Digital Camera Archiving
Hopefully someone here who does a lot more professional photography than me can answer this.
In short, how do you archive your digital originals? Currently I upload them to a photo gallery which keeps original copies, then just back that up. However, I find that sometimes I may take ten or fifteen shots and only want to upload three. I’m thinking that it would be prudent to start saving all images, just in case some may come in handy down the line.
So, how do you do it? I’m thinking that maybe using a directory structure with all photos taken in a particular month dropped in there. Then all I need to remember is the month if I want to dig something up.
I’ve also been thinking about is captioning all photos and embedding this data in either a EXIF or IPTC header. The problem I’ll have is that I’ll need to somehow re-caption around 7000 images in order to bring things up to date. However, this would ensure that as long as the original image is kept intact, the caption won’t be lost.
So, what do you do?
I just save mine to disk then label. The other ones I like an want to share I put in my yahoo folders.
In what way? I’m talking about the kind of structure used to save originals…
Do you save all of your originals, considering them digital negatives? Some people seem to work on a per ‘roll’ basis, but I don’t know how they define a roll. I can’t do it each time I pull images off the cards, because sometimes I do two or three images, sometimes it’s two hundred. It all depends on the day…
just when I fill a card. If I have a bunch of random images I store them on my puter for a bit till I fill a folder then save them to disk. I dont really have a method to my maddness =)
My wife is a professional graphic artist, and her method tends to be just dumping everything onto a CD and writing a date on it. However, she doesn’t worry about adding information (such as captions to photographs) or going back and “re-archiving”. At least, not yet.
What I’d love is that if the Gallery software that I use had a way to automatically export all the captions into EXIF or IPTC of the files themselves. The software supports reading those in order to create the captions, so if from here on out I just added captions there and the software kept them sync’d, I’d be set for that.
As far as archiving goes, I think I’m going to end up just creating directories for a date range and tossing the files in there and making a point to never delete any. Then those files will just get rsync’d to a backup facility, be it another disk, a remote server, etc.
I’m currently looking into my options when it comes to copying my current 6000-some photos captions to metadata. Hmm…
Well, if you’re going to go that route for archiving, I’d highly recommend just using iPhoto since it will create the directory structure for you. There’s also a third-party plugin for Gallery as well as support for multiple libraries.
Judging by this thread, I’m guessing there won’t be direct EXIF/IPTC support anytime soon, but then iPhoto isn’t going away anytime soon either.
Eh, I personally find the Gallery plugin for iPhoto to be kinda lacking… I’m just hoping for some support to write headers when Gallery 2 hits release it can read them, so writing them from it’s own DB shouldn’t be too hard. I just can’t write it myself. :\
Perhaps I’ll find a way to parse the current berkley db or whatever files and just use jhead to write them all out. Hmm.
Check out preclick gold. http://www.preclick.com, I use it and alot of friends who are photopros use it as well. No hassle, no junk, just does what you want it to.
Hmm, thanks, but it’s also Windows-only, meaning it won’t do things cross-platform.
I think I’m looking more for ideas as to how people structure the data…
my “system” has just been to dump all of my images on to the second hard drive and every month or so i burn them to cd. more important projects i burn to cd immediately. i keep them all on spindles, takes up less space.
in the past i tried labeling every image but that is just too time consuming when i’ve shot a couple hundred images at a time. so i’ve gotten into the habit of labeling each folder with the date and a brief description of whatever it is. sometimes i’ll sub divide folders to be more specific. i keep all of the images too.
i generally have a pretty good memory for this kind of stuff so i haven’t had a hard time digging up an image when i want to find it again. i do label the cds with some clues as well.
i loved the old nikon software that came with the coolpix camera. i could open up each folder and see a “contact sheet.” unfortunately when i got the D70 i had to uninstall the old program to upgrade to their newest piece of crap which angers me greatly so i won’t use it.
i keep all of my film negs in books. i have four seperate categories: snapshots, landscape/nature, travel and “art.” i found that most stuff fit into those categories and i am now thinking about doing the same with the digital stuff but having the main directory be the year and then sub divide from there.
i hope i answered your question – i wasn’t sure if you were looking for an actual program or organizational philosopy.