Do you “Back That Thing Up?”

No, not that thing! Your hard drive on your computer. With just about everyone shooting digital these days and keeping all our photographs on our computers you need to back that thing up. The fact of the matter is your hard drive will fail at some time. It’s not a matter of if but when.

Nothing would be worse than to go and print that cute picture of little Johnny’s 1^st birthday for Grandma and your hard drive has crashed. It is going to be ether impossible or very very expensive to have some computer guy work his magic and pull those pictures off your crashed drive. If you’re not prepared you could risk loosing everything. And come on, do you really want some 17 year old computer genius working at Best Buy to see those pictures you and your wife that you took in Mexico last year!!!

Don’t worry its easier than you think to make a back up. Most operating systems can do it for you. There are 3^rd party programs also. You can set them up on a schedule so they take care of themselves. All you have to do is pick a day, time and frequency and it dose the rest. I back mine up once a week. You will want to back up your pictures, tax files, music, phone numbers or what ever onto something and with how cheap external hard drives are now they are the best bang for your buck.

The more the merrier when your backing that thing up. If your going to make one copy of your important files why not make 2. Take that 2^nd external drive copy of your hard drive and take it over to a friend or relatives house. That way should something bad happen to your house, fire, water damage, tornado, you will still have all your important stuff safe and secure. You can back this one up once a month.

So take a few minutes and put together a plan for backing up your important files on your computers hard drive. No one wants to loose everything.

What do I do with all these images part 2

In continuation from last post…

OK, now when I get home with all the pictures that I took what do I do with them? This is the same for a long trip with gigabytes worth of images or an afternoon walk with a handful of pictures. I do the same procedure regardless of the number of images. In this case I plugged my external hard drive that I had with me In Maui into my desktop computer. If I only had a CF card or two filled I would insert each card individually and import the images from them.

I use Adobe Lightroom for all my image handling. So I open Lightroom and go to the Library page and click Import. This brings up a dialogue box with a few options that you can choose. First I select that I want Lightroom to import a copy of the files. Again just incase something were to go wrong I still would have a copy on my portable hard drive/CF card. I like to import and organize my photos by date, so I have that selected as how I want them organized upon import. The next thing is where do I want them imported to? I have two external hard drives that I keep all my photos on. I select my main drive to import to. One of the best things about importing you photos with Lightroom is that you can select to have a backup copy of your images also imported to another location. As you can tell I am a big fan of having copies of everything. I once had a hard drive fail on me and if I didn’t have a backup, every picture I had taken up to that point would have been lost. So back up, back up, back up. Like I was saying I have two hard drives that all they have on them is my photos. Each drive is an exact copy of the other but I only work out of one. The other one is turned off and only gets used for backing up.

Next big thing it Keywords. This is another great thing about Lightoom. You can add keywords to your photos. Great when you have 30,000 or so photos and you want to find that one photo of a “bridge” on the “Mississippi river” in “Hastings” Helps narrow it down for you so you don’t have to try and remember where you put those shots. When I am importing photos like this last vacation with multiple days and multiple things photographed I like to keep the keywords pretty vague. You can go back and add more keywords later. So every photo imported this time got “Hawaii”, “Maui” and Vacation” as keyword’s. Next I will import my photos and let Lightroom do its thing. Depending on how many images your importing this could take awhile. I started importing and went and did something else.

Now that I have all my photos on my computer the next thing I will do it to quickly go through and make sure everything looks correct. No missing photos or things like that. I never have had a problem but don’t hurt to check. This next step can be a pain. Rating. I like to rate my photos. Helps me when I want to sit down and work on images. Lightroom has several different ways you can do this. I use the stars. They have 0-5 star rating system. The way that I use them and this might not be how anyone else would do it but it works for me. I have one, two and three star images after import. I also will delete anything that is obviously out of focus or those random pictures of the inside of your lens cap or the ceiling. Otherwise its 1, 2 or 3. I go through them very quickly and don’t spend much time looking at each image. One stars are the one’s that are obviously not very good but you don’t want to delete. My one stars could probably get delegated and I would never miss them but memory is cheap these days and if you rate your photos you can just not select one star images when you go to view your photos. Next are two stars. These are ones that might look a bit soft or the composition is off or what ever. Like I said I go through them quickly. You can always change things later. Than there are the three star’s. These are the ones that jump out at me as being a good photo or ones that have the most potential. I do use the four and five stars.

If I work on a photo I will give it a rating of four stars. So If I work on the raw image in Lightroom or work on a copy of the image in Photoshop I will give it four stars. If I print an image it will get five stars. More on this later. By this point my hands were all cramped and tired from going through almost 3000 images and giving them a rating. Its time for a beer!

What to do with all these images

Well I made it back. To warm, sunny, green grass, flowers blooming, birds singing Minnesota. Oh wait that’s where I came from. I tell you it was hard to put pants and shoes on for our return flight after eleven days of shorts and flip flops. I have had a couple of days to sort of get back in the swing of things. Man its good to be back but…

So I took just over 36 GB of photos when it was all said and done. That works out to 2698 photos. I got them all transferred over to my main computer and now its time to work on the images I took. I thought I would take you through my work flow for when I am shooting away from home. This is my work flow it probably isn’t perfect and it might not work for everyone. But it dose work pretty well for me at this time. My work flow is constantly changing and getting faster, better and more efficient. As should yours. So here we go.

My camera takes CF flash cards. I have several cards from 1GB cards all the way up to 8GB cards. I try not to get too large a card. I like not having all my images on one card in the event that a card gets lost or broken or for what ever reason stops working. If all my images were on one big card and something happened to it than all that days photos would be lost. So my thinking is worst case half my images might be lost. And I say worst case. I personally have never had a card fail. But I have forgotten them in pants pockets and they have gone through the wash and dryer before. Another testament to buying quality gear. The couple of times this has happened all the cards were fine. Images still on them and they reformatted ok and they still work today.

So like I said I format all my cards directly from the camera. Find in the menu where it says format and that is how I erase my cards. I have all my cards in a little CF card wallet that holds 12 cards. I have six cards in the wallet and one in the camera at all times. I have all the empty cards on the left side of the holder and as they get full they get put in the right side. That way I know what ones are ready to go and what ones are full, with out having to load the card in the camera and check. All my photos are shot in RAW format so they can take up some space on a card. I can fit give or take 75 images per GB and I have 19 GB worth of cards. For a total of something like 1425 images possible before I have to download to a hard drive.

At the end of the day I sit down with my full card and a laptop. I have a folder that the photos go in. On this trip it was :Maui ‘09” I then make folders for each day, day one, day two…I copy all photos to an external hard drive that I have. It’s a 180 GB self powered hard drive. It gets its power from the computer so it’s one less cord to try and find a plug in for. Notice I said copy all the photos. Done transfer or cut the pictures from the card to the hard drive, incase something happens while you are transferring your data. Once I have all the photos copied to the external hard drive I will copy that folder to the laptop hard drive. So at this point I have three copies of every photo I took that day. Now I will go and verify that all photos got copied to both the laptop internal hard drive and the external hard drive. Once I have verified everything got copied, all cards get reformatted by the camera and put back in the card holder for the next day. This gets repeated for the length of the trip. Once you get used to making this part of your routine it’s not so bad. You load a card, go do something, copy a folder, take a shower. You get the picture. The best part is you have two copies of all your images and empty memory cards for the next day.

The laptop I travel with is a bit out dated. So I just run Canons Digital Photo Pro. A very basic Raw converter. Basically all it gets used for is viewing images and basic edits on copies if images for posting in this Blog and sending e-mails to family back home. Other than that not much gets done on location. I save all the major editing for when I get home. If I had a newer laptop I would have Lightroom, my main program for photo organization and RAW editing, loaded and might do some key wording and rating of images that’s about it.

Next I will talk about what I do when I get home with 36 GB of images.