Photo management

[edbarton]

I've been doing photography for about 9months or so now, using Lightroom to manage a bank of raw files that's about 6000 in number and 150gb in size. Now, with my macbook hard drive full up, it strikes me that this probably isn't the best way to archive things.

So basically I was wondering what you all use to archive, store, manage libraries this large. The RAW files are occasionally useful to me and I at least want jpgs of all of these images, and because of this the size will undoubtedly keep increasing so I guess I should be getting it off my hard drive, I'm just unsure about the best solution.

It'd be good to know what everybody here does, whether you offload everything to an external hard drive and work off that or whether you just work off your laptop and delete files. My work varies but all the photos are either taken professionally (in which case I feel I should keep them here in case and for portfolios) or personal, in which case I don't really want to get rid of them BUT, with a laptop it'll be annoying to have to carry around a big external hard drive, just to work with my photos. Also backing up concerns me, currently I have a good backup system with my macbook and a light external hard drive which stays wherever my macbook isn't but with larger bulkier drives, I'd worry both the main drive and the duplicate would get stolen (I live in a high crime area)

Anyway, that's a bit rambly. So in short, what do you/would you do?

 

[neil_g]

1) copy RAW from CF card to PC 1TB local storage drive
2) allway sync detects new files within my "photos" folder and syncs up with a copy on my 4TB "server"
3) import RAW files in to Lightroom
4) wait for my spyder to adjust for ambient light, process/disguard images as required
5) use Lightroom to export as low res for web or high res for sending to print labs
6) close Lightroom and wait for allway sync to make any addtional copy processes
7) copy new files to portable HD take to work and files sync up with 2x 750GB drives on my desk
8) files stay on CF card until formatted the next time they are used, typically 2 week rotation

its not perfect by a long shot but it should cover me for fire, theft, drive failure.. until i figure out a better way.

 

[Craikeybaby]

First of all, if you are using Lightroom you could get rid of the processed jpegs you are storing, as they are so easy to replace when needed by re exporting.

Another option to save space is to convery your raw files to DNG, with 6k images, this will make a noticable difference.

In addition to the above steps my workflow is:

Import everything off card with Lightroom and copy to "Archive" drive using the copy to function in the import dialog. I don't delete anything from this disk.
Anything that is flagged as a reject in Lightroom is deleted from Lightroom and the laptop HD and anything that is used or needs to be kept is coloured or starred.

My archive disk is backed up regularly, separately to my OS/working backups.

Every 6 months I go into Lightroom and open up a smart collection which shows every image that doesn't have a colour or star rating (ie hasn't been used and isn't worth keeping), I star any I may want to keep, then delete the rest on the basis I already have them on my archive drives.