• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Storing Digital Photos (1 Viewer)

mcapper

Registered User
How does every-one store their digital photos?

I've recently got a digital SLR and even more recently started shooting in RAW.

The result - RAW conversion software and big big tiff files on the computer.

My computer is creaking a little and going a bit slower than I would like.

So, firstly I may buy some extra RAM memory to speed the processing and then secondly, I think I will also by an external hard drive as a way of storing photos. I can then access them from the external drive to work on and convert and not clog up the computer. After that, they can go on a disc.

Now, this might be asking too much, but is there something that would work as a classic hard drive as well as having the capacity to store photos straight from the compact flash card so that I could use it to store photos when on holiday. From what I've seen, it looks like the media storage devices that read cards aren't the same as a classic hard drive (and you have to pay a lot more for them). But any ideas for something that would do both at a reasonable price would be much appreciated.

Many thanks as ever

Matthew
 
I recently got a HP printer. It makes nice prints, 4x6 inches or so. Wherever the media goes in 15 years, some color will be left and I can rescan them. So far none of my bird pictures were worth printing, only family photos.

CDRs will keep them 5-10 years OK. After that, no guarantee.
 
mcapper said:
Now, this might be asking too much, but is there something that would work as a classic hard drive as well as having the capacity to store photos straight from the compact flash card so that I could use it to store photos when on holiday. From what I've seen, it looks like the media storage devices that read cards aren't the same as a classic hard drive (and you have to pay a lot more for them). But any ideas for something that would do both at a reasonable price would be much appreciated.

Matthew

I picked up a Wolverine data Flashpak drive (just google wolverine data). It is a 60GB hard drive, has in-built card readers and acts like a normal hard drive. I use it for storing photos whilst on holiday & as a normal external hard drive to back up my computer. So far, it has done a good job. It was also cheap; I think I got mine for about $100 on special. Could be what you are looking for.
 
storage

I've always used a second internal HD, 120GB, sounds big but for Raw/Tiff files you need something big. All programmes stored on another.
Its fast as well 7200rpm 8mg cache.
DVDRW/CDRW for archive.
For hols / working away I use a lap top and card reader :t:
 
The importance of back-up - can't stress that strongly enough. My pics currently take about 130GB (1.5 years of pics) worth of hard drive space. As I'm currently stationed in another country away from my family so I FTP all the pics back to home as a way of back-up and for the family to look at. FTP done immediately after pics (RAW) transferred from camera to hard drive + batch photoshopped preview jpg files created. I also burn DVD back-ups on as needed base, meaning once I can fill a DVD with material I will burn a back-up copy. Seemed pretty good way of backing up?

Until this week I thought this was good enough. Last week the family computer failed on a power failure, got some kind of a spike and that killed the motherboard and a hard drive (the hard drive with the pics!). Oh and yes the computer was behind an UPS! Now - this week here the computer I work with had some sort of a hiccup as the drive that I only store the pics to got plenty of reading problems and the result was seemingly ugly as I had not burned the backup DVD's in a while... about a month. Luckily I did not lose everything but still a fair amount of pics....

So keep backups and do it often - IF You value the work that You've done.
 
I have to admit to being a bit fanatical about backups of my data - especially photo's - I have a second internal hard drive to store all of my photo's on (120 GB) and take regular backups onto DVD's, usually weekly but never longer than a month & that's only if I am away.

I also never overwrite CD-RW or DVD-RW material preferring to accept the cost of new discs against any possible corruption of data.
 
Matt,

I imagine that downloading a card of tiffs onto a stand alone drive/viewer might be quite slow since few will have the capacity of a PC. I don't know - but this could be an important factor in the field. When I was on holiday recently I downloaded pics onto my iPod which has plenty of capacity but took about 40mins to download a GB. A video iPod may be quicker of course - and you can see what you download.

I use a 80GB external hard drive linked to my PC solely for photos - buts its full now so I reckon its just about easier to buy another one for future photos than to go through the palaver of copying stuff to DVD to make space.

I archive by making a DVD each month of the previous months photos and keeping it off the premises. If your house burns down a backup kept in the home goes with it! As external hard drives get cheaper I think I'll soon resort to consolidating the back-ups on hard drive too.

S
 
How about having them transferred onto 35mm transparencies ?!?!
I'm only half-joking. When my Grandfather died we could look back through his extensive collection of prints, negatives and transparencies and re-print anything we wanted. I'm not so confident that our childrens children will be able to so easily see our pictures.
 
Get yourself an external USB hard drive, they are cheap as chips now, I back everything up on two separate 300Gb drives, (I have four of these, two are full of files already) two are permanently (one of each set of images) attached to PC for instant ready access and also I burn all my edited RAW files to DVD, two sets, one set is stored away at another location in case of burgulary or fire.
 
Have purchased the additional RAM memory for the computer. I was on 256MB so the extra 512 I purchased has made a big difference. The best price I found was orcalogic.co.uk who had a very good system to find the product you needed.

Fitted it last night and it has made a difference. I now have something that could be called a workflow rather than a trickle!

Next on the list is the external hard drive.

Many thanks for all the advice

Matthew
 
I picked up a LACIE 500GB external USBII hard drive from Staples around Christmas time for £199 they were also selling 250GB for £99----mine is already 20% full----the problem I always find with backing upon to CD's or DVD's is that I have bird photos filed by species and adding some new shots to a disk almost invariably overflows onto another so you end up with a huge pile of CD's or DVD's and unless you are truly meticulous it becomes very easy to loose shots and impossible to find the ones you want---I must admit that I only store RAW files anything converted is emailed off of printed and then deleted---it takes seconds to convert the file if needed in future so why clog up the hard drive with what is in effect two or three copies of the same photo
 
If you print off the thumbnails which are stored on eac cd/dvd,and the same date etc is on the cd and the print off,it is quite easy to find whatever photo you are looking for.Store print off and cd together.
 
Hi,

Recently I changed my workflow for the better. I have two external hard drives, one for my Raw and DNG and the second for JPEG and TIFF files.

The images are placed in folders which I fill until they become the size of a DVD-R, then each folder is burnt to a disc, two copies, one is kept on site and one off site, in case of, as Nigel pointed out burglary and fire.

I've taken photos of different subjects, underwater, birds, travel etc. and they all go in the same folders together, I don't separate by species or subject, after all its only data.
The name of the disc is the same as the name of the folder, so if folder RAW_001 becomes corrupt, I get the DVD-R disc called, RAW_001 and load them up again.

So, now I've got the images on my hard drives and stored safely on DVDs.
Every day I'm trying something new with my images, make DVDs to music, printing off or preparing them to go to a stock library, I submit to. So I always require access to them instantly.

This is where the smoke and mirrors come in, I use DAM software, Digital Asset Management, this software sorts the data out, by species or type or in any other way you've selected and puts the images up on the screen as thumb nails, click on the thumbnail and the full image is displayed. You don't lose shots and you can easily keep track of them.
DAM is not browser, browser does exactly what it says, thats all.

Dave
 
Last edited:
Warning! This thread is more than 18 years ago old.
It's likely that no further discussion is required, in which case we recommend starting a new thread. If however you feel your response is required you can still do so.

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top