I am just getting into digitl photography and I keep finding myself lost when it comes to how I should store and organize all of my photos. I love to take my Canon Rebel XTi pretty much everywhere I go, including nightlife. So I usually end up with at least 60 shots from any given night out (and that's after narrowing it down to only what I like). I also take a lot of city/urban shots that I end up playing with in photoshop. My question is, does anyone have any software recommendations for storing and viewing photos. I'm currently using iphoto on my mac. Also, any advice for storing and organizing raw vs. modified image files?
My standard recommendation on this question is to read Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers". As far as I know, this is still the book on the subject.
Agreed. While I don't care for the Adobe-centric viewpoint, there's a lot of good ideas in there. Take a look at the DAM software he mentions, I cannot suggest my own favorite--it's Windows only. And thank you for specifying the OS in question right off.
For storage, I suggest external or removable hard drives over burned optical media. There's been many discussions about this here, so a search ought to turn up plenty of information to mull over.
I have learned the bitter lesson that optical disc degrade to unreadable in a few years. Use hard drives.
For media storage I keep it simple: well organized folders on mac OS X's extended/journalled. That way you're not locked in. The right way to do search is to store keywords in file meta-data, again to avoid lock-in. ZFS is coming to mac. Read up about access control metadata on mac. It's very powerful.
As far as back-ups go, I have the original files on one internal HD on my computer, my working image files on another external HD, I burn each event to it's own CD, and occasionally burn DVD's to back up the hard drives.
kidwitdamic wrote:
I am just getting into digitl photography and I keep finding myself lost when it comes to how I should store and organize all of my photos. I love to take my Canon Rebel XTi pretty much everywhere I go, including nightlife. So I usually end up with at least 60 shots from any given night out (and that's after narrowing it down to only what I like). I also take a lot of city/urban shots that I end up playing with in photoshop. My question is, does anyone have any software recommendations for storing and viewing photos. I'm currently using iphoto on my mac. Also, any advice for storing and organizing raw vs. modified image files?
I dropped iphoto a long time ago when it couldn't handle more than a few images at a time. I have heard reports that it is much better now, and if it works for you, then it should be fine.
What do you do now, and what would more would you like from your software/workflow?
I would highly suggest Adobe Lightroom, but only if you learn how to properly organize your folder architecture behind it. I wrote a very lengthy and detailed post here:
