How to organise - Work, archive, backups

[Leo Noordhuizen]

Hello photoenthousiasts,

I am an amateur photographer using a Canon 40D and a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10. With the Canon I use RAW.

I have a problem or challenge as some would say. I hope some of you can advise me.

I have a large collection of images, either taken digitally, or as a result of my attempts to scan my collection of slides and negatives.

The question is how to store, archive and backup.

Archiving is not the biggest challenge. I can use (and have used) archive-quality DVDs and or a USB Disk.

Lately I purchased a 320 Gbyte 2.5 inch drive, which is easily stored in a safe place and can hold many images.

But the more recent images and the newly created ones are the challenge.

For example how to organise them. Currently I use a date-based directory tree like: /YYYY/YYYYMM/YYYYMMDD/<image>.

I keep the RAW images as I always want to be able to go back to them. 

Now where do I put processed images... In the same directory as the original images, or should I create 2 separate trees, one only for the originals and

one for all images created from those originals ?

Of course, because I store all images Date-based, I need a tool like DigiKam to add tags to the images in order to be able to find them back, based on subject or event.

Can any of you advise me or point me at a website for example where accepted methods are described ?

Thanks in advance.

Leo Noordhuizen

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[Francis Corvin]

Leo,

Presumably you've read this:
http://www.gerhard.fr/DAM/#sdfootnote1sym

Here is another article:
http://blog.juergenspecht.com/2009/how-i-organize-my-photo-library/

Methods are highly personal, depending on how you think about your
work. As long as you are comfortable with your filing system, that is
what matters.

Archiving and backing up give you a safety net if you make a mistake
or lose a disc, but how you organise your images within that is
really up to you.

Best regards,

Francis

At 2011-08-08 13:43, Leo Noordhuizen wrote:

>The question is how to store, archive and backup.
>(...)
>Can any of you advise me or point me at a website for example where
>accepted methods are described ?


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some ideas: never work on the single original of a digital photo.
Always make first a copy and use the copy.

The HDD are so cheap, nowaday, one can have *all* his data files
archives online. I used (among other things) two 2Tb HDD, one in my
desktop computer (second drive, not master one) and an other copy
stored elsewhere for security (raw disk, filled with a e-sata external
device).

This internal disk is most of the time read only, to prevent too easy
accidental erasure.

That's for the archives (not speaking of Blu-Ray disk supplementary
storage).

The collection of edited images is stored in folders by date, on the
format YYYYMMDD-some_eventual_detail

I noticed that the date something happen is the most evident way to
find it back when all the other system fail. the details are added to
have some visual data

20100906-wedding

make it easy to find that My daughter was married this day.

Some time a folder hold only one image, sometime 100, depending of the
event.

As often as I can I tag the images with digikam. It would be better to
have a comment for any, but I can't cope with this by lack of time.

I publish my images with *piwigo*, a very good gallery.

http://dodin.org/piwigo/index.php

I manage my self my uploading, because I want to have always the
original name of the image kept all the time. I just add a random
number in the name to prevent robot downloading lot of images (but lot
of images are passwd protected and can only be seen by my family).

some details if you happen to read french:
http://dodin.org/wiki/index.php?n=Photo.UsageDePiwigo

the only problem I don't resolve yet is the tagging. I (and others)
can tag photos both in digikam and piwigo. I would need a tool to sync
the two sets (the online part and the local part)

jdd

solving some file names problems:
http://dodin.org/wiki/index.php?n=Photo.NormaliserPourPiwigo


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[pshute]

I've found that storing by date doesn't work for everything.

For my bird photos, a date tends to be associated with a location or a trip, so a folder per day works well.

But for family photos, where there may be only a couple of random photos a day, if that, the rest of the family gets annoyed by them being in day folders. They don't understand or want to maintain tags, so the compromise is month folders for those.


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----- Original Message -----
From: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tue Aug 09 19:23:23 2011
Subject: Re: [Digikam-users] How to organise - Work, archive, backups

some ideas: never work on the single original of a digital photo.
Always make first a copy and use the copy.

The HDD are so cheap, nowaday, one can have *all* his data files
archives online. I used (among other things) two 2Tb HDD, one in my
desktop computer (second drive, not master one) and an other copy
stored elsewhere for security (raw disk, filled with a e-sata external
device).

This internal disk is most of the time read only, to prevent too easy
accidental erasure.

That's for the archives (not speaking of Blu-Ray disk supplementary
storage).

The collection of edited images is stored in folders by date, on the
format YYYYMMDD-some_eventual_detail

I noticed that the date something happen is the most evident way to
find it back when all the other system fail. the details are added to
have some visual data

20100906-wedding

make it easy to find that My daughter was married this day.

Some time a folder hold only one image, sometime 100, depending of the
event.

As often as I can I tag the images with digikam. It would be better to
have a comment for any, but I can't cope with this by lack of time.

I publish my images with *piwigo*, a very good gallery.

http://dodin.org/piwigo/index.php

I manage my self my uploading, because I want to have always the
original name of the image kept all the time. I just add a random
number in the name to prevent robot downloading lot of images (but lot
of images are passwd protected and can only be seen by my family).

some details if you happen to read french:
http://dodin.org/wiki/index.php?n=Photo.UsageDePiwigo

the only problem I don't resolve yet is the tagging. I (and others)
can tag photos both in digikam and piwigo. I would need a tool to sync
the two sets (the online part and the local part)

jdd

solving some file names problems:
http://dodin.org/wiki/index.php?n=Photo.NormaliserPourPiwigo


--
http://www.dodin.net
http://pizzanetti.fr
_______________________________________________
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