How I Organized Photo Storage

Hi Habr! Each of us stores some information, some use secrets and life hacks for this. Personally, I love to press the button of the photogun and today I would like to share my experience of storing information, to which I walked and walked and came.

I’ll warn you right away: there is no “silver bullet” under the cut that will multiply by 0 the problem of chaos in the files on your devices. And not even a line about neural networks, recognition of something by anyone and other nanotechnologies. Under the cut - a little text and an oak plate, which also has to be filled in manually =) But it works.

Intro

Before I understand what problem I wanted to solve, let me briefly talk about it =) I do not consider myself a direct photographer-photographer, but still:

• I have a photo gun and take pictures in RAW (each photo weighs an average of 20-25 MB)
• I had a question about storing and structuring photos (or rather their source files)

Now a little more detail.

I use 1-2 memory cards of 64 GB each (not the ones in the photo below, although I know that they have already come into view)) - buying larger cards (128-256) suffocates me with a toad. Not even so much a toad as an attitude towards the card as a kind of consumable, with which a fiasco can happen at any moment: I lost the cards, bent them, and once it was stupidly stolen right from the camera. And “all eggs in one basket” is not the most far-sighted approach.

This is what happens when you forget to take the card out of your laptop, put it in the passenger seat and brake hard. And on this rake - twice.

64 GB is somewhere around 2000-2500 equal photos. In my case, these are 4-6 photosets of events or about 10 “gadget” ones. Check out my previous posts and see why so many. Someone will say “why torture the shutter button like that” and they will be right, but I wrote above that I am a bit of a noob. Moreover, I have a bad habit of taking two frames at a time - if the first one turns out to be blurry, then perhaps the second one will come to the rescue. I have it at the level of instinct and so far I can not do anything about it. This is the answer to the question “why do I take pictures in ravines” - yes, it’s trite to correct their own jambs, all sorts of overexposures, underexposures and other geometries.

Problem

For a long time, I could not find a program that would help me fully cover my data storage needs. There are catalogers, there is convenient work with meta tags, with face recognition and drawing photos on a map - a whole bunch of cool features, but ... scattered across different applications. I will list a few pitfalls that almost all applications have stumbled over.

Problem number 1: there is a memory card on the table - what is on it? You never know. Of course, you can scroll through 2000 photos on your camera, insert them into your laptop or take notes on your smartphone, but this will not give you the “big picture”. And will not answer the questionHave I already backed up this data or can it be deleted permanently?”, if, for example, you urgently need to free up space? After all, free 64 GB may not be at hand.

Problem number 2: you never know what state the photo is in. Sorted? Processed? Can I delete it or put it on my computer first? Do you know those endless folders “From SD”, “SD64 LAST”, “!UNSORTED”, “2018 ALL”, “iPhone_before_update” and so on? =) On a laptop, on a memory card, on an external drive, with a bunch of repetitions? And this oppressive feeling,it would be necessary to put things in order in all this - there will be a free weekend ...". And there are no free weekends.

Problem 3: How do you find the photos you need quickly? For example, recently I needed to make a collage of all the “first Septembers” over several years. Store on laptop? Won't fit. Wool on different disks? Well, as an option. But is it uncomfortable?

I will be extremely grateful if you tell me a more functional and flexible option than the one that I came up with by trial and error for myself (below). I repeat that this is not about a photo viewer / sorter, but about convenience / visibility / information content.

Solution

I decided to use such a cool tool as tables in GoogleDocs =) It's free, cross-platform and ted - I think it needs no introduction. Before compiling the frame of the plate, I tried to understand what fields I need. You can come up with at least a hundred of them, but you need to make sure that they are convenient to use and do not bother filling out every time. Well, try to take into account further scaling: so that the sign is convenient to use in a year or two or three.

I stopped my thoughts on the following set of fields:

1. Category. I analyzed what I photograph and broke it down into categories. It turned out like this:

   Cars - cars
   Events - events
   Gadgets - gadgets
   Girls - well, you understand
   Home - something home, family
   Life - any movement that does not fall into the categories above
   — =)
   Travel - travel

   
   All photosets will be laid out in these sections. If you take a lot of photos, then it is more convenient to keep each section on a separate sheet (at the bottom of the table).

   
   It's important: Try to avoid creating the "Other" category, as this is where the chaos will start, which will collapse the universe. The maximum is “!Temp”, into which you will merge files for further sorting into other categories.

2. Name. Within the category, each photoset has a name - you need to give names that will be easy to remember or find. Two options are convenient here: alphabetically or chronologically. I alternate between both options: in gadgets it is more convenient to use device names, in events - a mask like “2-2018-03 - March 08”. If anything, there is always CMD+F.
3. Where now. In this column, I indicate where the photos are currently stored - on the camera's memory card, on the laptop, on an external drive or in the cloud. If the data location changes, the label is updated. It is important to indicate information about the photoset immediately, otherwise it will be forgotten later.
4. Pieces before sorting. It is not always possible (or rather, it never works at all) to take and sort gigabytes of RAWs right away, usually you just throw them off the memory card. And here it is important to understand how many photos are in the photoset - in order to roughly estimate how long it will take to sort and process.

   life hack: It will be useful to know the average speed of sorting and processing photos, if you bother with this at all. Just set a timer for 5-10 minutes and then see how much you managed to ennoble. It takes me an average of 2-5 minutes to take a photo (provided that I know the hotkeys in Photoshop well). Further see item 8.

5. Sorting and processing. Just two columns whose cells are filled with either green (= "Done") or red (= "Not done"). You can add, for example, blue - if processing is not required. Such a color legend will clearly show what is in what condition. Optionally, you can display numbers in it - the speed of work multiplied by the number of photos after sorting (see paragraph 11).

   By sorting, I mean the selection of the best frames (removing repetitions and marriage) for further processing, and by processing itself, their path from rav to jeep (which is not a shame to show others). In the future, inside each folder, it will be the processed jeeps, and in the "Originals" subfolder - raves and * .xmp-shki from them.

6. Cloud copy. Usually it makes no sense to upload an unsorted layer of photos to the cloud, it's a waste of time and space. There it makes sense to backup already sorted photos. And better - already processed. If I upload files to the cloud, then I make a clickable link to the folder so that I can go to the right place from the tablet in one click, and not climb the online file manager (which, as a rule, slow down).
7. copy on disk. Clouds are considered to be reliable, but something inside tells you that it is better to have a backup also locally (at least for especially important data). Well, either if we are talking about some kind of “sensitive” data that I would not want to upload to the Internet.
8. Quantity, size. The number of photos after sorting, as well as the amount of space they occupy. An optional column, but now I'll try to explain why I made it.

   If I see a certain photoset with a green “Sorting” cell and a red “Processing” cell, it means that I just need some free time for a rather dull and monotonous mechanical work. Knowing the number and size of photos, I can plan this activity. For example, next weekend I have to drive a peregrine falcon from Moscow to St. Petersburg and back, that is, I know that I will have a laptop and 8 hours without a stable Internet (= excellent conditions for photo processing). We roughly estimate how many photos we will have time to process during this time and upload the necessary photosets to the laptop. This is where knowledge of at least the approximate processing speed of 1 photo comes in handy. It takes me from 2 to 5 minutes to take a photo, 8 hours is 480 minutes, which means it hardly makes sense to copy more than 300 photos to a laptop (which is about 6 to 9 GB). I have a 256 GB disk in my macbook, sometimes I have to “play tag”, but with a sign, the total size of photosets never comes as a surprise to me.

   
   And then you just need to arrive early at the station in order to have time to take a table in the dining car =)

9. Shooting date. An important parameter that is closely related to the next column.
10. On the phone. It often happens that in addition to the photo gun, you have to simultaneously shoot something on the phone. For example, if you take a picture of a dynamic scene (races), and ask a friend to shoot a video. Or if you are doing repairs and you have dirty hands, you don’t want to take out the camera, but shoot it on your phone – just right. As a result, right now I have 128 photos on a 25000 GB iPhone. Yes, there is a lot of bullshit, but there is enough of what is needed.

    So that important phone photos do not live a separate life, it would be more correct to add them to the thematic photoset folder. And just by date, it’s the fastest to search for what you need (although geotags also help a lot here). If there is a “Yes” mark on the phone, then I need to upload photos from the phone separately. If “No”, then either they were not there, or they have already been thrown off.

11. Marriage. It is unlikely that this column will be useful to you, but for myself I decided to leave it for now. It displays what percentage of the marriage I remove from the photoset - on average it is 50%, that is, as I said, my problem is that I make duplicate frames. In general, I don’t see anything wrong with this, I don’t feel sorry for shutter count =) but still for me it’s a kind of irritant that I see every time I enter the plate and every time I think “learn how to take a picture, pumping knowledge and skills”. One day I'll get crazy and get busy!
12. Draft and post. If I need to write something about the object being photographed (for example, a review of the device, of which there were many in my profile), then first I create a draft in Googledox, the link to which I link to the word "Here". Green color - the draft is finished, yellow - in the process, red - not taken yet. The same with posts - adding a link to a post allows you to go to the desired post in one click, without any googling there.

    You can immediately see what condition all the publications are in, what is the amount of "technical debt".

Clickable:

Actually, I got such a sign =) Quite massive, but I made it for myself. If you liked my way of thinking, then take and adapt to your needs, add, remove.

Optionally, you can sum up the weight of all photosets, and count the% of space occupied on a media of known capacity (a kind of progress bar).

Speaking of carriers.

At first, I only kept files on my laptop, but the space quickly ran out. I bought an external drive for 2.5 ″ - it died relatively soon due to my fault, since I constantly carried it with me in my backpack and once didn’t save it.

I decided to try Ya.Disk, bought 1TB - in general, it seems convenient, but at the same time a lot of inconvenience: upload and download speed, cost, confidentiality (what if some beta version of the new algorithm considers my photos invalid and fixes the entire account?) and much more.

Therefore, in the end, I settled on the symbiosis version: I took two stationary disks and left an active subscription in Ya.Disk as a transit point and a spare wheel. Those “insensitive” data fly into the cloud that may potentially be needed in the foreseeable future - for example, photos of a device that you have to write about, or photos from children's events that you have to rummage with other parents (the presence of a SLR automatically dooms you to this function in kindergarten and school). On disks - everything that does not belong in the cloud.

At the beginning of the year, I took two 3.5″ Seagate Ironwolf as stationary drives - a series of drives specifically for NAS-s. In this line there are models from 1 to 14 TB - for 1 and 2 TB it’s not serious, for 6 or more it’s a little expensive. I settled on a 4 TB model - at first I thought to make an 8 TB JBOD out of them, but then I calculated and realized that I hadn’t taken so many pictures yet =) And in the end I glued it into raid 1 - so as not to bite my elbows for sure. Disks with 5900 rpm, so there is little noise, they don’t get particularly hot, at a speed everything is more than ok (although I didn’t even do an exact measurement).

1TB on Ya.Disk costs 2000 ₽ per year, that is, 4TB will cost annual 8K (life hack: if you have a Ya.Plus subscription for 1500 per year, there will be a 30% discount on Ya.Disk), from the pros - you can add a place in a couple of clicks. Seagate Ironwolf 4 TB cost 7K per piece (I managed to snatch 6 each), but you bought them once, set them and forgot - they can autonomously rustle somewhere in the closet and not ask for money at intervals of a year.

For the sake of interest, I looked at the tariffs in [email protected] - 1 TB costs from 699 ₽ per month! ) That is 8400 per year. 4 TB - from 2690 ₽ per month (32K per year).

For me, 4 TB is still enough for photos, but if you are editing video, it will not be enough. In general, consider yourself under your tasks =)

An important point to be taken into account in the calculations. I recently spoke with two wedding photographers - they said that they are trying to send a photo to the client within a month (this is already retouched). Then they keep the photos for a couple more months, and then they ruthlessly delete them, leaving only a couple of photos for the portfolio from each photoset (and the source files for them in case they have to prove something to someone, both of them happened). At first I thought about this approach:Hmm, maybe well, fuck him ?! After all, why keep all these photos of other people's weddings and gadgets if you will never look at them?". Wait for the magicand suddenly come in handy"? If over the past year you have not had such a usefulness, then believe me, it will not come in handy. But then I thought that there is still a difference between one’s own and someone else’s - yes, you won’t watch family photos and videos either now, but it will be very nice to watch in 5-10-15 years. And here you realize that it is better to stock up on free space.

Browser hack

I use Chrome and it has a handy bookmarks bar (CMD+Shift+B). Create a bookmark of the table with files, rename it - assign a name:

(Ugh, Habr does not support emoji, I had to insert a picture). If there are a lot of bookmarks, you can do it with a separator, I like this one - “⬝”. It turns out this beauty:

The end

I've been using this tablet for about six months now and I generally like everything about it, I'm already used to filling it out while the files are being copied. Therefore, I propose not to waste time trying to convince me =) But at the same time, I understand that it is from the Stone Age and it is possible (but not possible, but definitely!) There is a lot to improve or automate (which requires more knowledge and time). Collective mind, let's think together how we can improve / redo / optimize all this, achieving better results with a minimum of effort? Any suggestions are welcome.

Well, or maybe you have your own secrets of file storage pickles - share.

I hope it was useful =) Good luck!

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Where is the best place to store photos?

• Locally on PC

• In the cloud

• On an external drive

• On a separate home server / NAS

• In several places at once

• Other

464 users voted. 40 users abstained.

In what format do you take pictures?

• RAW

• JPEG

• RAW+JPEG

443 users voted. 47 users abstained.

Do you organize your photos?

• Yes, everything is organized

• I systematize only the selected

• No, it's all lumped together.

442 users voted. 38 users abstained.

Source: habr.com