How do you store your photos & separate processed / viewable from unprocessed

So, for years, I have been using my harddrive(s) as the main dump for all photos and videos, and Flickr as my gallery to browse with. I organize photos in folders by year / month (2018/ 01, 02, etc) and use the same album names in Flickr. On Flickr, I only keep the photos that I consider good enough to display / browse (i.e. my albums),while on computer, I may have multiple versions of the same photo, raw originals, photos that are not processed and don't look too great but I don't want to delete them, etc. The biggest advantage of having my albums on Flickr was the ability to browse through them from anywhere and share albums with my family members.

Now with Flickr terms changing, I am going to do something different. I am really turned off by them deleting photos that users had uploaded over the years. Grandfathering existing photos while requiring a subscription to upload additional files would hardly cost them anything, and would show lots of goodwill towards users. I don't mind paying $50 a year to support a service I use and respect, but with this kind of cutthroat attitude, there's many other ways I can spend that money, store my photos, and get better overall value.

So, the question... how do you (other amateur photogs) store, access, and browse through *your* photos, and separate processed / ready to view ones from the rest ? I am looking for a simple process with least amount of upkeep required.

I've been using a combo of lightroom and smugmug since 2008 or so. Lightroom is excellent tool for organization and editing. I flag and tag my photos for quickly sorting out the keepers. I also have it linked to my smugmug account so I can create galleries and folders and upload photos straight from lightroom. From smugmug I can share the files with my family and post images here and other platforms. It's pretty simple and easy for me.

I use Lightroom, it is built for this purpose.

Inside of LR I use "collections" to organize my images into logical groups. For example for my Patagonia trip I created a top level "Patagonia" collection set and then inside of that I have separate collection sets, one for each image I will process.

My photography done in a way to minimize PP.
I only use LR and if for some reason I want original - virtual copy - revert to original.

I do film and digital 50/50.
I have negatives as originals
I wish I could make copies of my lith prints...
But I rather send them to private collections.
Some of my prints went as far as Australia.
Some of them are on paper which is not available anymore.

I use a combination of Lightroom and Apple Photos. All of my images are stored in LR with finished images put into Collections, these are then exported into Photos, this way I have multiple copies around the place. My hard-drive is backed up with Backblaze and on a separate hard-drive. Finished images are also in Photos and therefore backed up in iCloud. This gives me 1 physical and 2 off-site cloud back ups of finished images and 1 physical and 1 off-site back-up of the raw images.

Lightroom.

I was using Flickr as well and Lightroom has publish collections which allow you to automatically publish image to Flickr. However I was mostly using it to share images to forums and won't be continuing. Instead I now post to my own webserver and link from there.

I also share via Instagram.

I too use Lightroom.. I use Jeffrey Friedl's “Export to Flickr” Plugin as it is more feature rich then the built in feature. I don't use collections that much yet. I am using them to sift through my images that I have published to Flickr. I have 65K+ images in Lightroom and 11.5K on Flickr. I originally started by publishing the Uploadr tool. The aforementioned plugin allows you to link images in your catalog to what's on Flickr automatically (by name and time stamp) or manually by setting the URL. I use starring to determine which photos I will process (4), publish (5), pictures I have processed but chosen to not publish (3). Anything less could be culled when space becomes an issue. Since I have re-upped by pro subscription, I will continue to use these...

For archival storage and instant project access, I use Darktable under Linux, presently with redundant high-capacity (8TB) external drives. Some specific or special shoots or projects may be further exported from here into Cloud storage. Otherwise for a creative editing project, Darktable is used to select and copy data in various ways (select raws, or other fotos intended for edit); or, just one of the 8TB archival drives is used with a my editing machine (described next) to obtain a whole shoot, or select fotos, depending in the project. Projects are imported by Darktable by type, then by date, along with supplememtary keywords, and sometimes EXIF adjusts -- like fixing having forgotten to update the camera's clock when first in Europe, etc. In this manner, I've finally been able to facilitate centralized access for work across 15 years of time, for some 450+ foto shoots. Think of this as the darkroom, and the main negatives storage cabinet.

Then for creative editing, per the above, data is moved to a literal light table: my Google Pixelbook, which is a combined tablet and laptop computer. Touching the image literally for me is much more like working with film. For this processing, I often use the Linux container on ChromeOS as a secondary and transient negatives storage area, where I'll run Raw Therapee to perform detailed camera raw edits and conversions. Then specific creative edit work is done on ChromeOS with Polarr and Snapseed, plus some glamour-specific utilities. Creative product results from here go where they go, online posting, upload to cloud for magazines or print, now and then actual print-making. Then the finished art is often archived back to the "main negatve storage cabinet," but more often Cloud storage, which becomes the "Product Warehouse" storage facility. Finished work is grouped into folders by project and date.

Today, no software from Apple or Adobe ever touches my art work, none whatsoever. All original foto data and project data is ultimately used only transiently, never stored on the edit machine archivially, in case it fails. A broken edit machine is annoying for sure, but replaceable. Lost data is not. The "main negatve storage" is operated under a Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) policy, to which I'm adding additonal geographically dispersed storage voiumes. I do not believe in RAID for local physical storage, but I do believe in blob storage in the Cloud, which is exponentially more reliable than RAID. Drives are operated only when they are needed, preserving mechanical and magnetic storage life to 《 20000 hours operating time, in order to stay ahead of the MTBF curve. I have found that digital data is nomadic, it must move from time to time, or it will fade away with the sands of time. Approximately every 36 months main storage is upgraded to the next doubling of storage capacity that costs about US $130. This is generallly the knee in the price/capacity curve, and read/write bit rate always improves with new technology. As new work gets added to the collection, improved technology enables keeping full data copy times down to 12-16 hours per volume. I am definitely managing millions of my own fotos, mostly of belly dancers, but enough other work that I accidently discovered that I am also my own stock foto agency. I'm considering adding machine learning adjunct to Darktable, to make finding specific things faster. Otherwise, in terms of the "Product Warehouse," Cloud storage is as reliable as Civilization is. Which does feel a bit more risky these days, and it does take money and faith.

Amamba wrote in post #18776259
So, the question... how do you store, access, and browse through your photos, and separate processed / ready to view ones from the rest ?

I am looking for a simple process with least amount of upkeep required.

My 'process' would undoubtedly meet your requirement with respect to simplicity.

I dump all of my RAW files into 'Photos', which is the program that comes already loaded onto every Apple computer (it replaced iPhoro).

The good photos that I want to share / view / edit / share are made into 'favorites' by simply clicking on the little heart-shaped thingy at the bottom of the picture. You can click on 'favorites' any time you want to, and then only the favorites will come up.

Photos is a combination RAW converter, editing tool, photo manager, and slideshow generator, so you just stay in Photos all the time and there's no need to ever jump from one program to another.

All edits are nondestructive so a copy of the RAW image is always there for you automatically. There's no need to make copies of unedited versions because you can just go back to the original file at any time.

I would never use anything internet-based as a way of storing or managing my images. I want full control of my images and their management and storage - why surrender any control to a company like Flickr or Smugmug or PhotoShelter? To me it would be preposterous to count on any third party to store my images.

I back up the contents of my 'favorites' to a couple of removable hard drives a few times each year, so that my best photos will be backed up in the unlikely event that something horrible happens to my computer. I have no need or desire to back up all of my photos - I only care about the good ones that I've made into'favorites'.

.

Bought myself a 6-bay Q-Nap NAS with 6TB HDDs (in RAID5 setup). Best purchase ive made in years! Have 27TB of usable storage now for photos and a bunch of other IT work I do. Can FTP and a bunch of other things. Added a couple of 8TB drive i already had as a redundant backup for files.


Past that I keep my file structure pretty simple. General sport, team, or client name -- year-- then the specific event. Probably not the greatest but it's worked for me the last few years.

I have one folder for RAW images, another for processed images to share.

i have a similar set up to Juergen and Tim...

really quite simple.

if its a one off sort of thing, i make a folder on the laptop named "2018 work party" or whatever...
dump all my RAW files into it.
process with LR.
export the keepers into a sub-folder with in "2018 work party" named "edits"

if i have a recurring event, say my daughters band shows/concerts, theres a folder on the laptop named "2018-2019 PHN Band"
inside that file is a sub-folder named "Memorial Day Parade" or "July 4 Parade" or whatever the event is.
all of the RAW files go into it.
process with LR.
export the keepers into another sub-folder (in the same event folder) named "edits"

after a couple of weeks of playing around i copy all of this new(er) work to a 2TB portable hard drive...

it is my intention to get another portable hard drive or 3, to have a back up copy to the back up copy. i dont do anything that is earth shattering or needs much more than family picture type archival storage so i dont use the cloud or any sort of off-site storage even though ive been told that just having multiple copies on separate drives does NOT constitute backing up files...

MichSt wrote in post #18776295
I've been using a combo of lightroom and smugmug since 2008 or so. Lightroom is excellent tool for organization and editing. I flag and tag my photos for quickly sorting out the keepers. I also have it linked to my smugmug account so I can create galleries and folders and upload photos straight from lightroom. From smugmug I can share the files with my family and post images here and other platforms. It's pretty simple and easy for me.

Personally, I like the fact that Flickr functioned both to back up my photos as well as easily share them (or just certain albums) with others. It seems to me that Flickr is still one of the better choices in this regard if you want full resolution photos. How does smugmug compare in your experience?

el_duderino04 wrote in post #18798399
Personally, I like the fact that Flickr functioned both to back up my photos as well as easily share them (or just certain albums) with others. It seems to me that Flickr is still one of the better choices in this regard if you want full resolution photos. How does smugmug compare in your experience?

To answer my own question, it looks like one big difference for me is with Smugmug, you have to go to the $70/yr option to share photos with only certain people. It seems the $50/yr option that's comparable to Flickr either lets you share everything with the world, or not share at all. This is just based on a quick reading of the plan comparison on Smugmug's website, so I certainly may be mistaken.

I think you got it right on. I switched over to Smugmug about 10 years ago. Back then Flickr has some limited abilities to customize your site, organization, etc. Smugmug was far ahead in that area. Not sure where Flickr stands now. Also, I think back then on Flickr you could share all your photos or hide all your photos with no in between. On Smugmug I'm able to hide my site from searches. Which controlled access to just friends and family I gave the address out to and kept my stuff out of web search engines. Again, not sure where Flickr stands now with their options.