Storage (How, Where, What)

Hey all... Yes - another DAM question. I've read through almost all of the threads about this on here and can't seem to find an answer to my question.

Here is my situation: I am a rising senior this year and an aspiring professional photographer. I'm looking into several colleges and a potential major in photography or possibly business to be able to start a photography business. I have thousands of images that I have taken over the last 5 or 6 years and of course I have deleted those that I have no use for. I recently (as a birthday gift) received a new macbook pro from my parents. Of course, as a teenager I have other interests in my life (ie. music, schoolwork, movies/videos, and loads of other content) that unfortunately take up a lot of room. My mac has 120 gb of storage and even before ANY photos are put on it I only have about 20 gb of space available while I have MANY more images than that.

My question is not about backing up images as I know that is important and I cannot even explain how many backup externals I have lying around. My question is how does one organize their images so that they can access them. I currently am putting together portfolios to submit to colleges and need to be able to look through my photos to find ones that fit the bill and then I have jobs that I get and need to have room on my computer to be able to edit them.

What do I do? Upgrade my hard drive? Delete music (seems inconvenient)? How does one find ways around storage constrictions when they need access to more images than they have room for?

Any help and advice would be great or even links to other threads similar to this that I can look at!

I use Lightroom to organize my photos. Folders, collections, keywords/tags, facial recognition all works in conjunction to let me find any photo in a few minutes (provided I did the appropriate labeling when I imported the photos).

Because the Macbook Pro has room for only one HDD I'd upgrade that to the fastest, largest disk possible to accommodate my current and recent work, then use NAS or an external Lightning drive for supplemental image storage.

There's not much you can do (cheaply) to remedy the storage issue with newer Macs, unfortunately. You're pretty much limited to some sort of external solution, although Lightroom does work rather well with that setup, and even lets you work on photos when the drive isn't attached when using the smart previews feature.

That's one reason why I love my high-spec Late 2011 MBP. I removed the optical drive and installed a secondary hard drive to overcome the exact issues you mentioned. I have a 120GB SSD for programs and such, and a large 750GB WD Black HDD for bulk photo/video/music storage. But that's something you can't do with newer MBPs.

I'd check out OWC's line of products if you're set on an internal SSD upgrade. Not cheap, but it's about as good as you can do with what you have.

You state that you have many external drives lying around.....why not use them for storing your images?????

One large hard drive, with things in folders. Back this up to another hard drive and keep it in a different location, ideally using backup software not just mirroring - mirroring copies corruption and deletion.

Maybe have a folder on your computer with your portfolio - your top 20 images in each category, Q10 high res sRgb jpeg.

agree with Tim, create a folder for every year, then create a folder for every card you copy onto your machine with year, month, day and cardnumber abbreviation and you're good to go. If you put year first, then month then day it's easier to keep things in chronological order.

e.g. 2015\150805.001

Often I'll add a description, e.g. 2015\150803.001 Liam's first day at school

If it gets unwieldy or you run out of drive space, archive off a few years' worth & consider upgrading to larger drive.

I have the first Retina MacBook Pro that came out. Small SSD and no drive to upgrade. My solution has been to stick two Sandisk Ultra Fit 128GB thumb drives as storage. These things are as small as the wireless mouse transmitters from Logitech so I just leave them in all the time. I think I might actually lose them easily if I ever started swapping them out.

I probably get booed out here but I seriously would recommend picasa. It does capture all your pictures and makes it easy to skim through all your pictures along a timeline. Yes, Lightroom is able to do the same - but if you don't have extensive keyworded all the pictures (who does that anyway - except if you are already narrowly focus on what you most likely want to find in the future) then it's not better nor faster.

However, I have to confess that I didn't use Picasa for quite a while now. I hope that the newer versions are still usable. And: I am a windows person - there might be other/better solutions for the Mac plattform.

Additionally, I exported all the usable pictures from my raw folder into a separate (organised according to event and date) jpeg folder. In this way I have a much better overview of the pictures and can ignore all the duplicates and bad shots (and my family has access to the pictures - because nobody wants to deal with Lightroom if they don't have to).

As to your other question about what to do with all of your externals lying around, you could pick up a raspberry pi (the new version 2 has 4 USB2.0 ports if I remember right) and build a NAS from the drives as your main archival space.