Hard Drive Space

fd1075ny

Whats up guys and girls. I have a quick question on how you guys store your images. Considering the thousands of photos taken over the course of time, how do you go about saving your images and keeping them from clogging up space on your computer. I have several backup drives that I use. But have yet to pull the trigger on removing these images from my Mac to free up the space. I was wondering if anyone had some advice to share. I use both iPhoto and LR. Thanks in advance.

Dan

Richard

I do my culling and processing on my local drive, which is backed up nightly to an external drive. Periodically, I move the pics I am done with to an external drive and for safety, that drive is synced with a second external drive. So at any given time, I have two copies of everything on separate media, which I consider to be the minimal requirement. My better stuff gets uploaded to SmugMug as well, so if my house burns down at least I'll have high quality JPGs of the pics that matter most. I'm an amateur, so that's good enough for me, but if I were relying on photography as a business, I would want everything backed up to the cloud as well, raws included. There are a number of reasonably priced services available. In the end, how much time and money you spend depend on how valuable you consider your photos to be.

I've never used iPhoto so I can't say much about that. In principle, it will complicate your life if you are using multiple databases, as you need to insure that all of them are aware of the current location of each file. It would probably be worth your while to move all the iPhoto stuff to LR so that you are dealing with a single catalog, and remember that you will need to use LR to move files to external storage rather than just doing it from the Finder. You also should make sure that you have backup copies of your LR catalog on external storage.

FlowingLight

I have all my photos stored on a NAS with around 9TB of storage. I currently have around 8TB free so I'm not going to worry anytime soon, lol.

pathfinder

I store my images on a local Raid Array ( Promise Pegasus ) and back it up with two other external hard drives, for a total of 3 separate copies of my Raw files and Lightroom catalog.

I have not gone to Cloud back up yet, but that is the next step for me.

Peano

fd1075ny wrote: »

I have a quick question on how you guys store your images.

Another question worth asking is: Why do you store any given image? Storage is cheap nowadays, I know. Even so, why squirrel away two or three copies each of 15,000 throwaway images? Some images should be saved, others should be deleted. Come up with a rationale for deciding which is which.

puzzledpaul

Peano wrote: »

Another question worth asking is: Why do you store any given image? Storage is cheap nowadays, I know. Even so, why squirrel away two or three copies each of 15,000 throwaway images? Some images should be saved, others should be deleted. Come up with a rationale for deciding which is which.

Yep.
On the occasions I revisit stuff that's been kept (for whatever reason) and manage to dump vast amounts I feel as if I've definitely achieved something worthwhile.

Storage may well be cheap ... but the energy use / consumption associated with IT / data centres is another issue.

pp

pathfinder

I still wander through my files shot over the last dozen years, and occasionally find an image that I ignored or thought not worth editing back then, that now, with better software, gives me an image I rather like.

nfocuz

Installed a Western Digital My Cloud DL4100. Super Happy!!! Migrated from a SBS. Should done this long ago. Use it as a backup. Production still done on files stored on the laptop.