Re-organize my photos

Dogdots · October 13, 2007

I want to re-organize all my photos I have. They are on rewriteables now. I want to go thru them and get rid of the ones I don't want to keep anymore and keep the others. To do so I must copy/paste them to a new file and then re-copy them to a disc. Is this ok? Or is there a better way of doing this as to not degrade my photos.

I really didn't think I would have so many photos and am finding out that I have many, many, many and way to many

I read someplace you have to be your own editor from h#$$. So this is what I want to do. If someone could help me I would be so happy :ivar

DavidTO · October 13, 2007

I moved this thread to Finishing School.

jfriend · October 13, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

I want to re-organize all my photos I have. They are on rewriteables now. I want to go thru them and get rid of the ones I don't want to keep anymore and keep the others. To do so I must copy/paste them to a new file and then re-copy them to a disc. Is this ok? Or is there a better way of doing this as to not degrade my photos.

I really didn't think I would have so many photos and am finding out that I have many, many, many and way to many

I read someplace you have to be your own editor from h#$$. So this is what I want to do. If someone could help me I would be so happy :ivar

How many gigabytes of images to you have on rewritables? Storage these days costs only about 25-50 cents/GB so even if you had 200GB of images, you could solve this problem for less than $100 of hard drive space. It is so time consuming to keep images on optical media and the media doesn't last forever that I find it worthwhile to just buy enough hard disk space. You can get a 500GB, external USB 2.0 drive for $129.99 on Amazon.

If you really want to trim what you have on optical media, then I'd say copy them to your hard drive. Delete the ones you don't want and then burn a new disk with the remaining ones. This won't touch the remaining image files so there's no sacrifice in quality.

rustic · October 13, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

To do so I must copy/paste them to a new file and then re-copy them to a disc. Is this ok? Or is there a better way of doing this as to not degrade my photos.

When you say "copy/paste them to a new file" I'm assuming you just mean that you're copying the entire file from one place to another?

As long as you're just copying the file (as opposed to opening it and resaving it as a new jpeg or something), you can copy it as many times as you like and it's not going to have the least bit of impact on the image.

Dogdots · October 13, 2007

Thank you for the information. I know that buying these disc's and the cases is a costly expense. I even looked into getting the books that hold all the disc's so I didn't have to buy all these cases. And storage of all this stuff takes alot of space.

I have thought long and hard about an external hard drive. Then I start looking at the different brands and wonder which is the best, etc. But I have heard some horror stories about the externals losing data. I have this fear that I have all my pictures loaded and poof they are gone. That scares me.

I'm glad to know that I can transfer my files the way I stated. I thought I might be making a big mistake.

As for an external I would appreciate it if you can recommend one and maybe let me know all there is to know about them. Getting information from someone who has and uses one is good.

~~~~Mary

jfriend · October 13, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

Thank you for the information. I know that buying these disc's and the cases is a costly expense. I even looked into getting the books that hold all the disc's so I didn't have to buy all these cases. And storage of all this stuff takes alot of space.

I have thought long and hard about an external hard drive. Then I start looking at the different brands and wonder which is the best, etc. But I have heard some horror stories about the externals losing data. I have this fear that I have all my pictures loaded and poof they are gone. That scares me.

I'm glad to know that I can transfer my files the way I stated. I thought I might be making a big mistake.

As for an external I would appreciate it if you can recommend one and maybe let me know all there is to know about them. Getting information from someone who has and uses one is good.

~~~~Mary

I have a Seagate 500MB USB2 external drive and it works great. It's not difficult to buy one these days. Just make sure you look for the following specs:

The storage amount you want. The sizes in the range of 300GB-500GB will probably be the most cost effective/GB.
USB2 (usually it should say something like "full speed" or "high speed"). An eSata connection can be a little faster, but only fairly new PCs come with that type of external drive connection so yours may not have it. All PCs have had USB2 for the last few years.
A brand name like Seagate, Hitachi, Iomega or Maxtor is generally safe these days. I wouldn't buy a brand name you don't recognize.
Some examples at Amazon:

After that, there's not much to it. External hard drives are completely plug and play. Just plug it in to a USB2 or eSata port and start using it.

wxwax · October 13, 2007

I've opted for external hard drives. They're getting to be really inexpensive. You can't beat the flexibility and storage capacity.

You'll have to make sure you have a backup hard drive. That can either be the one in your computer, or a second external.

As long as your shots are on two separate hard drives, you should be fine.

Dogdots · October 13, 2007

I was going to open the file and copy and paste them into a new file. Then copy the new file to disc. That way I don't have pictures on my disc's that I don't want anymore.

I was trying to dwindle down my discs to just pictures I want.

So I guess I'm outa luck doing this aren't I?

As for the externals--I'm going shopping tomorrow to look them over. I think its about time to get one. How does one get so many pictures:D .

ShebaJo · October 13, 2007

Maybe you could keep the discs you have been working on, use them as your extra backup... then copy the pics you want to keep to an external hard drive? That way, you won't feel your hard work is wasted.

One of my friends burns a disc monthly, then backs up on his external hard drive. I used to burn to disc, switched to just using a Seagate external hard drives.

Dogdots · October 14, 2007

Sounds like a good idea. Thanks!

rustic · October 14, 2007

Like Sid said, if you can keep them on two drives, you should be fine.

I've heard good things about the Western Digital MyBook drives. I've had a 250GB from them for about a year and have had no problems.

My favorite way to buy things like this is to go to www.newegg.com, find the category that I'm looking for (ie, hard drives with USB2 and at least 250GB) and then sort the results by rating. You can usually find a model with 50-100 five star ratings, along with pros and cons from people who have bought them.

Dogdots · October 15, 2007

Rustic alot of info in that site. Thanks.

But, now I have another question. If the external hard drive dies, what happens to all you stored in there?

Probably you've lost it all. And you go out and buy another external and download all your pictures from the discs you've saved the originals to. Right?

claudermilk · October 15, 2007

Get paired drives and back everything up. I have a well-known, and well-earned phobia of storing my images on burnable optical media. When you consider reliability, access convenience, storage convenience, and cost, hard drives win on every count.

Dogdots · October 15, 2007

Sounds so reasonable and smart to do. Still scares me tho.

I sapose anything can fail and you just have to get the best that is out there and it seems to be externals. I just know what can happen to hard drives in your computer. Thats what makes me so afraid of externals.

dmmattix · October 15, 2007

claudermilk wrote:

Get paired drives and back everything up. I have a well-known, and well-earned phobia of storing my images on burnable optical media. When you consider reliability, access convenience, storage convenience, and cost, hard drives win on every count.

I agree with Chris here. The problems with Portable Hard Drives generally come with 'Portable' stuff. Most people lose their Portable Hard Drives by dropping them. If you are careful with them they will work very well. However you have to drop a DvD pretty hard to mess it up

. Scratches on the other hand...

The best approach is probably to use both and be careful with both. But how far you go generally depends upon how deep the paranoia runs. Nothing is 100% failure proof, you just have to decide how much you are will do and spend to get to your level of comfort.

Me, I have an external hard drive and just bought 100 DvD-R's last week...

Regards,

Mike

Dogdots · October 15, 2007

I'm going to purchase 2 externals and some DvD's.

I bought some Dvd's -R's as I was told that is what I needed. I ran into a problem downloading pictures to them. Some only came thru halfway. Is that common? And should I have gotten +R's instead. I don't know what the difference is. Maybe someone can help me with this issue.

I seem to be a woman with a lot of issues lately. No comment to that statement

Cuong · October 15, 2007

I agree with others regarding external hard disks. I got a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external hard drive (USB 2.0 connection only) 5 months ago for $200. Costco now sells the same hard drive for $200 but it has all 3 types of connection: USB 2.0, eSATA, and FireWire 400. Seagate hard disks are really reliable based on my experience with them.

If you're worried about hard disk failure, get a couple external ones and mirror the data (identical data going to each disk). Also think about off-site storage for your backup: uploading your photos to a smugmug account and/or put them on DVDs on regular basis and store them somewhere else.

Regardless of which backup/redundancy method you use, make sure you use it regularly. Some backup is still better than no backup at all. Good luck.

Cuong

jfriend · October 15, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

Sounds so reasonable and smart to do. Still scares me tho.

I sapose anything can fail and you just have to get the best that is out there and it seems to be externals. I just know what can happen to hard drives in your computer. Thats what makes me so afraid of externals.

As far as general reliability goes, DVDs scare the heck out of me because they have an unknown lifetime and can deteriorate and fail to be readable by some or all drives at nearly any time. Further, refreshing them onto newer media every few years is an enormously time consuming task.

Perhaps you are more discinplined than I, but when I put "enormous time" + "backup process" together, I end up just not doing it very often so any backup strategy that takes a lot of my time just fails to work for me.

As my library exploded to hundreds of GB, the problem got even more challenging.

That's why I use backups to hard drives. The whole process is automated and fast and can even be set to run without taking any of my time. I have copies of my photos on three hard drives. One on my main photo PC (the working copy). The second on an internal hard drive in another PC on the home LAN (this one backs up every night). The third on an external USB drive. All are 500GB drives. With three separate drives (coincidentally all different brands and all on different computers), I am completely covered against regular hard drive failures.

I learned the hard way when I had an unrecoverable hard drive crash several years ago and lost some photos. I had some backed up on CD, but many were not because of the pain of the backup process. Now everything is backed up automatically within hours of coming out of the camera.

Dogdots · October 15, 2007

Ok....I hope to get my external this week-end.

I will use the external and also burn to CD. Now, I have been reading that many of you have Seagate. Why Seagate over Western Digital? Is it just cost?

Cuong · October 15, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

Ok....I hope to get my external this week-end.

I will use the external and also burn to CD. Now, I have been reading that many of you have Seagate. Why Seagate over Western Digital? Is it just cost?

I think Seagate FreeAgent looks much cooler than WD My Book. Since I have to see the external hard disk, might as well get the nicer looking one.

Cuong

dmmattix · October 15, 2007

jfriend wrote:

As far as general reliability goes, DVDs scare the heck out of me because they have an unknown lifetime and can deteriorate and fail to be readable by some or all drives at nearly any time. Further, refreshing them onto newer media every few years is an enormously time consuming task.

Similarly external hard drives scare the hell out of me. Do you realize the number of moving parts and tolerances required to keep that thing working reliably? Besides how many SCSI-1 Interfaces are there still out there that will work with XP or Vista or even MAC-OS/X. What I am saying is that the interfaces are probably changing more rapidly than the optical formats. I guess if you keep moving up the food change technology wise you can always get the latest and greatest, copy everything over to that, mirror it, and move on. None of it sounds horribly maintainable to me.

Just something to think about.

Regards,

Mike

jfriend · October 15, 2007

dmmattix wrote:

Similarly external hard drives scare the hell out of me. Do you realize the number of moving parts and tolerances required to keep that thing working reliably? Besides how many SCSI-1 Interfaces are there still out there that will work with XP or Vista or even MAC-OS/X. What I am saying is that the interfaces are probably changing more rapidly than the optical formats. I guess if you keep moving up the food change technology wise you can always get the latest and greatest, copy everything over to that, mirror it, and move on. None of it sounds horribly maintainable to me.

Just something to think about.

Regards,

Mike

I disagree with your point. Yes, you have to migrate your technology to stay current. But, that is true with optical disc formats or with hard drives and it was true with tape and floppies before these.

The beauty of hard drives is that you can buy a newer drive, plug it into your PC, copy your current backup over to it (or just run a new backup from scratch) and be done in a matter of an hour or so of unattended copy time. Try migrating old optical discs to a new format or making a new backup set. You could be sitting there for days feeding it discs. Because it's such a pain, most people won't do it and pretty soon you've just got a bunch of backup media that has either gotten so old it can't be reliably read by any drive or you no longer own drives capable of reading it.

Unlike optical media, I don't do a hard drive backup and put the hard drive in my drawer. I may occasionally rotate a drive off site, but my main backup drives are kept live and connected to my PC and working. If I'm contemplating a new PC, I either buy one that is compatible with my existing external drives (easy with USB2) or I plan for an upgrade to my external drive as part of the new system purchase.

USB has proven so far to have good staying power. USB 1.1 compatiblity has been around for a long time and looks like it will continue to be around. USB2 kept that compatibility and added a lot of improvements. USB 3.0 is in the planning stages and is demonstrating a 10x speed improvement while keeping backward support for prior versions of USB. This is not like the days of proprietary tape drives where you backup solution was obsolete in two years or less. USB drives can be useful for a very long time.

My content needs are growing fast enough and drives are dropping in price fast enough that I don't find I need to keep an external drive in operation more than two years anyway (though I could) because I'm usually incented to replace it with something that is faster, has more storage and is cheaper in that time frame.

As for SCSI, I agree with you. SCSI never was committed to and baked into the OS by Microsoft and built into the default hardware configuration in the way that USB is (the way Dell, HP and everyone else building PCs has done - USB is now baked into the core chipsets used in motherboard designs).

dmmattix · October 15, 2007

jfriend wrote:

I disagree with your point. Yes, you have to migrate your technology to stay current. But, that is true with optical disc formats or with hard drives and it was true with tape and floppies before these.

The beauty of hard drives is that you can buy a newer drive, plug it into your PC, copy your current backup over to it (or just run a new backup from scratch) and be done in a matter of an hour or so of unattended copy time. Try migrating old optical discs to a new format or making a new backup set. You could be sitting there for days feeding it discs. Because it's such a pain, most people won't do it and pretty soon you've just got a bunch of backup media that has either gotten so old it can't be reliably read by any drive or you no longer own drives capable of reading it.

Unlike optical media, I don't do a hard drive backup and put the hard drive in my drawer. I may occasionally rotate a drive off site, but my main backup drives are kept live and connected to my PC and working. If I'm contemplating a new PC, I either buy one that is compatible with my existing external drives (easy with USB2) or I plan for an upgrade to my external drive as part of the new system purchase.

USB has proven so far to have good staying power. USB 1.1 compatiblity has been around for a long time and looks like it will continue to be around. USB2 kept that compatibility and added a lot of improvements. USB 3.0 is in the planning stages and is demonstrating a 10x speed improvement while keeping backward support for prior versions of USB. This is not like the days of proprietary tape drives where you backup solution was obsolete in two years or less. USB drives can be useful for a very long time.

My content needs are growing fast enough and drives are dropping in price fast enough that I don't find I need to keep an external drive in operation more than two years anyway (though I could) because I'm usually incented to replace it with something that is faster, has more storage and is cheaper in that time frame.

As for SCSI, I agree with you. SCSI never was committed to and baked into the OS by Microsoft and built into the default hardware configuration in the way that USB is (the way Dell, HP and everyone else building PCs has done - USB is now baked into the core chipsets used in motherboard designs).

It is just fine for you disagree with me I just want people to understand that portable hard drives are not the panacea many here make them out to be. While they are quite a bit cheaper now they are still pretty expensive when you getting into getting pair so you can mirror them for reliability and even more so when you get a third one to cycle through the mirrored set for offline backup. Most people don't go through this effort (mostly due to the expense) and when they have problems with there single drive they have real problems. While DvD's have their drawbacks, I have never seen one fail due to power surges (Power company provided or lightning strikes), overheating (many portable hard drives are convection cooled - a real potential problem), or being accidently knocked off a bed/desk/recliner/you name it. I have seen portables fail for each of these reasons.

Again I have nothing against portable hard drives. I use them myself. You just have to decide what level of protection gives you the comfort you require but you need to do so being a fully informed as possible.

Over and out,

Mike

P.S. I just finished typing this and found the following post here in Finishing School:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=658092#post658092

Dogdots · October 15, 2007

Hummm....Going out of town tomorrow. I will do a lot of thinking on this while tooling down the road

I understand that everyone is different in what they think is best. When I started this process I copied my originals to CD-RW's. Ok, I thought that worked cool. Then I moved to DVD's---which I had a big problem. All my pictures didn't come thru. It said they were there, but they didn't load for me to see them in the thumbnails. So I went back to CD-RW's knowing I needed something better.

Next was the externals which did scare me, but I knew it was the next best thing or else store them off site someplace.

You all have been so good in your imput and advice for me. Still wondering though why my DVD's didn't show all my pictures

~~~~Mary

Dizzle · October 16, 2007

External drives
I have been using external drives for backups for years, before it was the popular thing to do.

I recently upgraded to 3 Western Digital My Books (500GB for $129 is pretty dang cheap)

I have two that are mirrored and one that, in a pinch, I will actually take mobile with me.

I also have two 500GB SATA drives in my main desktop...having multiple backups in the key. I worked for DoD and learned early on that backing up our work was more important than the work we did...

!

I tried the CD/DVDs and that resulted in tears for me when all my film prints that I had professionally scanned to DVD were lost/destroyed. Seems DVD media isn't as long lasting as one would like it to be.

Backup and backup often. HDs are dirt cheap and far more reliable than they use to be.

Dogdots · October 16, 2007

HD's ?

denisegoldberg · October 16, 2007

I've been using an external drive plus Amazon S3 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261) for off-site storage.

Admittedly, I'm not a professional and I don't have the volume that some of you do, so S3 is still a reasonable solution for me.

I was using two external drives and keeping one at home and one at my office. Then I realized that more often than not both drives were in my house. And I kept thinking about fire. No, it's not a high probability, but it was bothering me.

--- Denise

claudermilk · October 16, 2007

I have to pipe up again now. I am total agreement with John here.

Yes, HDDs are complex mechanical devices, the manufacturing of which has been perfected a long time ago. In my experience they have been proven to be quite reliable overall. No, not 100%, but a damn sight closer than burnable optical media, which is still in it's infancy. Cost? OK, I'll concede that looking at prices again--doubled up, HDDs are about 0.40/GB, a T-Y runs about 0.25/disk or 0.05/GB, so 0.10/GB (I won't consider any other brand). However, you get 4.2GB per disk vs 200GB-1TB per disk in HDDs. So, convenience, HDDs win by a long ways. Interface? SCSI is a poor example & seemingly chosen specifically for that. For shame.:nono The typical interface is now SATA which looks to have at least as long legs as the venerabe old (and still used) ATA (now "PATA"). Somehow I don't imagine hooking up a hard drive with the common interface will be a problem for a long time to come. COme to think of it, are there even any SCSI-based external, or removable drive setups? All I recall seeing is SATA or PATA.

In rebuttal to the point made about drive failure, those maladies are fairly easily guarded against, and with proper backups shouldn't be a big deal. I have seen a quite large stack of DVDs fail just because with no warning. No external influence was needed. They just failed from age--all of 18 months of proper storage per manufacturer's recommendations. How do you guard against that? Keep in mind half the failures were the backups. In my book, that does not constitute reliability. Now that I've trod both paths, I see that IMHO overall HDDs are by far the best way to go.

I'm not trying to be combative, I just feel strongly about this and hate to think of another photographer suffering the same data lost I have through trusting important data to the improper technology.

Dogdots · October 16, 2007

Are you saying that HDD'S are just a term or an external? Also I heard that you can just plug in your external and transfer your files to there then unplug it. Is that true?

One more question---How do you protect it from crashing and losing all your files?

Denise---I read the link....sounds good. I will have to check into it. My files aren't that large yet. I have about 60+ RW's now. I don't know what that equates to in size. 700MB x 60+ =

dmmattix · October 16, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

Are you saying that HDD'S are just a term or an external? Also I heard that you can just plug in your external and transfer your files to there then unplug it. Is that true?

HDD = Hard Disk Drive

Can be either internal or external

Regards,

Mike

ShebaJo · October 16, 2007

Dogdots wrote:

Are you saying that HDD'S are just a term or an external? Also I heard that you can just plug in your external and transfer your files to there then unplug it. Is that true?

One more question---How do you protect it from crashing and losing all your files?

Denise---I read the link....sounds good. I will have to check into it. My files aren't that large yet. I have about 60+ RW's now. I don't know what that equates to in size. 700MB x 60+ =

hard disk drive... hdd
yep, you can plug/unplug, copy or transfer...via usb or firewire, sata
fast and very easy, much easier (to me) than cd/dvds

Re-organize my photos

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