Best options for storing my photos

[bgelfand]

Who cares, we got some miles out of it. You had something better to do?

 

Now that you mention it, yes, I do.

 

This past Holiday Season, I built a new computer to replace my over ten-year old i7-870 running Windows 7. I built - I should write over-built - a Ryzen 7 3800X, X570 motherboard based machine with 32 GB of 3200 memory, a so-so Radon 570 graphics board, a place holder 512 GB 970 EVO NVME boot drive (until the Phison E18 and Samsung equivalent controller are released for PCIe 4), a 2 TB HHD for internal backup, a 1 TB SATA 6 SSD for image storage, and installed Windows 10 Professional. I figured that would make a fast and future proof Lightroom/Photoshop machine. I was right - at least about the fast part; I'll have to wait a few years to see about the future proof part. :-)

 

Now, what to do with all that extra processing power? It seems my Nikon D750, my old Canon PowerShot Pro 1, and my phone can take moving pictures, better known as video. I know very little about video and nothing about editing video, other than I need to do it just as I need to process my still images in Lightroom and Photoshop. I looked around and found a free program called DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic. It comes complete with full documentation and a tutorial, a 400 page PDF tutorial,and lesson media. Talk about jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool... :-) All joking aside, Resolve looks to be the video equivalent in complexity of Photoshop for videos. The steep part of the learning curve is learning the vocabulary. Imagine learning Photoshop without knowing what hue and saturation are or for that matter contrast or crop.

 

The media to be edited as a classroom exercise is a cooking show with two Australian ladies. I am learning not only how to edit; I am also learning to cook Spaghettini with prawns! It looks delicious.

 

Oh, I also have to learn how to take videos with the D750. My first attempts yesterday show I have much to learn.

 

Yes, I have at least three better things to do:

 

1) Learn how to take videos with the D750.

2) Learn how to edit videos in DaVinci Resolve. After I finish the 400+ page Beginners Guide, there are four more 400+ page books to read and understand - Advanced Editing, Color Correction, Audio Editing, and Special Effects. It should keep me off the streets and out of trouble for a while.

3) Learn how to cook Spaghettini with prawns.

[mikemorrell]

Hi David,

 

It's unbelievably good to hear that I'm not the only person on the planet who goes through this laborious and very time-consuming process! I would love to have some kind of automated tool/plugin that organises my photos into 'bursts' with one thumbnail per burst. Based on, for example time of capture. I've never really looked into this but I'm not not come across any. Who knows, in the future, AI may even suggest 'the best of the burst', based on a number of criteria. So up until now, I tend to just eyeball the photo thumbnails and rate photos. But 2000-3000 photos are still a heck of a lot of photos to eyeball!

 

Like me, I guess you might have to deal with 'sub-events'. At some events, I need to to get one good shot of as many attendees as possible during a formal ceremony. At running events (after the first year), I agreed to deliver a limited number of representative, 'good' photo's rather than to deliver at least one photo of at least runner. I don't always have the options but (as an an amateur) I'm trying to improve my sensitivity and confidence to take less photos in certain situations and trust that better ones will come up. And even if I miss a really great shot, to have faith that another will probably appear. But I still take the "OK" and 'good' shots whenever they appear ("a bird in the hand ..."). So I still end up eyeballing for the 'something special shots'.

 

Good to hear from you!

 

Mike

 

 

[garygruber]

I'm an old fart and don't fully trust cloud solutions. I keep a multi-TB drive of backups in a fire box at home, along with multi-TB USB-C drive attached to my computer. I should keep another off-site, but this isn't my livelihood, so the risk is not so great. If you want cloud, take your pick. Upload speeds can be very slow with a large number of very large image files. Like others, I advise you cull deeply before saving. I once heard an instructor at the Nikon School note he was lucky to get one keeper from a roll of 36 exposures. I've found that's a very optimistic ratio, particularly in the age of digital and when shooting wildlife. I now do an initial, deep cull as a part of importing via LightRoom. This takes the number down to a manageable amount, and I then cull even deeper as I evaluate images for processing and printing. This was a hard lesson learned, and I have a couple of TB of older, poorly-culled image sets to get through before I'm where I want to be. (This is what I've been working on while locked-down at home the past few months.) That same instructor made the point that bad photographs don't get better with storage in a shoebox. The same applies, I'm quite sure, to digital images on a hard drive. But, for counterpoint, I've found a few less-than-perfect images my improving eye and PP skills have allowed me to make into something desirable that was not initially obvious. Still, this is by far the exception rather than the rule.

 

I used to keep local backups. I now have both a Microsoft OneDrive and GoogleDrive accounts to store nearly 2TB of photos. I have scanned some of my 54 years of negatives and transparencies -- well over 100,000 images. I find cloud storage to be optimal, but Microsoft's software is much better than Googles.

[danny_o]

If the picture is worth saving, print it.

If the picture isn't worth printing, then it isn't worth worrying about.

Nobody will ever look at your pictures, if they are just meaningless snapshots of nothing in particular, especially if ( as likely, at a rate of 1000+ per diem) they are repetitive drivel.

I have spoken.

[jerryrahman]

I am using external SSD. It is fast and best way to store.

cps test

[john_harper9]

At a photo workshop, I asked one of the pros how he culled ... he didn't. He just retired the hard drive(s) and acquired a new and bigger one for new work. A good approach for project by project work, but not for my efforts to organize decades of family images. Lightroom is used for tagging and rating, and when I'm satisfied with rating, all the non-rated images get purged from the working drive. The higher rated images get added to a collection, and the collection is subsequently exported to archive media with the original images.

 

Even with purging, the aggregate of images and working metadata keeps growing. When 4TB SSDs and NVME drives are available, I'll upgrade my workstation.

 

Cloud backup of everything is a non-starter due to slow uploads on my DSL connection. Only the high rated images get pushed up to Google for sharing. Backup goes to NAS and to a USB HDisk.

 

The O.P. didn't want to purchase hardware for storage and post ... but that's the other half of digital photography.

[mickeysimpson]

Print them.

 

 

 

(You'll soon learn to be more selective)

LOL! Is there enough paper to print them?! I see a paper shortage coming.

[Tony Parsons]

LOL! Is there enough paper to print them?! I see a paper shortage coming.

 

There was a paper shortage a few months ago - but that was continuous roll-fed, and far too absorbent for fine detail work.

[chris_thomas21]

On 5/19/2020 at 9:29 PM, DavidTriplett said:

I'm an old fart and don't fully trust cloud solutions. I keep a multi-TB drive of backups in a fire box at home, along with multi-TB USB-C drive attached to my computer. I should keep another off-site, but this isn't my livelihood, so the risk is not so great. If you want cloud, take your pick. Upload speeds can be very slow with a large number of very large image files. Like others, I advise you cull deeply before saving. I once heard an instructor at the Nikon School note he was lucky to get one keeper from a roll of 36 exposures. I've found that's a very optimistic ratio, particularly in the age of digital and when shooting wildlife. I now do an initial, deep cull as a part of importing via LightRoom. This takes the number down to a manageable amount, and I then cull even deeper as I evaluate images for processing and printing. This was a hard lesson learned, and I have a couple of TB of older, poorly-culled image sets to get through before I'm where I want to be. (This is what I've been working on while locked-down at home the past few months.) That same instructor made the point that bad photographs don't get better with storage in a shoebox. The same applies, I'm quite sure, to digital images on a hard drive. But, for counterpoint, I've found a few less-than-perfect images my improving eye and PP skills have allowed me to make into something desirable that was not initially obvious. Still, this is by far the exception rather than the rule.

There is best option is cloud These developments mean you can store lots of photos on your camera. But keeping the shots on your memory card is bad practice. Thanks for sharing this type of information 

Edited October 24, 2022 by chris_thomas21
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