I label myself an authority on this subject, so i thought i would post about that.
Ok so i often show my photos off to people, and they are like "whoah you are you of your effing mind .." or "jesus dude how do you do all this" or some other similar reaction. A lot of people ask how i keep it all in order.
So to share my secrets, and reveal my severe case of OCD ... here it is! My entire process!!
Firstly, for every photo you see that i took, i probably took about 20 or more! For Valentines day i posted 39 amazing photos i have ... those were cherry picked from a total of 130 pics i took! The rest got trashed for whatever reason.
Ok so lets use those pics as an example. So i have these 39 pics ...
1st thing i do is upload into a new Picasa album. If you dont know what Google Picasa is, go google it because its amazing. The reason i use Picasa for photo storage/sharing is because it does not reduce the size of your images! It allows you to retain the original high resolution. This makes it not only a source for sharing photos, but it becomes an excellent online backup of your entire collection!
2nd, i usually share the photo. This is when a lot of people will either see an email from me, or a post on myspace or facebook, or one of my blogs. You might get just one photo i really think is great, or a link to the entire Picasa album.
Now comes the OCD ...
My entire photo collection is stored on my laptop. I keep a folder called "Photos" and within this folder is a zillion sub-folders titled after the occasion. For the above pics, i named the folder "Isabellas first valentines day 2.14.09".
This "Photos" folder containing all of my photos, is backed up to an 500gb external hard drive on my home server.
Then the entire folder is uploaded to my web server as a data backup.
Then i have one 8gb flash drive i use to store all of my daughters photos, and 1 flash drive i use for all other photos. I keep them separated because my daughters pics take up too much room to share with the rest of my photos.
THEN once every 3 months i burn ALL photos to CD so i can store a backup. I burn multiple copies, and give them to a few different people. In the end, i have a copy of the CD's, my mother has a copy of the CD's, and my brother in law has a copy of the CD's. I do this because if god forbid anything happens to me, i know my daughter will always have her fathers amazing photo collection and enjoy them forever.
So there you have it! In the end i have 5 redundant backups of all data, and 3 different people have a copy of all of my data.
It sounds like a lot of work, and i guess it is a bit nutty .. but honestly it takes about 1 hour per week once a system is down. I do all of this because I feel so attached to my photos and it scares me to death that i will lose my data, or that my family wont have them to enjoy 50 years from now.
There you have it. If you have a method or system, let me know! I would definitely not mind adding another layer to the safety of my collection LOL
