Photo organising and back-up. How do you pro's do it??

[adman]

How do all you pro's do it??

I am really struggling with getting my photos organised and backed up. This is for a number of reasons. I live in a twilight world between PC and Mac - we have one of each at home - an ageing iMac (circa 2005 or 2006 - but with current version of OSX, and a decent amout of RAM) and a much newer i7 PC running 64 bit windows 7 with 16 gig of RAM. Throw in 2 iPads and 2 iPhones, an Apple TV, DropBox for backup, Aperture for editing and getting things to the Apple TV. Then start considering things like Photostream (there are many reviews that make me hesitant to switch this on), and it quickly starts to become more than my brain can handle. I have got part way through re-organising all this and have got a bit stuck on what to do next.

Here is how I do it currently. I keep all my photos in a folder structure on the windows PC, as that is where I am mostly when I import from the camera. Everything is organised in year_month or year_month_event folders. I cull most of the really delete-able photos in the camera before importing, and then do a little extra culling once I see the full size thing on my PC monitor. I tend to under-cull though because...well you just never know (OK I am a hoarder).

I then go through new photos and see which ones need tweaking a little, which I will do in Canon DPP or PS CS5. The whole thing is backed up locally on an external USB drive, and my 'best-of' pics I copy to my dropbox folder that mirrors the directory structure of my main photo store. I would love to just keep it all on dropbox, but it just seems like an awful lot of uploads and downloads....

Now. This is where I get stuck. I would like to be able to get the photos onto my apple TV which entails using something like iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac. I have read that you can simply put the Aperture library in your dropbox, and it will keep it all nicely backed up, but then some others say that this can lead to problems, and that you should use a symbolic link in your dropbox?

Next thing is using photostream. I would love to have the latest 1000 photos I have taken appear automagically on mine and my wifes iPads and iPhones, but am unsure about how to accomplish this with the current PC/Mac setup.

Can anyone shed any light?

CHeers
Adam

[Octane]

The below (your quoted text) is all I do.

All directories are backed up to three hard drives.

I have an iPhoto library in which my completed weddings and landscapes are stored as events. These are then synced to the iPhone. And, as of tomorrow, a new iPad. :)

I don't have a TV so there ends the complications. Keep it simple!

H

[DavidTrap]

I was using Aperture, but have been converted to Lightroom. I tried to persist with Aperture, but Lightroom has so many cool features. The pro who showed me how to use it says he does 90% of his image editing in Lightroom alone, and only drags 10% of images into PS.

For a while, I was keeping my library on an external HDD and plugging it into which ever computer I wanted to work on, e.g. laptop while away from home or desktop at home. That seemed to work fine, but you do have the risk of losing the external drive and losing all your photos. It's slower than an internal drive, but the drive I was using had Firewire 800, so not too bad. I regularly backed up the library to my NAS.

Now that I'm upgrading to a 36MP camera, I've had to upgrade my laptop to cope. It is significantly more powerful than my desktop, so I'll be doing all my editing on the laptop. To keep the libraries at a manageable size, I'll probably start a new one each year. I'm also looking at a Synology NAS for backup of everything.

I'm interested to hear if there are any conduits to get Lightroom talking to iTunes, because I would also like to have things easily shifted across to an iPad and Apple TV for sharing with family and friends. Thus far, I've been doing an export into Aperture or iPhoto which feeds across to iTunes for distribution to the Apple devices.

DT

PS. My responding to this thread doesn't imply I consider myself a Pro!!!!!

[adman]

thanks guys - hows this for an idea....

I create a new Aperture library and start anew. I can save the library any place on the hard drive, but I import the images from my dropbox folder as referenced images, so they are not kept in the Aperture library, but any edits etc are. Then whenever I add new photos I just have to make sure to import them into Aperture. I then make regular backups of the aperture library (which should be fairly small, as all of the masters reside in dropbox) which I also keep in dropbox.

The only downside to this is that I have to manually import into Aperture, and also that I have to be careful to keeop the dropbox folder structure constant so the referencing doesn't break...

comments?
Adam

[DavidTrap]

No idea if that will work Adam - I have no experience with dropbox. I know Lightroom doesn't cope with catalogues on a NAS, but I see you are referring to "referenced" files.

DT

[koputai]

To get photos on your TV, you can just point your Apple TV to a network drive, which in my case is a Windows PC in the shed.

Cheers,
Jason.

[adman]

Well, what I have ended up doing is moving my whole photo collection to dropbox, and then importing them into Aperture as referenced files - which means they stay where they are in my dropbox folder rather than being kept in Aperture's database file.

Any edits I make to them are kept in Aperture, and if I move them around in dropbox I need to do it from the Mac, as its file system will keep track of them so that Aperture still knows where they are

I cannow access them from my TV (via Apple TV linking with Aperture) and iPads/iPhones (via dropbox, and also Photostream keeps the last 100 photos for 30 days).

The only downer with this system is that I have to manually import them into Aperture. Does anyone know how this could be automated??

Adam