Sports Media And Editorial
Previously we covered how to get the photos to your computer. This installment of photography workflow will cover how to best store and archive all the images.
My system for storing and archiving photos is based on a couple of principles. I have applied these principles then to my current situation which may be different than yours.
Making the back-up happens quickly in my workflow because cards and hard drives can and will go bad, guaranteed. The only question is when. For this reason I store my photos on two external hard drives (HD’s).
One HD is my working drive which has the images that I will work from as I process them. The other drive is a back-up that includes the same images.
With the size and number of my photos rising and the price per gig of HD falling I chose to use external drives for my storage. In addition I back-up all “final” images that I provide clients on CD’s or DVD’s.
When I began with digital I used CD’s and DVD’s to back up but this quickly became unwieldily and time consuming. Using CD/DVD’s also required another system to organize them in a way that I could quickly find an image if needed. The other thing that I didn’t like is that once my images were out of site they were also out of mind.
My current pair of 320gb HDs are storing two years of images. I am anticipating that they will be filled in the next month.
There are also online services that will provide the archival of your images with the ability to access them anywhere in the world, while also providing an industrial strength back-up system. This seems beyond what I currently require but can see the benefits of this kind of system. The two leaders in this are Photoshelter and Digital Railroad.
The “HOW” of managing all the images will be my next post on workflow. While it can be done manually I have software to help me manage the thousands of images, spanning years. Stay tuned….
