what do you do with all your pictures?

I rarely delete my RAW files. Thanks to the convenience of Lightroom I have all my RAWs stored in a safe place on an external hard drive and I create Jpegs of most of my images.

I share my images through e-mail, family events mostly, and I'll print 4x6s of my favorite shots. I'll place the 4x6s in a photo album and allow friends and family to see them, if they want one I can make them a larger print. A lot of my stuff also goes on my flickr.

I import CR2 with Lightroom, discard the obvious garbage, and backup to external HD. After that, ill do any editing in PS CS3 and convert to JPEG as necessary. Haven't printed any yet, and have not amassed enough yet to warrant a DVD backup.

1. Download them using EOS Utlity.
2. In DPP (yeah, I should use ARC) I convert the worthy photos to jpeg or tiff (really depends on the usage).
3. Edit them in photoshop, and depending on the photo I'll upload it to Flickr.

I'll also periodically transfer photos (including ALL the RAW files) to the external hard drive.


If I'm shooting something for Cadets, I'll burn a backup CD (for me), a CD for the Commanding Officer (the photos have to be approved for 'public release', and I need to check if everyone gave permission for their pics to be used), and a CD for the other people in the Public Relations section.


I very rarely delete photos, especially if they are from a holiday. From my last holiday, to France/Morocco/Singapo​re, I didn't find some of the photos initally appealing. However, after waiting a bit and trying new things with the editing, there are some photos that actually looked good.

What's the harm in keeping them? It's not like you can easily go back and get a shot that you deleted (airfairs from Aus to Europe are rather expensive).

At the moment they are in several groups of folders (eg. cadets), and then based on dates. I know where most pics are, but sometimes I can spend ages looking for a single picture. What system to do you use to tag your photos? I take it that Lightroom can do this, but is there anything else?

Not only do I take a lot of digital pics but am also in the process of archiving may years of negatives and positives by scanning them in on a Nikon Coolscan. I currently have over 12 thousand photos on file so hard disk storage does not suit me. I am typically scanning at ful resolution so I do not loose any information should I want to go back to a negative.

I use a package called Thumbs plus, in which, either my scanned or digital photos are dropped into a hard disk folder until they reach a size that fits onto a dual layer DVD. I burn them onto DVD and Thumbs Plus trackes them as an off line disk but still keeps the thumb nail of the photo on a local database. To this I use key words to cataloge and also place the genre of the photo in a gallery.

Once off line the DVD's are stored on a Imation disk stacka that keeps track of where they are. If I need a particular photo, I can do a search by keyword or just about any other field in Thumbs plus, it will tell me to insert a particular DVD that is off line, I recover the DVD from the Disk Stacka and insert it into my computer. Once mounted, Thumbs Plus recognises the disk and brings up the photo.

I generally do not chuck a photo unless it is obviously crap. With the system I have I can call up a photo that my father took 30 years ago to a shot that I took last week.

I am currently using dual layer DVD's. When the blueray technology become cheap enough I will transfer the disks I have to this (less disks to cataloge).

I do not trust relying on hard disks as I have had many fail. By copying onto removable media, and having a database that I can back up, I can pretty well retreive any photo I have ever taken. Keeping the DVD's in a relatively controlled enviroment has ment that to date (touch wood) I have never had a photo I could not recover.

The negative and positives are archived in KLAME archival sleives that are stored in ring folders. Each sheet is referenced back into a field in Thumbs Plus so should I have to re scan a negative I can easily find the original. Digital is referenced to the off line DVD.

Cheers
Rainsey

Do a once through in camera to weed down obviously OOF images. Then to my PC. Go through again and delete duplicates or similar pictures, bad light, shadows, etc....Then open all in PSE 5 editor (usually in groups) and edit and make the final deletes.

The best go to my website, the rest get cataloged and backed up to an external drive. At the end of the year, I burn the whole year onto DVD's and delete them off the hard drive (but leave them on the external).

I will usually get about a dozen prints every week or two. It's nice to have them around to give away. I have a wall in my house that is all my photography, and I will update and change the pictures as needed.