Losing your files on a CD-R or two is a topical subject at the moment. OK, so losing a couple of CDs of images isn't as catastrophic as mislaying the personal financial details of 25million people, but those lost CDs can mean family upset and heartache. Worse, if you are selling your images, it can mean lost sales or even lawsuits.
It used to be so easy. Most put their negatives and slides in a shoebox under the stairs. The more hardcore used A4 sleeves and binders. Serious users had wall upon wall of boxes of photographic paper with negatives and ready to roll prints. That was your archive and - just so long as the house didn't catch fire - things were fine.
That all ended with digital. Archiving your photos isn't that difficult, but that's not how most people seem to paint it. "It's so easy, even a mathematics post-graduate could do it!" seems to be the cry in the digital domain.
The problem is two-fold. First, you need to find a reliable method (or methods) of storing your images, because just dealing with the hard disk drive inside your computer is a very bad move (you'll fill it up, and if the disk crashes so your memories die). Then, you need a simple and robust method of finding your images in the future. This last isn't as easy as it sounds, and making a method of finding images that works across multiple storage systems becomes very complex.
It's a good idea to have your images on at least two different media from the moment you bring them into the computer. Initially, your pictures are stored on your media card (so they are only saved once); importing them to your computer's HDD means you have those images stored twice - once on the original card, once on the computer.
Most downloader/browser programs allow the user to rename these originals as they are downloaded/imported/ingested. This is one of the best reasons for using a dedicated browser or downloader program, like Breezebrowser or PhotoMechanic (Adobe's Lightroom is not just a browser, but has the same flexibility). PhotoMechanic, Nikon Transfer and Lightroom (among others) allow you to automatically download to two separate hard drives, which automates a lot of the process.
You should at least consider appending the date as a prefix to the original filename. Try using 'year-month-day_title_original-filename' (for example '071123_anchovy_DSC01127.nef'); this allows you to quickly search for your work by the date you photographed it, the 'job' and camera's own incremental file naming. This last is not so important when using the same camera all the time (in which case a simple incremental '071123_ anchovy _001.nef' is fine) but if you use more than one camera, preserving the camera's file name lets you see which camera was doing what... and why. A good trick here is to change the standard filename prefix in camera to differentiate; mine have the prefix 'ASA' and 'ASB'.
These renamed original files are all contained in a newly created-folder marked 'master_files' inside another newly-created folder with the same 'year_month_day_title' naming system ('071123_ anchovy'). This 'job' folder is often best stored in the 'My Pictures' or 'Pictures' folder on the computer, unless your programs insist on storing them somewhere else. If you are being really pendantic, write these new folders and sub folders into a separate folder marked '_new_captures', and keep them there until you have burned copies of these master files to CD or DVD. This should be your next priority. Whether you burn to disc from the browser program, a separate dedicated burning program like Roxio's Toast, or even from the operating system itself is a matter of taste, although Toast appears the most reliable and simplest method for handling files that need to be burned across more than one disc.
Once again, title the CD or DVD using the same naming convention as before, adding a suffix if more than one disc is required to save those master files (I use '071123_ anchovy _a', '071123_ anchovy _b' and so on). When these discs are burned and tested, you can reformat your media cards, because you now have two sets of those master files. Go back to your choice of program and make a contact sheet of thumbnails of each disc (heavy laser printer paper and draft print quality is fine) and insert this in the jewel case of each disc. Remove these files to a safe place (the truly paranoid will store these masters in another location, to reduce the chance of theft or fire damage from taking out all your back-ups).
You now have a series of master files, both on your HDD and saved to CD or DVD. Never, EVER do anything destructive to these files in post processing. Programs like Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 work non-destructively on files, but many do not; if your image editing program works on the files themselves instead of the metadata appended to the file, always make copies of every image you work on. To this end, I create a 'WIP' (work in progress) folder nestling next to that master file folder inside each job folder and make a copy of any master files I plan on working on, using the 'Save As...' command in Photoshop. These copies are saved in the WIP folder.
When a file has been worked on in Photoshop (or similar), the end result - whether TIFF or JPEG - is saved in a third and final 'completed' folder. These are then sent to the client, printer or whatever you intend doing with those completed files. Depending on the requirements of the end user, these files can be renamed descriptively, given essentially the same filename as before or something in between. Generally, if sending a selection of photos to a friend or client, renumber them ('071123_anchovy_001.jpg', '071123_anchovy_002.jpg' etc). Now, save the whole 'completed' folder to yet another CD or DVD as before, making sure you highlight that these are the completed files as clearly as possible in the disc name. Unless your intermediary 'WIP' files are useful to you, delete the whole WIP folder and its contents.
If you have an external HDD as added storage, drag the whole job folder (containing the 'master_file' and 'completed' folders and all the files within both) on to the HDD. Once you are sure everything has been transferred and you have CD or DVD back-ups of the same files, take a deep breath and delete the files and folders on your computer. We haven't even touched upon updating your cataloguing program, because this will depend on the program itself, but you need to amend your programs to show where the files are stored.
Finally, as an added precaution, it's worth revisiting your stored files every few years and resaving them onto newer, fresher media. Hard disks can fail over time from being stored too long and many people have checked out a CD-R from the turn of the century only to find the disc has degraded beyond any chance of saving. Also, if you use RAW master files, you might want to translate them into DNG format for archival purposes, just because there's no guarantee that tomorrow's programs will support today's RAW files.
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