Managing photos with your computer - best recommendations for storage, software etc?

[dieselcruiserhead]

Subject basically says it all. I have friends who take 300-500 photos easily in a single 30-60 minute sitting just walking around. I starting thinking about all of those photos and the room they must take. I cannot imagine it would be comfortable to toss a lot of photos? Even with the limited amount I take I still have several thousand on my regular hard drive and feel that I manage them pretty will photoshop for resizing. I also like going back and looking at photos I missed and will occasionally use a different photo with something I might not have caught, etc, but not getting overwhelmed as well...

So far I have been using the regular-old Windows program which I like a lot and drops the photos in designated folders by date.

Other comments / recommendations? The cheaper high storage portable hard drives? What happens if one of those takes a dump as well?

What do you use for resizing?

And other thoughts or recommendations from the folks who constantly take gobs and gobs of photos?

 

[ThomD]

Adobe Lightroom. Manage, tweak, catalog.

Network storage device for a local back up of everything and an ftp site for off site storage.

 

[Michael Slade]

adobe lightroom. Manage, tweak, catalog.

Network storage device for a local back up of everything and an ftp site for off site storage.

+1

 

[Root Moose]

I'm not at the point where I need Lightroom yet. I'm using iPhoto for now - actually just started using iPhoto - was using Gallery before (it sux - don't go there).

A friend introduced me to Picasa by Google. Seems pretty cool but I'm not sure if it does anything more than what iPhoto does. Even then, I'd be inclined to make the jump to Lightroom if it came to that. You didn't mention what software you currently use - give Picasa a try. It's free.

Between me and my wife we are sitting at around 500GB of photos and videos. A lot of that needs to be culled but it's still a lot for a non-professional hobbyist. Seems we add over 150GB per year lately. I expect it will be increasing as I move into more video stuff. WTH are they going to be releasing 10TB drives?!

I have all my photos on a network attached storage device (D-Link DNS323 for now - cheap solution, two 1TB drives RAID mirrored). In addition to that I do backups with external USB connected 1TB drives. I rotate these in and out of the fire safe at a different location. The backup script runs every night to sync the NAS and the external drives.

I do the fire safe rotation at different times depending on what is going on in our real life. For example, just copied all of our photos and video from Christmas to the computer so we are ripe to do a back up disk rotation.

If my computers were ever stolen, broken, burned to a crisp I'd be upset but if I ever lost our family photos and videos I'd be beside myself. The digital assets are worth more than any POS computer equipment so I try to protect it as well as I can.

HTH

 

[dieselcruiserhead]

What are the FTP sites you recommend? Picasa, photobucket drive me nuts because I see all the time "this photo has been deleted" .. I am very happy with smugmug but wasn't aware if it has a FTP option...

 

[Lost Canadian]

What are the FTP sites you recommend? Picasa, photobucket drive me nuts because I see all the time "this photo has been deleted" .. I am very happy with smugmug but wasn't aware if it has a FTP option...

It does, they call it smugvault. Very handy, and the price ain't bad.

 

[ThomD]

I use Godaddy hosting. Their unlimited (?!) storage is $14.24/month (12 mo at a time). Amazon wants $75/month for your 500G (unless you live in Nor Cal., then it is more. Google offers 400G for $100 per year, but 1T is $265 per year.

I "only" have about 40G to store, so I'm in a different league. For your kinds of numbers I'd be looking at a safe deposit box.

 

[articulate]

Other options for online back ups are www.mozy.com and www.carbonite.com. I only just found out about these services, but I'm thinking about them. Carbonite, for intstance, manages a limitless backup capacity of your entire computer, and does so without you having to think about it. About $60 a year.

Web hosting services (godaddy, bluehost, etc) get more money for the added services that go along with hosting a website - so if all you need to do is back up files and have web access to them, an online backup service would be a better value for you.

 

[Root Moose]

Never, ever trust some third party to do your backups or manage your media. If you read the Ts and Cs of their contracts you will see there is zero responsibility on their part. I won't go into the privacy issue...

Just to remove any possible ambiguity, in my post above I referenced Picasa. I am referring to the program you download and run on your local computer to manage your photos on your local hard drives. There is no network drives or web sites.

http://picasa.google.com

If you want to share photos, I use a combination of Facebook and my web site depending on the target audience. Private stuff gets posted to Facebook (oh, the irony - blame it on unsophisticated computer users in the family). Public stuff goes on my web site - one of these days I'll get all the old stuff migrated.

For my web site I use 1and1.com as my provider and use Wordpress as the blog cms. I'm happy with 1and1 but I have heard/seen complaints about them from a technical point of view. To date there has not been anything I've encountered that couldn't be worked around via tweaking the local php.ini. Billing and value for money is good with them and I've never had any issues that way.

HTH

 

[dieselcruiserhead]

I have unlimited hosting already so I am already set there. The problem is mostly the lack of software and I really like a > button for flipping through photos online... This is also why I like (and am willing to pay for) smugmug. I don't have a DSLR right now so I'm not quite there. This all sounds great. I badly need to network the house. We have 4 computers and it is a mess, particularly when printing...

 

[Root Moose]

You can make photo albums with navigation using Photoshop (think you mentioned you are using it in your first post). A buddy of mine does things that way and he likes it because it gives him full control. I haven't messed around with it myself but it gives you access to CSS markup as well IIRC so you can make your stuff look anyway you want outside of the navigation structure.

To access it in Photoshop go to File -> Automate -> Web Photo Gallery.

Another neat feature of PS that I use a lot is "Save for Web". Everything I put online gets put through this feature to reduce bandwidth. Why make web clients download a say 6 MB file when 50 to 400 kb gets the job done? The web is not the place for the full spectrum version of the photos unless there is some kind of background discussion/purpose to it in my opinion.

The difference between the two versions is lost on 99.99999% of the people that view your images. I used to host the web site for my off-road club. They'd be posting 4MB pictures of trucks parked on the same rock after every trail run. Then they'd complain that every gallery page took forever to download. LOL Plus there was no art ot the photos so it was a big waste in that way as well.

 

[nwoods]

www.DropBox.com might be the online storage you are looking for. You get 2 or 3GB free (more space has a price), but it's that "one button" simplicity, and the fact that it replicates and updates across ALL of your computers automagically, including your phone! The iPhone browser is extremely fast, and it recognizes image files verses documents, and displays your images on the iPhone like a gallery. I am completely addicted to DropBox for files I want access to anywhere and anytime, or for largish files that I want to share to multiple people. For example, I am doing a business card design right now, and the committee that votes on it can all access the special DropBox file that I shared with them. Instead of emailing out large image files, they just log in. Simple. Watch the DropBox video on their home page.

For processing images, I'm looking for the "best" answer also. Everyone here recommends Lightroom. You can download a fully functional Version 3 Beta download from Adobe right now for free. I have been playing with it for a few hours. i do not like it. It is extremely powerful, similar to PhotoShop's deep power, but it does not have the 15+ years of development behind the UI, and it shows. When I use it, I mentally picture a blind man playing darts. There are controls and functions and buttons all over the screen. It's chaotic and headache producing. You have to use a combination of keyboard commands and buttons, and they commands are not intuitive at all.

When CS3 came out, it launched with a massively improved version of Bridge. I am using Bridge almost exclusively for my image management. I really like it. Before that I used ACDSee, which is similarly powerful but much more intuitive than Lightroom, with a much cleaner, more mature UI. I weaned myself off of ACDSee in a forced effort to learn Bridge. But I might go back to it after dabbling with the headache that is Lightroom. To learn more about Lightroom, go here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

 

[dieselcruiserhead]

I have messed with and even posted a lot of photoshop galleries and it does work but only OK... Perhaps my version of photoshop is outdated but the method it makes the galleries is super dated as is the end product. For example the lack of the ability to use the > button.

I think I might try the smugmug service and just spend the money there perhaps... There are some great recommendations on this thread...

You can make photo albums with navigation using Photoshop (think you mentioned you are using it in your first post). A buddy of mine does things that way and he likes it because it gives him full control. I haven't messed around with it myself but it gives you access to CSS markup as well IIRC so you can make your stuff look anyway you want outside of the navigation structure.

To access it in Photoshop go to File -> Automate -> Web Photo Gallery.

Another neat feature of PS that I use a lot is "Save for Web". Everything I put online gets put through this feature to reduce bandwidth. Why make web clients download a say 6 MB file when 50 to 400 kb gets the job done? The web is not the place for the full spectrum version of the photos unless there is some kind of background discussion/purpose to it in my opinion.

The difference between the two versions is lost on 99.99999% of the people that view your images. I used to host the web site for my off-road club. They'd be posting 4MB pictures of trucks parked on the same rock after every trail run. Then they'd complain that every gallery page took forever to download. LOL Plus there was no art ot the photos so it was a big waste in that way as well.

 

[CanuckMariner/Nomad]

Online Photo Storage

Best place and cheapest (free) I have found is here. :wings:

• I have been using it for years
• I have 1000s of photos stored here and still have 23.5 GB free space left
• absolutely no charge for 25GB yes GB! other sites give small space free an then charge you later for more space when you run out
• Store by album, albums within albums, etc., etc. Organise your photos the way you want to!
• uploads your photos from your PC individually or in bulk or other any on line site
• takes your original photo resolution and uses an algorithm (read formulae) to reduce storage size but lets you or anyone you give permission to, download it at original resolution or a number of other resolutions

Check mine out on the link below in my signature - Trip Photos. :costumed-smiley-007

 

[Dennis David]

Personally I like top keep things close at hand. I also prefer mirroring to backups. I would use something like this: Raid 1