importing and storing images and edits

[CatherineA]

Since photography is a relatively recent interest of mine I have had no problem importing my images onto my internal hard drive and using one external hard drive to back up all of my computer's contents including the photos. I am about to run out of space though and need to switch to another destination for importing and now also seems a good time to re-consider how to back up my photos and edits.

I have been doing a lot of reading but I would also appreciate hearing how other people have chosen to handle this. There are SSD and mechanical drives and RAID and the cloud and blue ray discs, and the differences in price are extreme.

Thank you for sharing any of your thoughts and practices!

[Geoff F]

No 'one size fits all circumstances' answer to this problem.

I usually keep one year of data in my computer hard drive and regularly back up everything on to a 1TB external drive. Plus a duplicate which gets updated every month, sometimes more regularly, which is stored in a different location. Actually my garden shed proves sufficient because it is dry and the drive is stored inside a waterproof bag.

The Raw files get transferred to the external drive daily, or once I have finished editing each Raw folder. And at the end of each year I have a clean up of anything which won't be regularly required and send that to the external drives.

With the large size of modern photo images, particularly when stored in formats like Tiff or Psd, I get rather critical of my work and delete a lot of stuff which I regard as being inferior quality in order to save on space.

When you are using 2 or more external drives for storage you need to keep some sort of record of what is on each drive. Doing it by subject or date can be a good idea; or simply make a list using the traditional method of paper and pen.

Some people upload their data to internet cloud storage but because of the size of my images and the 'super snail' broadband speeds where I live, that option never worked for me.

[pschlute]

Agree with Geoff here, there is no one correct answer.

SSD drives access programs and data very quickly. But are expensive compared to traditional hard drives. SSD drives at present are best used for the computer OS and program instillation. Things like picture files and documents are best stored on a traditional hard drive.

For example I have a win10 machine with a 220 GB SSD and a 2TB traditional hard drive. My OS and programs are on the SSD and all files are on the other drives which I have partitioned for general data and for photo files. I backup my Lightroom library once a month to a seperate HD which is permanently connected to the computer, and backup my photos to the same drive. As added security I backup everything to another external drive every six months which is kept elsewhere.

The one thing i would advise you to do in addition to establishing a good backup regime is to be ruthless with your editing protocol. After a shoot I delete about 80% of my pictures either because they are techinically imperfect or because they are average. The ones I keep will be the raw images converted to TIFF and worked on in Photoshop and saved as TIFF and various jpeg sizes for uploading to the web or for sending to a printer.

There is nothing more useless than hanging on to picture files that have no merit, "just in case".

[DanK]

I agree with Peter and Geoff.

I have a 500 GB SSD and a 2 TB physical drive. All of my photos are on the physical drive, but my photo software is on the SSD. I have two backups: a local backup, which is a synchronization to an external drive, and a cloud-based true backup. I don't bother with RAID. It's overkill, IMHO. It's true that a catastrophic failure would cost me whatever I am working on at the moment, but I always have up to the previous session backed up.

This will work fine for some time. My tentative plan for what to do when I run out of room is to put a copy of the LR catalog, etc., and the image files on two external drives. One will live here, and one will live offsite. I'll then start a new catalog, repeating my current strategy. That way, if I need to access the older images, I'll have one copy here.

What makes this practical is dirt-cheap storage. you can get 2 TB external drives for well under $100, and the price continually drops. I find that with a reasonable amount of culling of garbage, 2 TB lasts years.

[Manfred M]

I have multiple backups of my files as any device will eventually fail.

SSD drives are fast and expensive and are best used for software and for working files. I use a huge (and expensive) 12 TB drive on my main computer as my primary repository. I use two RAID type drives as my backups; these are located on my home network and reside in different parts of my house. Short of a catastrophic fire, I have good backup. I am also looking at an online solution as an alternative.

BluRay is not a recommended solution as these disks can go bad quite quickly.

[CatherineA]

Thank you very much Geoff, Peter, Dan and Manfred! It really is helpful to hear what you do and why. I think I was about to throw away money on an unnecessarily expensive route - unnecessary at least for my purposes.

And I do need to be stricter when culling. (For example all those egrets recently captured from the backside... but I had such perfect focus and what if they somehow came in useful if I wanted a triptych of three surreal composites? In my mind it is quite amusing. )

[Geoff F]

One thing to consider when culling files is would they be of interest to someone in 50 years time. Street scenes and some landscapes can be of historical interest; eventually.

Recently, when producing a DVD for my local history society we had people talking about working in or regularly visiting certain local shops, which disappeared long ago, but we can't find any photos of those buildings to accompany the audio recordings.

[CatherineA]

One thing to consider when culling files is would they be of interest to someone in 50 years time. Street scenes and some landscapes can be of historical interest; eventually.

That's a very good point Geoff. I was thinking only of the quality of the image itself as the criterion to use. Ottawa has so many photographers that I'm not sure what role I would play with recording history but situations may arise.

[Tri Danimal]

Thanks for asking this question. I have been thinking about this for a while. I don't really delete my old files.

[pschlute]

Thanks for asking this question. I have been thinking about this for a while. I don't really delete my old files,=.

I recently went through a large amount of old film prints. Maybe I am just ruthless but I don't see the point in keeping poorly focussed/framed/exposed shots. The dustbin was heaving !

[george013]

Since photography is a relatively recent interest of mine I have had no problem importing my images onto my internal hard drive and using one external hard drive to back up all of my computer's contents including the photos. I am about to run out of space though and need to switch to another destination for importing and now also seems a good time to re-consider how to back up my photos and edits.

I have been doing a lot of reading but I would also appreciate hearing how other people have chosen to handle this. There are SSD and mechanical drives and RAID and the cloud and blue ray discs, and the differences in price are extreme.

Thank you for sharing any of your thoughts and practices!

I don't know if you've a pc or a laptop. If you've a pc then there will be probably space for another internal drive(s).
As mentioned here before ssd is ok when there's a lot of read\write actions. For storage you don't need it.
If you want to compare the prices of different subjects you could calculate the price in dollars/MB.

George

[William W]

. . . Thank you for sharing any of your thoughts and practices!

A few comments have mentioned that one size does not fit all. I agree. My approach, (since about 1980) has been based upon 'fit for purpose'.

In a nutshell, way back - I needed to keep all negatives for a long time: that was based upon our business model, so we devised a method of cataloging and storing negatives. Around 2008 my head was imploding about these storage issue we had, so we devised a method of destroying many negatives and digitizing the remainder.

However when (the business) cut over to digital in 2004, we retained a similar (not the same) business model that we used with film and that required us to store the original digital files (and the final edit). So we bought a lot of storage gear and had off site back up and etc... that was 'fit for purpose'

Move to 2014 and I had all but removed myself totally from the responsibility of storing a truckload of digital files - however I had my personal photos, a collection of various media spanning about 50 years, and for simplicity those files were stored in the same manner: every original negative or raw file and every final edit, including different versions of the final edit for some shots, all precisely cataloged and referenced.

Around 2016 my head started to implode, again - all these 'personal images' are stored and I've (re)used that storage how may times? What's my Return on Investment - about 0%.

It might sound silly using "ROI" - but seriously, it's not all about another $300 for the big storage drive my time is really valuable and although it doesn't take that long a period of time to store stuff, (although it does take time scanning negs and reversals) it is about the usefulness of what I do with my time.

So, I find it much easier now that I have shed my original 1980 business model (needing to keep every negative/file for ever) and applied a different way of thinking to my photography:

> I shoot stuff that I am interested in
> usually that same day I choose if I want to keep any worthwhile for display (we have a few display monitors in our home)
> I chose if I want to keep any for 'other reasons' e.g. the family at a birthday party
> I post produce the ones for monitor display and store those raw and the final edit in my hard drive - and in the back up HD
> I post produce the 'other reasons' and send file copies to friends family etc and store the files which have relevance for ME
> when I make a cracker photo that is "worth printing" I spend time making it beautiful

I dump everything else.

WW

[Tri Danimal]

I recently went through a large number of old film prints. Maybe I am just ruthless but I don't see the point in keeping poorly focussed/framed/exposed shots. The dustbin was heaving !

I primarily shoot astrophotography. I just got a new mount that will allow me to track objects across the sky, multiple nights in a row. MANY MANY MANY of the objects I am trying to capture look to require any where from 3-6 hours of data aquisition; objects like the great orion, flame, and horse head nebulas to name a few. The images get stacked to bring out the faint details in the nebulas, and the more images you have to stack the better the final result is. So that is my issue, should I keep the raw data around to try to get better final images in later years of should I get rid of it after each attempt?