Photo storage on hard drive
Nov 21, 2015 11:24:59 #
jaycoffman
Loc: San Diego
I use a Mac for my main photo storage and processing. Until recently I've used iPhoto but Apple is giving up on that and I reached more than it's limit and lost a few thousand pictures. I do not like Photos so do not want to get into that. I have recently gotten LR/PS on the monthly plan and am moving most of my pictures there. But my question is, where should I keep them on my hard drive. I'm thinking that I could keep a master file in Pictures but am not sure about that. (Oh, I do back up on two external drives--one for photos only.)
Does anyone know how stable Pictures is? Or somewhere else?
Does anyone know how stable Pictures is? Or somewhere else?
Nov 21, 2015 11:40:27 #
romanticf16
Loc: Commerce Twp, MI
jaycoffman wrote:
I use a Mac for my main photo storage and processi... (show quote)
I'd set up a "my Lightroom" folder in Pictures. Keep the Lightroom Catilog and Thumbnail images there. Set up 2 external drives to keep 2 copies of your ORIGINAL images, RAW or jpeg. Then set up an offsite duplicate backup or Cloud backup. The Pictures folder in a Mac is part of your primary data on the Mac and is safe and sound. The main issue is not to overfill your Mac's drive and slow down the computer, so let Lightroom store orignal images on external drives and only keep "proxy" thumbnail images on your computer to keep file sizes down.
Nov 21, 2015 11:49:05 #
jaycoffman
Loc: San Diego
Thank you--that is excellent advice and I will work on that. So far I'm OK on storage as I have a fairly new 1T-byte Mac and a 2T and 500 MB external storage. I know I should look for one more cloud storage but that will have to wait until I get all this organized. Thanks again.
Nov 21, 2015 12:05:43 #
Computer guy here. I concur with the external drives. I personally use Carbonite and at this point have 1.4TB out there. It's unlimited, it just takes a while to get large quantities of stuff out there for your initial backup. In the event of a disaster, they can ship you an external drive overnight for a fee or you can prioritize what you want to restore right away, with the rest dribbling in over time. With the latest ransomware attacks scrambling your PC, Mac and external drives, the rolling 30 days they keep of all of your files is your only sure-bet protection anymore. Good luck.
Nov 21, 2015 12:07:29 #
Nov 21, 2015 12:12:36 #
jaycoffman wrote:
I use a Mac for my main photo storage and processi... (show quote)
I use a mac and do not use Pictures. I use Lightroom and keep all images taken since I started using LR on an external drive, backed up on another external. I bypass Pictures altogether, though my legacy photos from pre-lightroom do still live there and I am OK with that. Currently the only thing new that goes into Pictures are the odd iphone shots that I want to keep. I can't see why you'd want an extra copy in Pictures if you aren't using the program, maybe there's something I'm not understanding about what you are trying to do.
Nov 21, 2015 12:28:15 #
jaycoffman
Loc: San Diego
I'm not sure--I suspect it's something I'm not understanding but the answers are starting to give me a better [shall we say] picture of what's going on. Thanks for your response--it gives me another perspective to think about.
Nov 21, 2015 12:37:42 #
jaycoffman wrote:
I'm not sure--I suspect it's something I'm not understanding but the answers are starting to give me a better [shall we say] picture of what's going on. Thanks for your response--it gives me another perspective to think about.
It just seems like keeping an extra copy in pictures sort of defeats the purpose I have for the images living on an external. I don't want to fill up my hard drive with photos, I like keeping my hard drive very lean and agile. Thus, all master images and their backups reside on large, fast externals.
Nov 21, 2015 18:10:26 #
I just have all my photos in category sub-directories under "PHOTOS" on my hard drive (C:\PHOTOS), which is off of the root (for easy locating). The PHOTOS directory gets backed up by Carbonite. It seems like each editor wants to store them in their own place - heck with that.
Nov 21, 2015 19:39:31 #
Defense in Depth is best for critical backups. Weekly, I back up the entire photo folder to a network NAS drive configured for Raid disk mirroring. Every other week, I automatically synch everything with Dropbox cloud storage.
Nov 22, 2015 07:08:09 #
jaycoffman wrote:
I'm thinking that I could keep a master file in Pictures but am not sure about that. (Oh, I do back up on two external drives--one for photos only.)
Does anyone know how stable Pictures is? Or somewhere else?
Does anyone know how stable Pictures is? Or somewhere else?
I've always said that companies should do a better job naming their products. When you said you wanted to keep your images in a master file in Pictures, I thought you might have meant having a folder called "Pictures," with all your images stored there. I also thought you could be referring to the software program called Pictures. From reading the other posts, I see my second hunch was right.
I keep all my photos in a folder called My Pictures, sorted into folders within that.
Nov 22, 2015 07:35:02 #
DavidPine
Loc: Fredericksburg, TX
If you make a lot of images you will soon run out of space on your hard drive. I recommend having several external hard drives and a cloud storage backup. I don't allow any program to determine where my files are kept. Before I import my images from my SD or CF cards I create 2 files on one of my external drives. I title one for the name of the shoot and I title one for the name of the shoot plus I add Finals to it. I import my images to the first file then I import from there to Lightroom. When I have completed processing an image I export to the Finals folder. For business purposes, I then export my Finals folder to DropBox for delivery to my client.
jaycoffman wrote:
I use a Mac for my main photo storage and processi... (show quote)
Nov 22, 2015 08:48:53 #
FYI Interesting article about the ransomware scam on the Mac.....https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-8071
Mr PC wrote:
Computer guy here. I concur with the external dri... (show quote)
Nov 22, 2015 09:24:56 #
I keep 3 copies of all my files on 3 separate hard drives, one at home and 2 at different off sites, and it takes 2 drives to hold all my files (so a total of 6). I used to keep only 2 copies, one on and one off site. Unfortunately, both versions of one of the drives failed, so I had no access to those files. Fortunately, I have a computer tech where I worked. He was unable to retrieve any files from one of the drives, but was able to disassemble the other and retrieve the files. Whew!!! I don't trust cloud storage, since I heard a horror story from a professional photographer.
Nov 22, 2015 09:49:06 #
ABJanes wrote:
FYI Interesting article about the ransomware scam on the Mac.....https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-8071
:thumbup:
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