Describe your photo storage setup

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Deleted member 68110

Deleted member 68110

Hi there - I'd be really grateful to anyone who can describe their photo storage and organisation set up to me.

I have never really cracked it, and our family photos are mainly dumped on a NAS I'm definitely not using to its full potential.

They are in some semblance of order, but I only access them from a HTPC that's attached and when I do it's a clunky experience of going into files mainly with numbers for names, and sometimes tilting my head to look at pictures that haven't auto-rotated.

I want to set up a system that will provide robust back-up, offers easy and automated importing, and which allows me to find and view our photos more readily.

So far, I'm leaning towards reading up on the NAS properly, buying a proper desktop for interacting with it, and using Google Photos to do the organising.

I'm just reading through this article which seems well thought out:-

http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-photographers-part-2/

Thanks a lot for any help.
 
I've a shared folder on the network, wife and I dump our photos into there by year and month.

It can be accessed with explorer but it's a pain. She uses Picassa on her laptop to view them as she can edit and view. Due to running my own photography business I use explorer or lightroom depending on which photos I want to view/edit.

They are set to back up automatically to google photos using their unlimited storage space. Although I don't feel the backup does a decent job, it's slow, never really seems to work so I do it all manually as well. It struggled from the start due to the fact that there was 23,000 photos to upload. It had a brain fart and died on me many times. :D
 
I shoot RAW mostly and keep both the original RAW and a converted JPEG. I also keep an extra copy of my best shots (which I may or may not post process), in their own sub folder so I don't have to hunt them down.

I try to organise everything into folders named after the event / location or date. Then I keep three copies of each shot, on two different internal HDDs and one external HDD backup. I also upload my best shots to my online gallery.

This approach works for me because my photo library only runs into hundreds of GB and not several TB. If it was larger I might need to do things differently.

Personally I feel that JPEG is more reliable long-term storage format than RAW, because so many billions of photos have been taken as JPEGs this format will be supported long into the future. RAW on the other hand is a proprietary format that differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, camera to camera. It's possible that suitable RAW converters won't always be available. Should anyone want to view my photos in the future then it'll likely be the JPEG they choose.

Whatever you do, don't put all your eggs in one basket (either mechanical or cloud). And be prepared to move your archive from one storage format to another if it gets outdated.

And if your plan is for future generations to enjoy your photos, make it as easy as possible for them, they won't thank you if you do the equivalent of shooting in slide film or don't at least name your files / folders so that they have some clue what they are looking at.
 
Cern said:
Personally I feel that JPEG is more reliable long-term storage format than RAW, because so many billions of photos have been taken as JPEGs this format will be supported long into the future. RAW on the other hand is a proprietary format that differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, camera to camera. It's possible that suitable RAW converters won't always be available. Should anyone want to view my photos in the future then it'll likely be the JPEG they choose.
Click to expand...

You're right JPEG is widely used but it's not the best choice for archiving.

For RAW, you're better converting to DNG, which is at least an open standard. The chances of that being unusable in a few decades are low I think.

If not that then PNG or TIFF are better than JPEG because at least they're lossless.
 
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joeyjojo said:
You're right JPEG is widely used but it's not the best choice for archiving.

For RAW, you're better converting to DNG, which is at least an open standard. The chances of that being unusable in a few decades are low I think.

If not that then PNG or TIFF are better than JPEG because at least they're lossless.
Click to expand...

The main problem with TIFF for image archiving is it creates enormous files, many times the size of a lossless PNG.

I agree that PNG is the way to go if lossless is important to you. But this still creates rather large files which can inflate an archive massively. If you're also storing the RAW it may not be so necessary to store a lossless conversion too.

JPEG is not as bad as people make out, at least not at the maximum quality end of the scale. For most people, a 99% quality (Photoshop quality 11) JPEG will not be discernibly different to a lossless image and will save a heap of storage space. And there's no discernible difference between 99% and 100% (Photoshop quality 11 and 12) either, other than wasting space.

As for DNG, this doesn't seem to be catching on as much as Adobe would like and it's future doesn't seem that assured. It's probably going to stay around though, but unlikely to be any more reliable than any another RAW format (looking a long way into the future).

Still, why worry. I doubt future generations will want to view most of the output of our current narcissistic selfie culture anyway.
 
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