Focused on Light Weblog

From The Camera

I trust my memory cards by not backing up on the go and wait until I can connect to my laptop. From here, photos are copied from the memory card and the original photos are organized into dated folders that look like this:

• 2008 Photos
  • 2008-01-02-Reference Name (CR2 and JPG files)
  • 2008-01-03-Reference Name (CR2 and JPG files)
• 2007 Photos
  • 2007-01-02-Reference Name (CR2 and JPG files)

Once organized by the date they were taken, three steps happen next:

1. All photos are then backed up to an external drive that stores all my unaltered originals.
2. The photos are then also imported as DNG files to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Photos are then tagged, rated and rejects are deleted (from Lightroom only, originals are kept). Not all photos belong to a Lightroom library. For the occasional photo that doesn't have a home, I simply leave the photo in the originals directory and use Adobe Bridge.
3. The Lightroom library is also backed up to the external drive.

#2 Lightroom

To keep things reasonable, I create multiple libraries based on subject. I do not maintain one single giant Lightroom database.

Why?

• It allows me to keep locally my most current photos. A complete library would be in the hundreds of gigabytes and I don't have the space for it.
• It is also faster to load when only dealing with 5-10 thousand photos at a time.

The problems with this.

• I can not search for a tag like "Stephen" and find all photos with me in it. Something I would love to see Adobe add is the ability to open multiple catalog libraries at once.

It makes more sense for me to allow Lightroom to manage the directory structure of imported photo and like above, I have it set to organize by date taken. This is very flexible but being consistent with dates works best for me. In Finder, it looks like this:

• Pictures
  • Lightroom
    • Library Name
      • 2008
        • 01 (month)
          • 01 (day) (DNG, JPG and PSD files)
          • 02 (day) (DNG, JPG and PSD files)
      • Backups (directory of library backups)
      • library.lcat (library database file)
      • library.lrdata (library thumbnails file)

Imported photos are renamed {date}-{library}{import #}-{original filename}. For example: 20080216-CHI0001-_IMG_6750.dng would be a photo taken on Feb 16 2008, it was in Chicago, it's the first imported photo, and the original filename was _IMG_6750.CR2 (the original filename can be found in the original photos directory 2008-02-16 on the external drive mentioned above).

#1 & #3 The External Drive

So what does my external drive look like?

From Others

Photos I didn't take.

GPS Tracks

I may or may not update my photos with location data but either way, I'm recording the GPX data.

Lightroom

This is a backup of my most recent libraries that I carry locally on my Macbook.

Lightroom Archive

Lightroom libraries that I no longer carry locally. These are now the originals and not backups.

Originals

Original unaltered photos right from the camera.

Scans

Original Scans.

Work

On occasion, I edit photos outside of Lightroom and need a place to save the edits.

Backing Up

This area is still a bit cloudy and not as fully automated as I want.

Currently all files that are on the external drive are backed up manually using SuperDuper to a second external drive and again to a RAID 1 NAS connected to my home network. So in theory, my photos should be duplicated across 4 separate drives. However, often are all in the same location.

This needs to be improved but I'm not sure how yet. Possibly adding a Drobo to the mix and doing a better job of offsite backup.

Overall

Besides manually running the backup, this process is not nearly as complicated as it may look.