Well since I’m not tired tonight, I may as well continue my rambling….
Now, on to pictures. First, I take a lot of photos. I mean a whole bunch. For example, on our recent vacation I took nearly 3000. There’s so many that I have to review and change how I handle them.
Pre-DSLR, I would take pictures and upload all of the non-blurry ones to the photo gallery. This worked great because there weren’t ever that many of them (some of you may disagree!), and the picture taking lag time was so great on the PnS that most of the photos ended up being documentary in purpose – recording events with no real creativity. So great, now I have one place for all of my photos to be kept and displayed. This one place was backed up, and life was simple.
Enter the DSLR and the world of mounting GBs of taken photos. I take pictures now that actually, in my opinion, have some creativity and aren’t just documentary in nature. So I now have two collections of photos – one for telling here’s what we did, here’s what happened and another for a more creative, photography kind. Which do I upload to the photo gallery? I want people to see the documentary stuff, but I also want my good pictures to be seen and not lost in the volumes of normal pictures. If I upload both sets, there’s just too many and even I won’t ever look at them on the web twice.
So the reality is that I have a massive and growing collection of photographs, a selective subset of which I upload for web viewing. The documentary type get put into a typical place in gallery, while the creative ones are put into Keeper sub albums or a completely separate album all together. But I’m not sure if this will work either. I think my good ones are going to get so strewn all over that they’ll just be lost.
Now that not all of my photos are online, I’ve had to start keeping all of them (good, bad, and ugly) on my hard drive. That presents its own challenges – namely, how the heck do I locate the two pictures of that lake, one edited and another the original, when they are named IMG_* and are two of ten thousand?! I now also need a backup/archive strategy for all of these. I don’t want to delete ANY of the images because, at this point at least, I can learn from all of them. I also don’t want to waste enormous amounts of space on my file server’s RAID backup array (or Jay’s either), yet I think I want that kind of reliability. I have an old tape drive and several tapes, that’s definitely an option.
I’ve started to get a handle on some of these problems, and I’ll elaborate soon. But since this is a new problem domain for me, I’m going to take things slow and hopefully end up with a good, usable process/method for all of this. And I’ll spill my brain here as much as possible. 🙂
Did anyone make it this far?
Anyone?
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4 responses to “Pictures”
I made it to the end!
On one hand–Flickr was invented for people and photographers to share their photos in a social way. For a nominal fee you can upload gobs of photos there.
On the other–As you know, I currently host about 5-6 photo galleries on my server in Durham. Right now, between these 5-6 I’ve only got about 25GB of photos online. However, the rate at which it grows has been increasing substantially as people upgrade to higher megapixel cameras and make more use of their galleries. For storage and backups, I’ve setup a ‘SAN’ with USB disks hanging off of a Linksys NSLU2. I’ve got about 2TB backed up and accessible not inside any of the computers but over a crossover cable and an extra ethernet card. This has simplified some of my storage challenges. It also makes adding disks trivial. At some point I’m going to have to upgrade from a NSLU2 to something else solid state as the unit gets more and more utilization.
-David
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I just checked and my gallery appears to be right around 14 GB right now. Not too bad, as I have plenty of disk space available (100+GB).
After seeing the quantity I’m running into now (forgetting disk space for a moment), I’ve come to realize that I’m trying to get two uses out of gallery: sharing with friends/family and personal organization. It excels with the sharing aspect (as long as I start to limit how much I toss on there – don’t want to flood people with 8 shots of the same thing) but really lacks in the organization aspect.
It looks like it has some promise in this area, with the ability to tag photos and add descriptions, titles, etc.. but it just takes so darn long to enter this information that I end up skipping it. Which makes it just not work for me for organization.
I’m going to elaborate in another post, but this is one of the main reasons I just purchased Adobe Lightroom this week. It makes the organization of thousands and thousands of photos fairly painless.
I’m going to check out that ‘SAN’ hardware you’re using, sounds very interesting.
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This isn’t a backups discussion (yet) but I’d look at Vembu Storegrid if you have multiple systems and want to distribute files between them.
http://www.vembu.com/index.html
Dave, who upgraded his digital camera when he got a new cell phone
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I already own Veritas Backup Exec right now and that’s working out well so far (since I’ve got everything on my fileserver at this time). If I get the point of having distributed storage though, I’ll take a harder look at it.
And it’s sick that your camera is in the phone! Wrong, I tell ya.. just plain wrong!
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