Organising, storing, backups and lightroom

[mctiny]

I jump straight to the point, or rather points....


I'm trying to organise/sort out around 300gb of photos, and was wondering what everyone else does to combat the ever growing amount of photos...


Currently I'm importing photos to one physical location and creating multiple catalogs depending on themes, work/personal - for example.

For the past two years I've been using a 60D and saving the jpg and CR2 files in the same locations, with a single folder backup/dump on an external drive.

Lightroom catalogs are stored separately as well.. and as you can see it's a mess

So I'm looking at cleaning up my act and going for a new scheme of saving, cataloging and backing up, my photos.

I just don't know the best way to approach this...

So, What do you guys do ?

 

[mctiny]

300GB doesn't sound a lot if they are RAWs? I handle 30k personal photos in a single catalogue, I wouldn't bother splitting them if I was you. Use metadata to tag your photos for searching purposes instead.

Some people keep jpgs, some discard the raws after a while. I just keep the RAWs and export to jpg when needed.

I keep my photos organised by year and month, then each month in folders named according to the shoot. One bit that lightroom could help with is searching by folder name... so need to keep that metatdata up to date.

That's pretty much what I do, import, organise by year / month / shoot name, keep RAWs, don't bother with JPEGs, backup the imports, backup the catalogue (redundanct copies on-site, offisite USB media and cloud) and away I go.

Organising things by year month help with backups, as I upload the monthly folder to Amazon every, well, month or so..

works for me.

Not all RAW, I have around 7 years of JPG's and 2+ of JPG+RAW's.

I was importing to "year/month/day" structure, which was working fine until I started shooting in RAW, as I wanted to keep RAW's seperate.

I'll keep the RAW files forever as some are work related - photo's I've sold, so I can keep them if I ever need to prove ownership at a later date.

 

[mctiny]

Working Drive - running in RAID 0 (mirror) 2TB.
Archive Drive - Running in RAID 5 - about 12TB.

Working drive is split into year/months/date.

Like this. Regular stuff is just a date, projects have names next to it for important identification.



When its done. It's convert to DNG then copied to the Drobo drive and cloud.

All RAWs, don't shoot Jpeg.

Any advantage with DNG's over CR2-RAW?

Also which cloud service are you using?

 

[mctiny]

Where are people storing their Lightroom Catalog's?