Photo Storage and Display (1 Viewer)

How do you store and display your photos? Do you just use albums? If you sell your photos, do you have a catalog system? What other things do you do with your photos?

I do not sell any photos, but I use Smugmug for online display (see the link in my signature). I will also use Photoshop Elements to create slideshows with music to put on Blu-Ray discs to display on our 67-inch TV -- I need to learn how to do this in Lightroom yet. The iPad (or any other tablet) works well as a portable device to show friends/family photos, too (Smugmug has apps for both the iPad/iPhone and Android). Finally, I use a couple of online labs -- Meridian Pro and Mpix -- to order enlarged prints that we display on the walls in our home. Most prints I order are either 20x16, 30x20, or 36x24. I recently did a metallic print of the photo below from Meridian Pro that turned out pretty well.

Beautiful, Scott.

I could see why you'd want that hanging on your wall.

Weekly Time Machine to an external drive that isn't connected unless it is actively backing up. This covers my OS and Apps and iTunes Library. Next time I find a 3TB drive cheap enough I will buy another one and run backup and take the copy to NJ for off site storage, but generally I can return the OS and Apps from cloud backups. The only thing that would be a bitch to get back is my media and even that I could get 90% back from iCloud and Amazon. I have too many songs to physically add em all to the iCloud music thing so I've had to turn that off. Hoping they bump it from 25000 to 50000 songs soon, that would cover me, for now.My photos are stored on an 8TB thunderbolt raid. It its not connected unless I am actively editing pictures.After each major photo import I use CCC to mirror this drive to a cheap backup drive.I have a second mirror I keep in NJ.I have my 'finals' all uploaded to Flickr.I have my yearly selects made into books given as gifts to family.I make a yearly backup of RAWs and Finals to Bluray I keep in a safeIt would kill me to lose any photos, so far this system has worked.

Sam, what 8TB drive have you found (for your CCC mirror) that is considered cheap?

I still have my entire Aperture library on the internal drive, although I'll be moving that to a Thunderbolt RAID sometime this year. After each import, I use CCC to clone the drive to an external disk and that drive is immediately taken offsite. I also have my machines backing up to Crashplan for cloud backup.

I generally don't sell my images, but at the end of the year I'll make books and calendars for family and friends.

While I use Smugmug for online display of my photos (the topic of this thread), I do not consider it a backup solution. I store my photos, both the RAW files and processed JPEGs, on an external hard drive. I store most of my other data on this drive, too. I then backup all my data to a 2nd attached external drive, plus I have a 3rd portable external drive that I leave unattached except when I perform another backup. Finally, like Michael, I use Crashplan as my offsite backup system. I figure that with 3 local copies plus one offsite copy of all my data, I should be covered.

Think you misread, I have an expensive 8GB raid and use cheap _3_ TB drives for backups.

Yeah, I'm considering a RAID solution again as well as my near-line external HDD fills up (for archiving/backups) while the primary photo/media store HDD on my old PC is on its last leg.

Been looking at WD's Red HDDs for this.

And upgrading to the Nikon D800 will force the issue in no time... even though I still plan to shoot mostly in 1.2x crop for 25MP files, instead of 36MP, and maybe often enough in DX crop for 15MP as well -- will have to see...

_Man_

These are some interesting ideas for storage. Im currently using a couple of external hard drives to store most my photos. For display I created albums using large scrap books so that I can put 8x10s and 8x12s in the pages. It leaves me room to put a name under the photo along with the photo number that corresponds with the digital file so I can easily find it for reprint if someone tells me that want that photo. I also have a website where I display some photos and have sold quite a few through the website as well. The first place I ever displayed photos on the internet was on deviantart. I still use it today, just not as often as I used to. Other than that, I have a few photos displayed in frames or done on canvas that my wife picked out around the house.

I did some needed spring cleaning and deleted all the non-keeper images I've accumulated over the last decade-plus.


Lightroom made the task fairly painless, but the trick was to be consistent about using the built-in rating tools. So identifying what needed to go was a matter of filtering out the unrated images and doing the harder thing - pushing the delete button. For the latter I adopted the same mentality as I do when cleaning out my closet or garage - if I haven't needed it or looked at in five years, I'm unlikely to miss it going forward. Also, I had to simply trust in my rating methodology that it would preserve what I truly want to keep.

You have way more faith than me. Once shot my stuff never gets deleted. There's a continuous set of refinement from there.


Whole take

Sets in Lightroom by 'event' or date

Selects

Uploads of edited selects to Flickr

Whole year of edited selects to one big set in Lr

Cull edited selects and a smattering of phone camera images to Blurb book

3 copies of the book made per year, one to my parents, one to sister, one to me


Rinse/repeat yearly.

You have way more time than I do.

Is Lightroom really all that helpful in terms of photo storage and organization?


I know absolutely nothing about it.

That's probably not the sole reason to get it. If you don't need or want to process your photos, then there are other programs that do similar things on the organization side.

Such as... (any recommendations?)

Google's Picasa is worth a try: https://picasa.google.com/

Mike Frezon said:

Is Lightroom really all that helpful in terms of photo storage and organization?


I know absolutely nothing about it.

Click to expand...

For just cataloging, it's okay, but as others have said, there may be better options out there. Lightroom's strength is in the combination of features it provides -- excellent post processing tools (especially if you shoot in RAW format), sifting through photos after a shoot to decide what to keep and what to delete, and finally the cataloging.


I already had a method for organizing my photo storage before using LR, so that piece doesn't do much for me. However, after a shoot I typically throw out about 75% of my shots, and LR really helps in comparing similar photos and tagging the keepers and the rejects.


The post processing tools are Lightroom's real strength, though, and the program keeps getting better and better in this area. I rarely need to use any other software for post processing anymore.

Mike Frezon said:

Is Lightroom really all that helpful in terms of photo storage and organization?


I know absolutely nothing about it.

Click to expand...

Mike,


What do you currently do or want to do w/ your photos? And as others asked, do you often/regularly shoot RAW?


Personally, I've found the less expensive Adobe Elements combo (of Photoshop and Premiere Elements for both photo and video) to be a very good value even if you do shoot RAW... as long as you don't find a need to batch process them.


Photoshop Elements does miss out on some capabilities I'm used to, eg. full curves functionality, from a (*very*) old version of full Photoshop, but it otherwise does most everything I need in terms of editing, including RAW conversion (for my Nikon D800 *and* lower end Nikon bodies)... while serving just fine for my basic cataloging needs so far -- and yes, I do keep a ton of old photo files and don't regularly cull out or prune them... although I do try to toss the obvious bad ones before putting them into my archive instead of what Cameron does. But I don't normally batch process a ton of RAW files though which is (I imagine) probably where Lightroom does much better along w/ certain other approaches to editing/processing that probably suit pro photographers more.


IF I were shooting gigs (in RAW) and need to produce sizable batches of photos w/ some regularity, I'd definitely go for Lightroom (or something else perhaps), but that's not what I do. Most times, I'm much more deliberate in choosing and processing a small set of photos to be presented, etc., and I find the JPEGs I get from shooting RAW+JPEG to serve just fine as prescreening "proofs" for that purpose -- and they are often also good enough to give away for more casual uses to family and friends... maybe w/ a minor tweak or two perhaps.


For a good comparative summary review, maybe check out this one I just googled for yah:


https://photographylife.com/lightroom-vs-photoshop-elements


It might be a tad outdated by now, especially regarding PSE functionality, since it's from mid-2013 -- Adobe comes out w/ a new version around Q3 of each year.


Hope that helps some...


_Man_

and yes, I do keep a ton of old photo files and don't regularly cull out or prune them... although I do try to toss the obvious bad ones before putting them into my archive instead of what Cameron does.

Click to expand...

I have kept plenty of old photos, but what I've discarded are the "obviously bad," which I see no reason to keep. If I feel like I can do anything with an image, I give it a one-star rating. Once I've one-starred all the images, anything left I rarely, if ever, re-visit because they are poorly composed, out of focus or redundant. I think the only value of holding on to those images is to evaluate lessons learned, but that's also not a reason to hold on to them long term. Images that get exported for presentation go through yet another selection process using the flag or "pick," but I could add additional rounds of selection if I wanted (e.g. increasing the rating).

Sam Posten said:

You have way more faith than me. Once shot my stuff never gets deleted. There's a continuous set of refinement from there.


Whole take

Sets in Lightroom by 'event' or date

Selects

Uploads of edited selects to Flickr

Whole year of edited selects to one big set in Lr

Cull edited selects and a smattering of phone camera images to Blurb book

3 copies of the book made per year, one to my parents, one to sister, one to me


Rinse/repeat yearly.

Click to expand...

That's my method as well (although a different "afterwards").


Also, I just finished a huge project, having all my 13,000+ colour-negatives (since the 1980s until 2001) scanned at (roughly) 5700 x 3800 pixels per image.

Very happy with it.



Cees