Your digital file size total

[Jayson Prentice]

Here are my stats that I cane come up with on my current external drive(s). Various photos are those that are random snaps, nature, landscape, nighttime photography, etc... And my business photos are most often portraits, weddings, etc. that I've done over the past two years or so...

Weather Photos: 104 Folders - 2,708 Images - 13.2 GB
Various Photos: 275 Folders - 11,848 Images - 62.2 GB
Business Photos: 65 Folders - 5,370 Images - 35.7 GB

Totals: 444 Folders - 19,926 Images - 111.1 GB

 

[Mike Deep]

I'm not a chaser so I'll break this down by category. This is original files only.

Total: 171GB, 22,927 Images

• Animals: 9.48GB, 1,291 Images
• Close Focus: 7.81GB, 1,113 Images
• Events: 9.23GB, 1,345 Images
• Insects & Spiders: 5.81GB, 825 Images
• Paintball: 73.9GB, 9,377 Images
• People & Places: 50.5GB, 6,920 Images
• Sports: 3.34GB, 435 Images
• Weather: 10.1GB, 1,525 Images
• Sorting queue: 675MB, 93 Images

 

[Tyler Burg]

I need to sort through some and this will be interesting to see where I started and where I'll end up at. I shot JPEG in 2008, and starting in April 2009 started shooting RAW...

Totals: 10,245 images, 147 Folders, and 30.7 GB

I know I could easily delete 6,000 images and still be comfortable, should probably do that lol. I Delete images on the LCD before uploading and never go through and delete after uploading.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Well I have a rule; If I never delete an image I will never accidently* delete an image. Terabyte hard-drives are so cheap these days why delete anything? I don't feel reducing the number of images by deleting will make cataloging more manageable. Any method of cataloging needs to account for a ton of images. I'm at several TB with back ups.

I bet the 20 gigs I now have is a lot more manageable than several TB! lol That sounds insane. I get what you mean though.

I get the whole cheap hard drive thing and have them, just as several different back up sources. I think the more massive amount of images one keeps, the more they themselves will need to be a computer to really comprehend what they have. I think that is what I'm trying to avoid, perhaps stupidly. Seems I'll never have a need to posses 20,000 images or even 10,000. If I did, it seems all the fluff I've kept would just sort of "cloud" the best of/gist of the reason to shoot in the first place.

 

[Mike Umscheid]

Interesting thread. If you have a good workflow/file&image management setup, then it really should not matter how many files you have...especially if you have significant storage space and decent computing power/memory. I have Lightroom 2, and I can easily manage my entire DSLR collection dating back to 2005. I rarely purposely delete images... My working hard drive is probably around 250GB now, out of 500GB. The problem comes when backing all this data up. Again, if you have a good backup system and good synchronization software, then this shouldn't be too big of a problem either. I have two backup 500GB hard drives, one I keep off-site at my parent's house that I synchronize about every 3 or 4 months.

 

[Stephen Locke]

I bet the 20 gigs I now have is a lot more manageable than several TB! lol That sounds insane. I get what you mean though.

I get the whole cheap hard drive thing and have them, just as several different back up sources. I think the more massive amount of images one keeps, the more they themselves will need to be a computer to really comprehend what they have. I think that is what I'm trying to avoid, perhaps stupidly. Seems I'll never have a need to posses 20,000 images or even 10,000. If I did, it seems all the fluff I've kept would just sort of "cloud" the best of/gist of the reason to shoot in the first place.

I remember when finding an archived image meant climbing down into the dungeon to face spider filled crates of negatives and narrowing the search ultimately required spreading countless negatives onto a light table and visually reversing the negatives into positives to find the one you were looking for. That was an effing nightmare. (and the total exposure counts per job/chase/outing were a fraction of todays numbers. The ability to locate things today by simply punching in keywords or searching alphanumerically is pure luxury. These days it just comes down to ones cataloging method . . .
I think Lightroom has a good system but I dont use it. Mike you are right in that one ultimately has to remember/compute something related to the search. Cataloging has no value if you can't remember your keywords. This has always been a problem in photography. I've filled dumpsters with negatives just to be rid of the headache. It just seems easier with digital now so I don't throw anything away anymore.

 

[Dan Robinson]

My archiving convention is fairly simple. I have two main archive categories, one for "storm photos" and another for "everything else".

For the 'everything archive', I have a folder for each year, then four folders inside each for the four quarters of the year. Then, each memory card offload gets its own folder and is placed in one of the quarterly folders.

I use a naming convention of "month/day-subject" for each offload folder. So, if I go shoot two cards worth of images in the mountains, the folders are "oct14-wvmountains1" and "oct14-wvmountains2". This has been pretty simple to browse by subject (I use the thumbnail viewer on my old Paint Shop Pro software, which is fast and lightweight).

The storm archive is the same, except there are far fewer folders - so I don't subdivide the yearly archives into quarters.

I don't rename individual photo files, instead I use the camera-generated number as my catalog number. I then use these numbers in my stock photo roster, which is a catalog of only the best images (which right now is only at 327). I add a letter prefix to the reference number so that when the camera rolls over 10,000, I just go to the next letter (a, b, c, etc).

I keep a second copy of my best images in a separate folder to make them easier to find when I get a stock photo order, and to prevent them from being accidentally deleted if I ever do decide to 'clean house' in the main archives. If I ever need to find an image, I just use the reference number from my stock photo roster and do a simple file search for the camera-generated number.

 

[Stephen Locke]

Lightroom addendum

The bulk of my work is shot for clients so I catalogue images and folders with their name and date.

I am using Lightroom for stock images but stock is a small percentage of what I shoot. The challenge is to find a picture of a rusty old truck I shot on the side of the road while on a storm chase in Western Nebraska back in '06 or '07. Actually the biggest challenge is to even remember that I shot a rusty old truck at all. Images shot out of context get lost in the mire. This is where Lightroom comes in. And the discipline to tag everything with appropriate keywords.
The list of keywords gets rather long and hard to remember but at least it is a list and one can scroll down through the list to recall what was shot way back when. If the image is not tagged straight away it will be forgotten . . . lost somewhere in a 3 terabyte hard-drive.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Interesting thread. If you have a good workflow/file&image management setup, then it really should not matter how many files you have...especially if you have significant storage space and decent computing power/memory. I have Lightroom 2, and I can easily manage my entire DSLR collection dating back to 2005. I rarely purposely delete images... My working hard drive is probably around 250GB now, out of 500GB. The problem comes when backing all this data up. Again, if you have a good backup system and good synchronization software, then this shouldn't be too big of a problem either. I have two backup 500GB hard drives, one I keep off-site at my parent's house that I synchronize about every 3 or 4 months.

An alternative method for backup is just manual backup -- that is, manually copy everything from time to time to another form of media. To me, the RAW files are what's most important, so I periodically dump all my new RAW files (and toned images) to two sets of DVDs; I keep one set here at home and another set offsite. Any more paranoia than that seems overkill. I use Flickr as a backup dump for all of my toned images; they have an unlimited amount of storage for $25 a year, which is silly cheap, and there are utilities out there to help with batch downloading of images should you ever need to fetch everything again at once.

 

[CZandbergen]

The bulk of my work is shot for clients so I catalogue images and folders with their name and date.

I am using Lightroom for stock images but stock is a small percentage of what I shoot. The challenge is to find a picture of a rusty old truck I shot on the side of the road while on a storm chase in Western Nebraska back in '06 or '07. Actually the biggest challenge is to even remember that I shot a rusty old truck at all. Images shot out of context get lost in the mire. This is where Lightroom comes in. And the discipline to tag everything with appropriate keywords.
The list of keywords gets rather long and hard to remember but at least it is a list and one can scroll down through the list to recall what was shot way back when. If the image is not tagged straight away it will be forgotten . . . lost somewhere in a 3 terabyte hard-drive.

+1

Lightroom is the way to go. I don't have to worry about file structures or naming conventions, etc. Just tag the images on import and I can easily find them later. This is a really great bit of software. I believe you can download a free trial from Adobe to check it out.

I tried several tools before settling on Lightroom. It is the best hands down IMHO...

 

[Stephen Locke]

An alternative method for backup is just manual backup -- that is, manually copy everything from time to time to another form of media. To me, the RAW files are what's most important, so I periodically dump all my new RAW files (and toned images) to two sets of DVDs;

Ryan, I don't trust DVDs anymore. I've seen them go bad and data lost. They are not archival. It is also very laborious to burn/tag/store/catalog/search DVDs. I'm using multiple hard-drives for back-up. Like Mike U. I keep a synchronized volume off site at parents house. Backing-up has always been a hassle and problematic but I am really liking Apples Time Machine. It makes back-ups every hour and one can actually go backwards in time and restore to any of the previous versions. Works better than anything else I've used to date.

 

[Greg Campbell]

Ryan, I don't trust DVDs anymore. I've seen them go bad and data lost.

If you're using DVDs, be sure to buy the +R disks. The +R standard features error detection and some correction, while -R leaves large fields of data completely unprotected. See http://www.myce.com/article/Why-DVDRW-is-superior-to-DVD-RW-203/ for all the gruesome details.

 

[Chris Allington]

Right now for all photos (not just storms) I am sitting at:

84.4 Gigs Total, 13,980 files in 194 folders.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Ryan, I don't trust DVDs anymore. I've seen them go bad and data lost. They are not archival. It is also very laborious to burn/tag/store/catalog/search DVDs. I'm using multiple hard-drives for back-up. Like Mike U. I keep a synchronized volume off site at parents house. Backing-up has always been a hassle and problematic but I am really liking Apples Time Machine. It makes back-ups every hour and one can actually go backwards in time and restore to any of the previous versions. Works better than anything else I've used to date.

Sure, I agree. The problem is that all forms of media degrade over time, both physically and in terms of becoming obsolete. The right brand of DVD (I generally use Taiyo Yuden) is much more stable than a hard drive (excepting high-end RAID systems). But that's why I use both -- I backup to offsite and onsite DVD and also keep a hard drive copy. That way, if either site fails or either media fails, the other can create another copy. And I keep all my "finished product" files in the cloud.

I figure in 5 to 10 years I'll have to drag out all my old DVDs and back them up to some new format, probably Blu-Ray or maybe solid state drives. I'll probably be doing this until the day that I die or the world ends.

Using Time Machine is great, but using one form of media in one site has a level of risk. What if your house burns down? Or is hit by a tornado or a flood? What if your nephew decides to play with his new rare earth magnets near your computer and drives? Or, as is most likely, what if you get two drive failures at around the same time?

 

[Stephen Locke]

"I figure in 5 to 10 years I'll have to drag out all my old DVDs and back them up to some new format, probably Blu-Ray or maybe solid state drives. I'll probably be doing this until the day that I die or the world ends."

Exactly, those DVDs will be obsolete media even if they don't go bad. Ergo, they will need to be replaced one way or another. The manual work involved with DVDs probably means I'll never do it. It would take days. Yes, hard-drives go bad but they are sooo easy to dupe. Just start the backup and walk away . . . they don't require me to babysit the process.

"Using Time Machine is great, but using one form of media in one site has a level of risk. What if your house burns down? Or is hit by a tornado or a flood? What if your nephew decides to play with his new rare earth magnets near your computer and drives? Or, as is most likely, what if you get two drive failures at around the same time?"

Again, it's just so easy to have TimeMachine (or any other back up) dupe my hardrive and send it over to my Dads house.

"But what if an F5 hits KC and the whole town gets wiped out?"

OK I see where this is going . . .