Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: sergio on July 07, 2008, 03:53:07 pm

Title: Backup and cataloguing, again.
Post by: sergio on July 07, 2008, 03:53:07 pm

I guess this has been covered but haven't found recent threads about this. If there is a thread about this then I will be greatful for the pointer and spare everybody the hassle to reanswer this.

I have literally thousands of DVDs and many HDs with all my images. Not everything that I have in DVDs is in my HD and many of those DVDs are deteriorating.
I use Portfolio to manage the database but at 150K images it is painfully slow, even though it is on a dedicated computer just for itself. I don't like the way it handles previews and xmps, it doesn't read zip compressed tiffs, which by common sense is the way I archive my tiffs, and it doesn't see DNGs.
I think I will start transfering all to 500gb HD that I will put in closet and pull out whenever I need an image. There's basically two approaches to manage a database of all this:

1) Keep using Portfolio, and suffer the forementioned penalties,

2) Start a new database using another method/software.

To clarify a little about my requirements. I don't keyword so strongly my images. I just keep track of clients, locations, model names, and basic stuff. Anybody using LR or Bridge for this, is it good enough for databases this big? When I do catalog work for example it can easily go somewhere between 20 to 60 gb per job.
Any ideas to help wade thru these oceans of very vulnerable data?

thanks.

Sergio

Title: Backup and cataloguing, again.
Post by: Alaska on July 07, 2008, 04:45:10 pm

Quote

I will be greatful for the pointer...
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=206257\")

Have not tried any of the commercial systems, but have had good luck with Picasa 2.  It works fine for 12,000 images.  It is a consumer product, but for free it may be worth a try.

File types supported include:

Images: jpg, bmp, gif, png, psd, tif
Movies: avi, mpg, wmv, asf, mov (QuickTime)
RAW data files, including cameras from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax.

[a href=\"http://picasa.google.com/features/index.html]http://picasa.google.com/features/index.html[/url]

Jim

Title: Backup and cataloguing, again.
Post by: Ken Bennett on July 07, 2008, 05:14:52 pm

Hola, Sergio,

I gave up on DVD backups a long time ago. It just takes too much time and effort to keep up, plus you don't know a DVD is bad until you need the images on it. Now I use hard drives, and keep everything on at least three different drives in three different places.

You might look at this blog for a decent system to archive huge amounts of data:

http://www.deathtofilm.com/ (http://www.deathtofilm.com/)

The top entry today is on the system, with links to more information.

I do use keywords and other metadata, and so I don't bother trying to keep a huge database of my RAW files. I keep photos organized chronologically, and I can use the Macintosh Spotlight search to look inside metadata (captions and keywords) and find files that I need.

Hope this helps.

--Ken