Archival Strategies

[Spindrift]

Hi All:

Proud new owner of an S45. Love the camera, hate the software that came with it. Buggy. But from what I've read about releases of ZoomBrowser prior to 4.0, I should be thankful.

I never thought that I'd take as many pictures as I do with this thing.....I'm an addict!!!! I purchased AutoSiteGallery online (www.brizsoft.com) and have been very pleased with it's features. It generates HTML pages of my photos (along with resizing them too) and some other cool stuff. So I think I have the webpage generation solved.

Which leads me to my actual question of Archival strategies.

What do you do to intelligently archive your photos? CD-R (or even DVD-R) seems the most economical. Is there elegant software out there geared towards the CD-R archival strategy?

My goal is to keep the RAW (or SF,L JPEGS) on the CD-R for archival purposes, but be able to pop the CD in to see (thumbnails?) what's on there quickly...and find the photo(s) I want quickly.

Your thoughts/experience/insights are greatly appreciated.

One more camera toter,
Spindrift

[henkbos]

Hi there,

First I put all my RAW files on CD-R. No DVD yet, since there is still a war on for the latest format.
Edit all pics in PS7 and leave them on HD, saved as 8bits TIFF. Burn these to CD every now and then.

In the meantime replicate one HD to another every night.

Web: use Breezebrowser to generate pages, WS-FTP to transfer files. Still looking for an engine to create albums on the web, but haven't made a lot of progress on that.

Good luck!

[phoby3]

This has been a quandry for me as well.

I do not shoot everything in Raw, I vacilate between RAW images, those that I will use to print, and .jpegs for those that are to be used by "clients", for web or stock purposes.

All origninal scans, digital images be they RAW or Not are committed to stored to my non system hardrive.

I have been keeping tabs of them by using Extensis Portfolio 6 (pricey piece of software) that is the best I have used to batch process keywords, generate thumbnails,etc.

After I get enough of a catergory or at least enough photos to fill a disk, I burn to CD. Those photos that are the heart and soul of my work get recopied to another CD.

All edited photographs are kept as .psd files with adjustment layers until they are distributed either by transmission or by printing. The resultant .tif or .jpeg is then trashed after it is printed or sent.

All edited work just remains on the hard drive. Unlike the "old days" I pick-up a new Photoshop trick everyday - and I go as far back as PS 2.5 - so each new print is an improvement over older versions, so I never feel like an photo is a done deal.

Portfolio archives a catalouge of photos on your CD's whether they are in the machine or not.

I don't know if this helps or confuses but I too would like to hear other folks strategies.

[phoby3]

Photoshop does a very creditable job at generating HTML pages. There are a number of very tweekable templates and it will automaticly take care of thumbnails, and display photos. It is pretty good for down and dirty work.