Offline Photo Archiving

[brettnem]

Hi There,
I've got a question that I'm sure someone has asked before, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

I take LOTS of pictures. Sometimes they are junk (just hoping to get a good one in 50-100 shots) and sometimes they are keepers.. In any case, I want to be able to catalog and store all of my pictures On CD-ROM or some other form of offline storage (Zip, Jaz, you get the picture). I have seen many programs listed that will do this kind of thing, but have yet to see one that exists that also supports CRW files. I /really/ want to catalog the crw files.

Also, maybe someone has a well documented workflow for downloading the images, cataloging them, and archiving them? Included in this would hopefully be the preservation of the CRW file, EXIF data, and perhaps a 16-bit Linear Conversion. Maybe even a method for adding edited versions of pictures...

I'm just finding myself with pictures all over the place.. Most of which still only have serial numbers on them. Sometimes I want to give them real name, sometimes I think they are probably more sortable by serial number.

Does anyone have a "system"?? I desperately need one! :)

THANKS!!
-Brett

BTW, imatch \(www.photools.com) and thumbsplus both have said they might support CRW files, but I don't see the actual support for them yet.

[onehotrx7]

For the low cost of CD media, I'd be inclined to convert them to .jpg, use that for generation of your thumbnails/catolgue and store the raw files on the CD too...

Cheers,
Stuart

[florida_Rob]

hi all,
u can not burn a .crw file to cd?

Rob

[Don Ellis]

florida_Rob wrote:
u can not burn a .crw file to cd?
Rob
Sure you can. The CD burner doesn't care what files are being copied.

[Roger_Cavanagh]

brettnem wrote:
BTW, imatch \(www.photools.com) and thumbsplus both have said they might support CRW files, but I don't see the actual support for them yet.



Brett,

iMatch support for CRW is in the next release. It is available as Release Candidate 2 at the moment, but only for registered users.

I decided not to install the beta versions, but the official 3.1 release is due any time. I will report back when I have tested it.

I also seem to recall from a post on this or the D30 forum that ACDSee had fixed their problems with CRW support. That another one you could check out.

Regards,

[brettnem]

Thanks all for your comments. Yes I can burn CRW to CD, however I want a database to keep track of keywords, EXIF data, and other meta-data along with thumbnails. If I'm going to be storing 1,000s of high-res raw images, I need them to be neatly cataloged. Just writing them to CD won't work because finding a particular image could take forever!

imatch looked neat. Just what I need in fact, but I really want to see it work with CRW files first. Please do keep me updated on how that turns out.. I'm about to give ACDSee a whirl. I'll let you all know how it goes. Thanks!
-Brett

[reittila]

brettnem wrote:
Thanks all for your comments. Yes I can burn CRW to CD, however I want a database to keep track of keywords, EXIF data, and other meta-data along with thumbnails. If I'm going to be storing 1,000s of high-res raw images, I need them to be neatly cataloged. Just writing them to CD won't work because finding a particular image could take forever!

imatch looked neat. Just what I need in fact, but I really want to see it work with CRW files first. Please do keep me updated on how that turns out.. I'm about to give ACDSee a whirl. I'll let you all know how it goes. Thanks!
-Brett


Try http://www.canto.com/ and download Cumulus 5.5 . That's what I ghave been using

[earlyjones]

I like to keep the master copy of my images on cd. I keep track of them with iView Pro (http://www.iview-multimedia.com), which is for Mac only. Canto Cumulos and Extensis Portfolio are good and have more advanced features. In fact, I believe they can manage all types of digital "assets", including text files. The question might be how well can they keep your crw files linked to your images? The same would go for any derivative images you generate from a master.

I don't think there is much benefit in giving meaningful names to image files. A logical naming method is more important. Serial numbers, etc. work fine. I prefer to put all descriptive/meaninful info in to the database and use it to locate the files.

You probably know this, but be careful to pick a database program that has good options for exporting and importing all textual data. You don't want to put a bunch of data in to something and then not be able to get it back out. I've seen that before and it's ugly.

Early Jones
http://www.thegoodthing.com