Organizing Photos

[TravisT]

Hi,

I'm a new user here as well as a new lightroom 2 user. I am a novice photographer, and just got my first dSLR (Canon Xsi). I do not (and don't plan to) do any professional work at this time. I have a 3 month old daughter though, and plan to take many pictures of her growing up as well as whatever else comes along.

I have a good amount of pictures already on my hard drive, and I'm adding many more on a weekly basis. I want to organize these pictures better than they are now. I like the idea of keywording all of the images so they can be searched easier. I would like to archive all of the pictures on to DVD so they are less susceptible to getting lost.

Are there any preferred methods/best practices for achieving this? My main problem is once they are on DVD, how do I know which pictures are on each DVD? If I did pro work, I could easily organize pictures on DVD by each shoot, client, etc. The problem I'm having is my pictures are completely random - I may have 3 pics of my daughter, a couple of the dogs, ten of a trip to another city... you get the idea.

Any recommendations would be great. I don't want to spend a lot of time organizing everything a certain way only to find that it will not work like I want it to and have to start over again.

Thanks for the great info on this site, and thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Welcome to the LR Forums, Travis!

You are on the right track by keywording your images. Regardless of what organizational scheme you settle on you won't regret the keywords.

There are many approaches to organizing your images. Take a look at Peter Krogh's book. While not specifically geared to LR it is an excellent introduction to how to organize digital assets.

A basic approach taken by a lot of photographers is to create a folder system by year and month. So, for example, you'd have a folder called 2''8 and in that some subfolders called 2''8-'1, 2''8-'2, etc. (or JAN, FEB, MAR, etc). That at least organizes your images by time frames.

LR will allow you to export and burn to DVD (or CD). This can be an excellent backup strategy.

 

[TravisT]

Thanks for the reply! That sounds like a possible solution. Two more specific questions about your reply though.

Would it be preferred to add metadata info as to location, subject, etc to act as "keywords", as this will be stored with the file itself regardless of which software you use to manage it? The lightroom keywords seem to be a good tool to do a rough organization on the pictures, but maybe metadata would be better?

Backing up to CD/DVD. I don't quite understand this one too well. At first it seems very simple. Copy your files to a DVD, and you're good to go. I want to copy the originals to a DVD and delete the pictures from my computer. I would still like to be able to browse my library for thumbnails of the files backed up on DVD. If I do this in lightroom, how do I know which picture is on which DVD? Does lightroom somehow manage this in its database?

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Keywords are metadata. Just be sure to write the metadata changes to the files before you export. What's key here (no pun intended) is what type of file you use. Metadata will be written to JPEG and DNG files but raw files will have what are called sidecar files. These are the files with the same name but the extension of XMP. These always present a problem because you need to remember to copy those along with the image files.

Yes, once you move images off to CD/DVD LR will remember where they are. The CDs/DVDs will appear in the folders pane with a red light to indicate they are offline. The thumbnails and previews will still be in the LR database and available in the Library module. However, you will see a question mark in the upper right corner indicating that LR can't locate the original file. If you mount the CD/DVD you will be able to access the original file. Keep in mind, however, that once on CD/DVD you won't be able to write to the file (unless it's a rewritable CD/DVD).

You may find it a better strategy to attach an external hard drive and just clone your entire library to the external drive. Keep this drive at another location so in the unfortunate event of a fire or other catastrophe, your images will be safe in the other location. Just bring it back on a regular basis and reclone it as your library grows.

Again, there are many strategies for image backups and you'll need to settle on what fits your workflow best.

 

[Replytoken]

Backing up to CD/DVD. I don't quite understand this one too well. At first it seems very simple. Copy your files to a DVD, and you're good to go. I want to copy the originals to a DVD and delete the pictures from my computer. I would still like to be able to browse my library for thumbnails of the files backed up on DVD. If I do this in lightroom, how do I know which picture is on which DVD? Does lightroom somehow manage this in its database?

Gene's advice about the The DAM Book would be very useful as a starting point. I might suggest that you reconsider using DVD's for working storage, and consider keeping a primary set of images on one hard drive, backing them up to another hard drive, and then creating an archive set on DVD's for emergencies. I find this to be a much faster and easier approach to managing images, and it is in keeping with good DAM practices.

Today's hard drives are cheap and fast. You can re-name and organize your images by date, and then use the collections feature in Lightroom to sort them by subject matter after import. This is a fast and easy approach if you are not a heavy shooter (i.e. let LR do the heavy lifting for you). There are other good workflow schemes, but as it sounds like your time is at a premium, I am recommending this quick and dirty approach, which by the way is scalable as your collection grows.

--Ken

 

[TravisT]

I agree about the fact that HD storage is cheaper than it ever has been. I just feel that DVD's are less likely to loose data than a hard drive. I will look at the two options and see which will work better for me. The thing I like about the DVD option is that I can use a DVD organizer and put all pictures in one place. I'm not opposed to keeping a working copy on the hard drive, as I have a file server that can support 4 more SATA hard drives as well as RAID, I just don't currently have that setup. Regardless, I like the idea of DVD backup (unless I start taking many more pictures, which will cause the DVD collection to get too large), even if it is in addition to the copy on the HD.

Thanks for the info on the keywords. If I understand you correctly, each keyword gets saved either into the file itself or the sidecar file. I was under the impression that it was stored only in the database. Does that mean that if I use LR for 2 years and keyword every picture, then switch to a different program, the new program would be able to read the keywords applied in LR? I thought just "metadata" was stored IN the file, and that the keywords were separate (since they don't show under the metadata section of LR).

Any more suggestions or recommendations would be welcomed.

 

[Brad Snyder]

I agree about the fact that HD storage is cheaper than it ever has been. I just feel that DVD's are less likely to loose data than a hard drive. I will look at the two options and see which will work better for me. The thing I like about the DVD option is that I can use a DVD organizer and put all pictures in one place. I'm not opposed to keeping a working copy on the hard drive, as I have a file server that can support 4 more SATA hard drives as well as RAID, I just don't currently have that setup. Regardless, I like the idea of DVD backup (unless I start taking many more pictures, which will cause the DVD collection to get too large), even if it is in addition to the copy on the HD.

Some folks are less enthusiastic than you seem to be concerning the longevity of self-burned DVDs vs. a 'rotating' (drive-swapping) hard-drive backup. Personally, I do both.

Thanks for the info on the keywords. If I understand you correctly, each keyword gets saved either into the file itself or the sidecar file. I was under the impression that it was stored only in the database. Does that mean that if I use LR for 2 years and keyword every picture, then switch to a different program, the new program would be able to read the keywords applied in LR? I thought just "metadata" was stored IN the file, and that the keywords were separate (since they don't show under the metadata section of LR).

[COLOR=#''''ff]Yes, the keywords would be stored in/beside the file. They will be stored in the XMP data segment, which has been proposed by Adobe as an international industry standard. While this is no guarantee of future compatability, it's not likely that things would change so fast that you'd lose that info. At the very least, there would be updates of current metadata manipiulation utilities to address the problem. The definition of metadata is 'data concerning the media, that is not of the media'. In this case any image information that is not pixels is considered metadata. (There are hairs to be split of course, but that's the gist of it.) Although LR shows you keywords differently, and gives you a separate set of tools to manipulate them, they are photo metadata.

The metadata is always saved in the LR database, and can optionally be saved with the image files, either automatically or by ad-hoc request.

The metadata is always written to 'exported' files, appropriate to the exported type, unless the 'Minimize metadata' option is enabled.
[/COLOR]

Any more suggestions or recommendations would be welcomed.

..

 

[Richard Earney]

The reason to recommend dual, synched hard drives is that you may go back to older images from time to time and 'reappraise' them, which might mean updating Metadata or edits. Obviously archival DVDs are not meant to be written to, so you end up creating another DVD with a copy (version 2) of the first image. In years to come you will have to remember or have a good archival system that tells you which is the correct one.

Now that isn't hard to achieve, but it makes the system a little more clunky, than having your primary library and a synched version on a separate disk. Then use DVDs as archival snapshots. (Or BluRay soon).

I tend not to use RAID any more as I have had problems in the past and they can be a bit fiddly to set up and maintain.

I sync one drive onto another, using Chronosync on the Mac (on Windows you can use SyncToy or Vice Versa). I do this at a set time every day (about 1am)