also rename the images with some indication of the subject matter.

Now I would use the same technique for finished results except these would go into a root folder called developed. This way I could easily track my images. In fact I still use this method with Lightroom. Adding keywords which you can do in bridge as well helps when you are trying to find specific types of image.

One additional point. BACK UP. Either on an additional drive or just DVD it is worth it if you value your images
 
I can't help you on archiving, but if you go to the effort of getting the whole lot archived on the LaCie, you'd be as well to have an identical copy of the archive on a second drive.
 
specialman said:
Right,

In a bid to get myself more organised, I've just picked up a bargain Lacie 160GB D2 drive for £25 off ebay.
Click to expand...

Just a note..

I got two 250GB Lacie drives a couple of years ago (shiny silver boxes designed by Porsche?)

Both of them failed. Data became corrupt. I tried to reformat but the drives would get to a certain point and just click without progressing the format.

I opened up the cases and found that the drives were Maxtor. Having previously had problems with Maxtor before I was pretty disgusted that these were hidden inside.

I have never had any problems with Seagate or Western digital drives. Hard disk does seem to be the simplest way of backing up data, but there is a lot to lose if they go wrong.... saying that though, writable discs can also self destruct - my girlfriend made a demo CD back in 1998 and now the discs (which have been stored in their cases out of sunlight have now corroded to the point where they won't play in any CD player).
 
Whatever make of whatever product, somebody will have had a problem. There was some guy on another forum strongly advising that nobody ever use CF cards again, just because he lost his holiday snaps.

For the record, my Maxtor and LaCie drives (the silver box is just styling, FA Porsche was the designer) have always been ok.

I'd never trust compact disks/DVDs. Personally I think you need at least two copies of your work, on two different drives in two different locations.
 
Ian T said:
Whatever make of whatever product, somebody will have had a problem. There was some guy on another forum strongly advising that nobody ever use CF cards again, just because he lost his holiday snaps.

For the record, my Maxtor and LaCie drives (the silver box is just styling, FA Porsche was the designer) have always been ok.

I'd never trust compact disks/DVDs. Personally I think you need at least two copies of your work, on two different drives in two different locations.
Click to expand...

You're right. I'll shut up now.
 
For any given shoot I create a folder called "shoot name - date", so London Zoo 23-04-08 for example.

In that folder I will download all the RAW's from my CF card into a folder called RAW's

As I process the images I will save the unflattened Photoshop files and final hi res TIFF in a folder called Hi Res. If I post a pic here or need a low res jpg for any reason these get saved in a folder called Low Res.

I find with this method I can quite easily refer back to any shot if I feel I want to further edit it, print it or whatever.

BUT ALWAYS BACK UP!

I back up regularly to an external hard drive and I keep an identical copy of that drive at work (y)
 
I just create a folder for the shoot (eg: Yardley Church) and there's 3 folders in that folder. So inside the Yardley Church folder there is "RAW", "FINALS" and "WEB". "RAW" is obviously the RAW files with the XMPs. "FINALS" is the finished article saved as JPEG ready for print or whatever and is narrowed down to ones I'd more than likely show people. The crap stuff I usually keep as RAW and don't bother moving to Finals and the reeeeal crap stuff gets deleted unless its so bad its actually funny so I keep it... just because... well, y'know. As for "WEB", I use the Automated Web Gallery in Photoshop to create a gallery from the pictures in the Finals folder and "WEB" is the files to and for the gallery. So its just an easy convenient way to go through or show anybody the best of that folder with loading up the individual full sized images.

Obviously, that's on a good day. A bad day is me putting them into just the one folder and not sorting anything out. I've got a stack of generic family, garden and just general shaps that are in various folders called "To Sort Out", "General", "SORT THESE". Anything from a specific day out, trip or location is usually sorted out pretty quickly though.
 
redeyshev, have had the 80gb Porshe drives (the little ones) fail on me before - am on my third in 18 months. However, they travel around and aren't really made for that.

The big D2 drives are supposed to be ultra-reliable. Will be investing in another as a secondary back-up that will back-up the main HD every week. Better safe than sorry.
 
Has anyone tried any Web storage?
 
All my new photo's are downloaded into a folder called 'awaiting folder'. Sometimes I have the time there and then to sort them but more often than not they'll sit there for a few weeks before I get time to sort/tag/process/delete etc.

I only shoot in jpeg, cos I don't have a clue what to do with RAWs. I'm also afraid of the amount of space they would take up on the HD.
 
I understand the need for backups and keep a complete copy of all my files on another hard drive (in my server) and then that gets copied to an external hard drive that is powered off most of the time.

The files are in all different formats RAW(NEF), JPG, TIFFS, PSD etc.

For long term storage, what do you archive the files as ? File formats are always changing so I guess in 10 years time you may not get something that can read it... What format is likely to endure ?
Also use "archive quality" DVDs ?
 
-RV- said:
For long term storage, what do you archive the files as ? File formats are always changing so I guess in 10 years time you may not get something that can read it... What format is likely to endure ?
Also use "archive quality" DVDs ?
Click to expand...

As far as formats are concerned, I would think jpeg will still be around for a while unless Microsofts new image format has a quick take up. For RAW shooting you could convert to Adobe's DNG but I would suspect the native camera manufacturer's format will be supported for years to come

We've seen floppy go, CD are replaced by DVD's ( still readable), but we now have Blueray. One thing that seems constant are hard drives. Increasing capacity makes them a good option for the foreseeable solution.

OK we have Solid State Drives (SSD) appearing on the market. These claim to be more stable than conventional drives, but their capacity is limited, and are expensive. For the next few years I'm opting for Hard Drives, with a possibility of additional backups on Blueray disks, rather than DVD
 
As for file types I think DNG is the way to go, I wouldn't trust anything that isn't open, look at Microsoft's music store that they have shut meaning that you can't reauthorise a new computer.

I'm using Mozy to cover the "house burning down and all my onsite back ups failing" situation, the intial back up takes ages, but incremental ones aren't too bad...
 
I use Carbonite http://www.carbonite.com/ as my hard disk backup. (If anyone is interested PM me your email address, if I refer someone I get free months and so do they).

However, as good as this is, it's only a backup, it will only backup your internal drives and it is no use for archiving.

Archiving is an area that I must get around to sorting, (I keep putting additional drives in my PC).

I think what I would really like is a NAS drive something like http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/161736/netgear-readynas-nv.html
but I can't really justify one at the moment (You can stick up to 4TB of drives in it, but then, how do you back those up ?)
 
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