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Old January 19th 08, 08:44 PM posted to rec.photo.digital.slr-systems
Paul Furman
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Posts: 7,367
Default Organizing working images, archiving all images, what approachto take?

nano wrote:
I'm curious to know how others are dealing with long term storage of
digital images? I'll lay out some of the factors as I see them.

I'm using a 5D, shooting raw most of the time.
Primary software is Photoshop CS2 and Canon's Digital Photo Professional
I tend to use 4gb memory

There are a lot of large files to grapple with.
I want to keep all images 'forever'.
I need to find archived images.
I would like to view thumbnails of archived images.
There are many images that are very similiar.
Some of the images are chosen to process further.
The images that get attention end up as jpg or tiff.

My current system is approx like so:
Return from a shooting session with 2 4gb chips of images.
Copy each chip to separate folder on workstation's hdd.
Folder names reflect date and subject/location (2008-01-18 Death Valley)
Create dvd of each folder, label by date and subject/location.
Select some raw images to work on, move them to working dir.
I usually retain the numeric tag that the camera assigns to an image
through the processing stage of an image, until it gets published. This
helps me keep track of which raw image was the source.


I keep those numbers with all versions. An annotated web gallery makes
the best searchable thumbnail archive. I also make full pixel crops in
these galleries which is handy to see if I really had that shot sharp
enough or it was cropped, etc.

Tried using external hdds for storage but still questions re durability
etc, aside from cost.


A pair of external drives. Replace when one fails. DVDs are just too
much hassle.

I'm a programmer so I may be able to write something that could help
with whatever process I end up using over time, if there isn't already
such software. But I'm very interested to hear what others are doing
with image management.


You can extract low quality full size jpegs from all the raw files with
some command line programs, or even maybe a batch routine for irfanview
to make smaller thumbnails to keep all the archives on your workstation.