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How big is your photo library?

GotMyOrangeCrus said:
I dont verify the media. I burn 2 discs per back-up, I use high quality discs, store them using archival materials and use really high quality Silica Gel Dehumidifiers in each box I store them in. I of course verify at the burn stage. Once that is done I no longer worry about it. I am sure there will come a day when I do verify to make sure the discs are keeping but it wont be for awhile. I have only had a handful of situations where a disc had gone bad and in each one of those cases the 2nd disc was fine and I simply made another backup. Its been 100% effective thus far.
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I haven't quite gotten into the storing images in every manner possible syndrome :rolleyes:... yet. But I feel kind of uneasy about relying on only 2 DVDs. One disc goes bad and then the duplicate gets a scratch and.... you may want to give serious consideration to an alternate storage method, even though my gawd that is an awful lot of data to store somewhere the other way to look at it is my gawd that is like losing a lifetime of work if things go wrong for you.


As to the topic, around 5500 images (actually kept) and 16GB of data using Raid 5 (4 drives) as well as copies on my workstation and a good portion of them being on SmugMug. With my server going to Raid 5 over 5 drives soon, the current drives are 60GB IDE drives and with drives being so cheap it will be 500GB SATA2 drives in the array. The sad thing was the 500GB drives were not much more expensive than the 80 or 160GB drives.

Oh memories of 500MB drives being a dollar a MB and now we suffer at 10c a GB :)
 
Between my dad and myself, we have about 20,000 images from over the last 7 or so years. We both keep track of photos on each of our computers and have them all backed up.

We typically just use point and shoot Canon cameras, so the file sizes aren't huge. Most of the photos are of family events and some nature photos.
 
jbernie said:
I haven't quite gotten into the storing images in every manner possible syndrome :rolleyes:... yet. But I feel kind of uneasy about relying on only 2 DVDs. One disc goes bad and then the duplicate gets a scratch and.... you may want to give serious consideration to an alternate storage method, even though my gawd that is an awful lot of data to store somewhere the other way to look at it is my gawd that is like losing a lifetime of work if things go wrong for you.


As to the topic, around 5500 images (actually kept) and 16GB of data using Raid 5 (4 drives) as well as copies on my workstation and a good portion of them being on SmugMug. With my server going to Raid 5 over 5 drives soon, the current drives are 60GB IDE drives and with drives being so cheap it will be 500GB SATA2 drives in the array. The sad thing was the 500GB drives were not much more expensive than the 80 or 160GB drives.

Oh memories of 500MB drives being a dollar a MB and now we suffer at 10c a GB :)
Click to expand...


First of all your making it seem like discs are these super fragile things and they are not. As long as you handle the discs properly and store them with archival materials, your golden. If you do happen to scratch a disc you can repair it. Hell I have rented DVD's from blockbuster that looked like someone took a bandsaw to them they had so many scratches and 15 seconds in a resurfacing device and they play like they were brand new. Certainly long enough to make another fresh copy. You have to literally gouge a DVD into the data layer to make it unrecoverable and that is actually an extremely hard thing to do. Besides as soon as one of your discs goes bad, if it goes bad, you immediately make another back up copy with the good copy. You dont just continue on with just that one disc. You always have 2 discs, always. I have been using this system for well over 10 years and I have yet to have a single unrecoverable image, not one. In fact I haven't even come close to having a unrecoverable image. I have only had a few discs go bad and in each one of those cases the 2nd disc was fine. I immediately made another back up and was back up to 2 working discs.

Why would I want to think about another method? 10 years+ without a single lost picture. As I stated earlier, its cheaper, more reliable, makes your pictures on your computer vastly more manageable, is a better overall organizational system, and it has unlimited size potential. The only disadvantage is the time it takes to burn and again as I stated earlier I burn while I am already at my computer doing other things so it only takes around 30 seconds a disc. Thats cake in my book. The people that should be worrying about losing their work are the people that store their backups on hard drives, not the people storing them on optical discs. Hard drives fail all the time, high quality discs do not. I would not be able to sleep at night if I actually still stored my backups on hard drives. I have heard way too many horror stories and have had too many problems myself to ever trust a HD with anything.

I used to know a bunch of photographers that backed up on HD, including myself, and every single one of them have switched to a disc back up system. Trust me I sleep like a baby with the system I use.

Its important to note that optical discs now include the Blu Ray format. Blu Ray, which ill be switching to soon enough at least for my new burns, has a vastly superior protection layer. That isnt suggesting that the protection on DVD's isnt adequate because it absolutely is. Its just something to consider if your thinking about which method to go with. Again I wont trust a HD with anything important. They simply fail far too often and for far too many reasons. Just google hard drive failure rates and do some reading and you will find out that HD's are failing as much as 15 times more than the HD manufacturers are claiming. They pad the numbers by a lot of different methods. For instance if your HD fails and you send it back to the manufacturer and they test the HD and find out it wasn't the optical drive that failed but some other part, they dont count that as a failed drive. Again a lot of experts predict that the failure rates are 15 times higher than what the companies are telling you. Now Google optical discs failure rates and read up on the projected life spans of high quality optical discs like Taiyo Yuden's. Then ask yourself which method you trust more. I did and I chose optical discs. The fact that they are cheaper, easier to catalog, make your collection of photo's on your computer vastly more manageable, and have unlimited size potential is just a bonus for me. I choose them for their reliability as they are vastly superior to HD's in this regard. Again everything else is just a bonus.
 
My photo situation is a huge mess. At last count I was approaching 25,000 photos scattered across 4 seperate iPhoto libraries on 3 HDDs between 2 different computers.

I haven't organized them very well, I haven't really looked into trying to merge them all onto one library (not sure if that's a good idea anyway), nor have I backed all of them up yet. :eek:

Some rainy day I really need to sort everything out. I want to start shooting in RAW more, but not till I get more organized (and probably buy another HDD just for photos).
 
About 30,000 images, 200 GB automatically backed up on a NAS and also uploaded into flickr. It took about a month to upload that many photos into flickr.
 
about 8K or so.

here's a quick question for aperture related to the number of pics:
in ap 1.1, i was able to see the # of photos per album, but I can't see it in ap 2? I checked the preferences quickly, but i must have missed something.

stats wise, i like to see those numbers.
 
I'm at just over 20,000 in the last year or so. At this point, I have them all on my MBP being backed up hourly with Time Machine / Time Capsule. That will likely change in the near future as I add other external drive options and move my media from my laptop and onto external drives.
 
GotMyOrangeCrus said:
I passed 5000 DVD Back Up's earlier this year and that doesn't include my film which easily makes up over 80% of my pictures. I honestly have no clue just how many pictures that entitles, I just know its far too many to count. My 4x5 film alone encompasses over 60 Light Impressions 4x5 Neg Boxes. Again its far too many pictures to even begin to count then again I have been shooting for well over 20 years.
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I find this ridiculous, maybe it's because I worked many years for a large storage company but 5000 DVD backup is .... again, ridiculous.

remember, your backup is only as good as your RESTORE strategy.

How do you do test that with 5000 DVD's ?
 
just under 12,000 - which is a collection of photos over 10 years. I am now in the process of scanning all my negatives (120 films), slides (50 films) and, finally, scan all the prints of the old photos - parents wedding, when they were young etc.

My big dilema is one that is asked here - how the hell do I sort them so that I can coe back to one that I want.

Is it safe to have them in a single databse (like iPhoto) or better as individual jpgs/RAW files under Pictures (as Bridge works)?

Oh - do you guys keep ALL the pictures that you take? or do you tend to delete the "iffy" ones - e.g. an elbow is in the way, or the eyes are shut?
 
About 600GB of photos - mostly RAW, and from cameras that make big files -- I can't remember how many there are right now, but quite a few!

If there is no way that I am going to use a shot (elbow in the way, etc.) - it goes away. If there are 4 successive shots that are very similar, but all usable, I'll keep them. "All that's fit to print"
 
2k locally
12k on my external
and another 10k on my archive (photos I don't need nor care about from past jobs - mostly sports)
 
I only ever keep a max of 5gb on my MBP (current projects and current job). I have 450gb on external (all RAW). Once it reaches 500gb, I sort through and keep about 100gb of the most recent that I may need for the current job.

All the rest is sent to bank safety deposit box in HDD and DVD formats. (DVD for the vital ones).

All final JPEGs are on a private "set" on Flickr and just recently got an FTP server so am going to upload all photos there which will likely take 2989084290580298529 years because Canada has terrible upload rates.

Yup.
 
45GB in Aperture on external, plus heaps of film to scan.

To be honest I could probably cull 1/4 of my Aperture library.

My library is also a mess, it was nice back in the days of iPhoto but since it became corrupt I had to start organizing again.


I only wish Aperture could sort projects by date :(
 
Somehow not even 2 months later I'm up almost 1,000 pictures to 7,798 and 18GB. Not sure how that happened, I feel like I haven't shot in a while. Sadly only a couple really good ones, lot of learning though.
 
I didn't install iPhoto on my computer, but I probably have around a terabyte of photos across 5 hard-drives.
 
About 80,000 pics at last count, backed up but really ought to look through again since in the early days I tended to shoot, download to PC and that was it done. :eek:


Jeff.
 
Help rebuilding Iphoto

I have over 7000 images. Some of the Iphoto thumbnails are from my desktop files and some from the DATA file copied into iphoto. I want to rebuild my thumbnails using all of the pictures on my desk top, not copying them/duplicating into inphoto (to save disk space). The reason is years ago while copying and moving pictures the picture data was deleted and the date data of the pics was lost. If I load the images, Iphoto mixes the images up. I have organized all the pics on my desktop into folders by month and year. I would also like the see the folder titles while viewing the thumbnails. When I try to rebuild old photos show up again so I deleted the original data (photos) in Iphoto and after rebuilding they reappeared. I was expecting a blank page so I could start build the thumbnails from my desktop folders. How do I get a blank screen/no images in Iphoto? Select all the images and drag to trash? To be safe I have all my pictures saved on 2 ext hard drives.
If you can help...THANKS
 
bit over 12,000 photos stored in about 5 different locations with a combination of DVD, HD and online backup. After losing around 5 hard drives over half a year period around 8 years ago I have been pretty paranoid about backing up everything over and over. I guess it's a lesson well learnt :p
 
digitalfrog said:
I find this ridiculous, maybe it's because I worked many years for a large storage company but 5000 DVD backup is .... again, ridiculous.

remember, your backup is only as good as your RESTORE strategy.

How do you do test that with 5000 DVD's ?
Click to expand...

Restore strategy? Your not making any sense. I am not restoring anything. They are permanently stored on Disc. When I need to pull a picture off of a disc, I do just that. I get the disc out, stick it in my DVD drive and copy it onto my HD for whatever work I need to do with it. If its printing then I print it and immediately wipe it of my HD again. If its to send a digital copy to a client then I send it and immediately wipe it off my HD again. There is no restoring needed. I do not store my pictures on my HD so how may I ask do I restore something that isnt there?

As for your opinion that 5000 DVD's is ridiculous, I guess I should just throw 50% of my work in the garbage so I can get down to a more "non-ridiculous" number of discs, lol. I can only imagine what you think of the hundreds of boxes I have storing hundreds of thousands of negatives. I guess I should just throw half of them away as well so I can again get down to a more "non-ridiculous" number. I really wasn't aware that once a storage system passes a certain number it immediately becomes ridiculous. Maybe you should contact the Library of Congress and explain to them that the hundreds of thousands of optical discs they have is ridiculous and that they should throw out half of the Libraries archive to get down to a more "non-ridiculous" number. 500 DVD's is ok but 5000 is ridiculous. 5 hard drives is ok but 50 hard drives is ridiculous. 10 boxes of negatives is ok but 200 is ridiculous. They failed to teach me about this back in school. I only wish I would have met you earlier as you could have passed on this amazing knowledge to me a long time ago thus saving me alot of time and money.

Now excuse me while I go burn half of my life's work so I can get down to a more "non-ridiculous" number of discs.
 
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