How Do You Store Your Photographs?

AdrianW1963

AdrianW1963

Well-Known Member
5+ year member
After having many years of storing my images on disc's I tried to reload some old disc's from 2008 and found that some of the images could not be uploaded to my laptop so I could rename the images by this I mean I have taken on the long hard process of dating and renaming all of my images by this I mean I am now putting species name location taken and date/year so I have invested in a external hard drive 6tb memory I have 1,481 disc's to do.

I was wondering how or what you store your images on?
 
Yeah, CDs and DVDs are not 100% reliable - I would not have that as your only copy of images. They are easily scratched or damaged and you also get what's called "disc rot" where the material used in the disc to hold the data starts to degrade over time, thus rendering it unreadable by the drive.

External hard drives can be good - but they will also eventually fail, as will any electro-mechanical device. You should keep multiple copies of things you don't want to lose.

I have all my photos on a 2nd hard drive in my computer - takes about 3TB all up, but that includes quite a bit of video as well. I back this up to a file server I have in my office (you could back it up to any other computer you have, or use multiple external drives) and I also back it up using a cloud backup service.

I currently use CrashPlan, but they are discontinuing their personal backup service next year so I'd recommend BackBlaze now ... US$5 per month for unlimited cloud backup.

Be aware that BackBlaze has an annoying thing where you can backup files on an external hard drive, but if you don't plug that drive in at least once a month, the files will be deleted from their servers after 30 days - it's the one thing they get the most complaints about.

Other cloud alternatives include Carbonite and iDrive, but they all have their quirks.
 
@Simon Hampel - are those little portable hard-drives better than the big desktop external hard-drives, or are they pretty much the same?

I stored all my RAW files on one of the latter variety, which I was using as a backup, and it crashed on me a few of months ago. And on Christmas Island there's no specialists I can take it to in order to recover the data so I'm now using one of those tiny external hard-drives (as that's all I had).

:p

Hix
 
I have two matching external hard drives. If one fails, I have the other one and will immediately buy a replacement to copy them to. I also have some images on a gold plated DVD which is supposedly reliable for over a century.
 
My photo collection has recently grown (due to a new camera with larger image sizes). I currently have it saved on 2 large external hard drives (at my home) and I back up once or twice a year on another external hard drive kept in my parent's safety deposit box. It may be excessive but it saves from the chance of electrocution, fire, or theft. I've never had an external hard drive fail on me but I'm probably due for a death soon.
 
For a couple of years, I was juggling with a few small external drives, then bought a 3TB which I now only use for zoo photos. Having bought a better monitor recently, I can now see how rubbish a lot of my photos are, so they are undergoing a big cull :D I might buy another 3TB drive as back up, depending on how many survive as.
 
I'm currently transferring photos to a smaller drive, deleting the relatively low number of non mammals on the new one as I go. Also, each folder is also being purged of duplicates as I go (caused by burst firing and just boredom at the time "I might as well take another one of the tiger staring at me, as there is nothing else happening") shots suffering bad focusing and poor composition. I've often joked that only about 1 in 5 of my photos is actually worth keeping, but that is how it is working out. My 250GB folder for Chester, is only around 50 on the purged drive. Hamerton and Whipsnade will more than likely see bigger reductions.
 
I have the same approach as Arizona Docent. External hard drive, backed up with another. I access them both regularly and when one fails - and it has - I buy another, plug in and carry on.

I should keep another somewhere else. I'd actually be more worried about burglary/theft than other disasters such as fire.
 
After looking at what other people do for storage of photographs I have purchased 2 extra external hard drives and are now busy transferring my so far done (248) of my 1,481 collection one will be placed with my niece and updated at the end of every year in the future.

I was wondering when you have downloaded your photographs to your computer/laptop from your visits to captive collections do you then sort them out into folders under the name of the collection with sub folders for Bird, Mammals, Reptiles ect,ect or do you just store them under the collections name and do you date them all?.

I do the sub folder thing as it saves me looking through all the photographs to get what I want
 
A few thoughts

1) There are two kinds of hard-drive in the world. Those that have failed and those which are about to fail.
Which is to say that internal or external they are never going to be 100% reliable. As such I'd advocate keeping backups - the type of which suits your nature of work and income.
You can go with a RAID setup which spreads out the data over several drives; you can use internal or external (although portable drives I'd wager are possibly less resilient than external drives).

2) You might consider off-site back up as well. A cloud storage is not impossible for the average person now; though of course any cloud storage comes with its own risks if the company hosting dies.

3) Printing can also be another good way to generate another backup that isn't reliant on the vagaries of digital data storage; though good quality printing is a skill in its own right (even if you're just preparing files to be printed by a printing firm).

4) As for organisation I keep mine simple. A folder for every year; a folder within that for every day/key event and then within that a folder for "edited/kept" versions.
Of course if your producing way more you might well use a more complex sorting system. If you're doing a huge scale management you might look at software like Adobe Lightroom which has catalogue systems that let you apply key word searching; meta data editing and processing of the photos.
Adrian if you're not already I'd look at Lightroom as it might be a big help in sorting and finding your photos.


Note lightroom can sort folders and files as well ;or you can leave those as they are and let lightroom simply run its own internal catalogues so that your photos are still on the drive where you want them ;but lightroom lets you more easily search and sort.
Eg you could use lightroom to search for all photos from a particular zoo or of a particular species/year etc...
 
Thank you (Overread) for the information and help will try and look into one or two of your idea's
 
I've just completed a blitz on my main storage for a project, cutting almost 2TB of RAW files down to less than 300MB on a separate portable drive (I'll back up the main device just in case).

As for organising, I have been simply creating main folders for individual Zoos/parks, with sub-folders for months where visited. In the past, I have messes about with folders for different species etc, but have ended up deleting a few collections in the confusion.
 
AdrianW1963 said:
I was wondering when you have downloaded your photographs to your computer/laptop from your visits to captive collections do you then sort them out into folders under the name of the collection with sub folders for Bird, Mammals, Reptiles ect,ect or do you just store them under the collections name and do you date them all?.
Click to expand...

Mine are sorted into the name of the collection, and if I've visited more than once then the year I visited, or the year and month if more than one visit that year. The only exception is Taronga Zoo where I have more than 2800 images all in the one folder because it is easier to look for what I want in the one folder than going through 50 or 60 folders looking for an image. I don't further subfolder into groups.

All my images are dated with the month and year taken, but the exact date and time is recorded in the EXIF. Scanned photos/slides have the correct date if known (or an approximate date otherwise) added to the EXIF.

:p

Hix
 
I store mine locally on my home networked main desktop, 2 different portable hard drives (1 copy on each) and, a set of DVDs (updated and re-burnt 2x a year. 1 portable hard drive and the DVDs are stored in the bank safety deposit box.

As far organizing, Lightroom and other programs allows you to tag each photo with keywords which makes searching much easier. Ex: A photo of a tiger at XYZ Zoo on a certain date could be tagged with each of those parameters and be found under a search for any one of them or combination of them. Lightroom is first and foremost a photo database manager with a photo editor built in.
 
I am only just starting out but this is my plan. I have a dedicated 1TB drive labelled [Zootography], on that drive are folders for countries, for example [Belgium], within which are folders for zoos, for example [Berlin Zoo]. Finally in each zoo folder there are folders with the date of each visit in the format [2018/02/06]. Captures will be saved by my camera as both RAW files and JPGs but these will be kept in the one folder.

In my country folders I do not have the United Kingdom, they will be Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, Jersey and England. Like in Rugby Union, the whole of Ireland will be one entity,

As memory cards are the only media I have not lost data from in the last 20 years these will be kept as a back-up, a different card for each zoo. My camera is reporting that a 16GB card will store 208 captures (as both highest quality RAW and JPG) but experience shows this to be more like 250.
 
I have had 3 SD Cards fail on me. One was only six months old and SanDisc sent me a replacement free of charge. The other I had used extensively for a few years.

:p

Hix
 
AdrianW1963 said:
After having many years of storing my images on disc's I tried to reload some old disc's from 2008 and found that some of the images could not be uploaded to my laptop so I could rename the images by this I mean I have taken on the long hard process of dating and renaming all of my images by this I mean I am now putting species name location taken and date/year so I have invested in a external hard drive 6tb memory I have 1,481 disc's to do.

I was wondering how or what you store your images on?
Click to expand...
I lost many early camcorder films that I put on to DVDs, and now always keep the original films, as well as making a DVD. I do the same for my still photos.
 
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