RAW management

nwoods

Expedition Leader
I don't think Flikr reads RAW images? You are best to store them on your hard drive (and a back up drive somewhere). Picasa has online storage, but the software itself is an "aggregator" where it finds and indexes all the images on whatever drive you tell it to search. It does not move your images though you can set it up to import new images from the camera and save them in a designated drive or folder though.
 

smslavin

Adventurer
Adobe Lightroom?

This would be a good choice especially if you can only run an older version of Aperture. Highly recommend you take a look at it. It'll give you the cataloging capability you need plus the ability to streamline your exports. It's non-destructive editing as well and you won't need another program. Pretty close to 100% of what you need to do is available in LR.

Storage is another issue entirely. RAW files are large and the transfer speed of whatever you have them is a gating factor. An external USB drive will suffice but you'll start beating your head on a wall fairly soon.

I don't know if this has any bearing on what you were looking for in terms of answers, but this is my setup.

I have a drive box from MacGurus that is holding 6 1TB drives and two SATA cards. The drives are split in two 3TB RAID arrays, one for originals and one of the backup of the originals.

On the Originals array, there are folders named sequentially like this: RAW_xxxx_YYMMDD. xxxx started at 0001. Each folder holds 4GB and is dated on its creation, not modification. The 4GB limit allows for easy DVD backup.

When I'm done shooting, depending not the number of cards I've filled, I'll either copy the card contents to the Originals array and then import into LR or just import into LR directly and have it place the files into the correct folders.

In my LR catalog, I have separate sections for client work and personal work. Client work is organized by session IDs that are generated from another piece of software. Personal work is split into several sections. I usually go a full calendar year on each catalog which puts about 100k (give or take) images in the catalog. From my personal experience, LR starts to slow dramatically as you approach the 6 figure mark.

Sometime next year, I'll be buying another 6TB box. I'll move my Originals array to that box and reformat the old one to be a full 6TB to be the new backup array.

I also have some Automator scripts set up to help streamline other aspects of the workflow. For example, exporting from LR and uploading to my lab.

Hope that wasn't too much info or unclear. Sometimes I consider giving it all up and going back to filing slides and negatives. It was so much easier...
 

dependencies

Observer
Evidently you have a handle on this,
The thing I keep thinking is, my pictures might be of some interest to someone beside myself, and I'd like the option to improve them the jurys still out on that one,
Likely I might spring for an external HD and review this in a few months,

Its catch 22, you don't want the hassle beyond Picasa, but all photographers want the very best results none the less, but I can see why people look at RAW and switch back to JPEG quickly :)
 

john101477

Photographer in the Wild
I shoot everything in raw, save everything as a PSD and only "flatten" once I am completely finished with a project, BUT I only save what i really like or believe to be useful. All Web content is processed and saved in a separate folder. I also keep 2 external hard drives. One with me and one at another location.
This may seem extreme to many but with the amount of travel I do it is really the only way to ensure my work is safe.
 

smslavin

Adventurer
This may seem extreme to many but with the amount of travel I do it is really the only way to ensure my work is safe.

Not extreme at all. I have a "live" backup copy (second drive array), one set of backup DVDs here at the house and another set of backup DVDs in a safe deposit box. At some point, I'll probably be replacing the DVDs with external drives.
 

john101477

Photographer in the Wild
Yeah I am trying to find some way to leave one external in cali and just update once a week. I am unfamiliar with "the cloud" so to speak but I know a lot of folks back up their work using it some how.
 

ThomD

Explorer
Yeah I am trying to find some way to leave one external in cali and just update once a week. I am unfamiliar with "the cloud" so to speak but I know a lot of folks back up their work using it some how.

"The cloud" is just fancy-speak for "internet based storage". If you backup to Amazon's storage service, you don't really know where everything is, you just know it will be available to you where ever you happen to be.

the biggest challenge with off site storage is simply the amount of data you have to move. Like you, I only keep the interesting versions of photos. I can go from 250 shots to 15-25 that I keep. One copy on the local HD, one on the Network storage device, one copy on an ftp site with Go Daddy. Plus an upload of a jpg to smugmug for sharing. The uploads to Go Daddy can take a long time.
 

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