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TomOwen

How do you manage your skydiving media?

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How do you store your photos and videos?

I have tried iMovie, iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom... but it would be great if I could have a software solution that let me tag and arrange by date my photos AND videos, without creating backup copies that are a drain on my hard drive space. I have .mpg, .jpg and RAW files.

The best method so far is a simple directory structure, keeping all my files in finder/explorer.

Dropzone Name => Year => Month => Day => Stills/Videos.

Anyone got any better solutions?

Tom

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Did you try Google`s PICASA? It does what you requested....

I did and I think it`s a good tool, but it also sucks performance wise when you are dealing with a very large number of objects (>50.000) especially when using a NAS or other form of Network Storage.

In fact, I did not find the "right" tool for managing a very large number of objects... :-(

alex

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www.tandemmaster.net
www.skydivegear.de

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I organize my photos in Lightroom unfortunately it still doesn't work great for video organizing yet (at least with, sony AVCHD...).

I also archive all of my photos and videos on redundant disks arrays (RAID 5)

Edited to add: I don't know if RAID 5 is the best for this but it does provide some data protection in that if one of the drives fails then it can limp by until the failed drive can be reboot... it also can provide reading benifits...

My desktop has a 4 - 320 GB disks in a hardware RAID 5 setup for RAW video data. (it comes out to about 900 GB)

I have a 2 TB Seagate Green Drive for Photos and other Data (rendered footage, etc).

Then I have a 4 disk Synology - NAS with 4 - 1.5 TB disks running in RAID 5 to provide ~ 4 TB of space to backup my home computers (Desktop, Laptop, home theather PC)

I've not yet explored the option of online storage... since I'm dealing with a lot of data... and frankly with my internet access issues lately it probably wouldn't work very well...
Livin' on the Edge... sleeping with my rigger's wife...

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I started using Carbonite online backup a while ago. I create data a lot faster than it uploads, so my computer was constantly uploading when idle. 100+ gigs uploaded over weeks. Then I had my OS/apps hard drive fail. My pictures and videos are stored on other drives. Anyway after replacing the failed drive and reinstalling Carbonite, my backup seems to have disappeared and Carbonite says it can't back up that drive because its removable. Its an east's docking station... internal hard drive as far as windows knows. I called tech support and after a wasted 2 hours they told me I would get a call from a higher level person. I missed the call and am never home during their hours, so no resolution yet.

Might ask for a refund and try mozy next.

Back on topic, I use lightroom to manage photos. I use a directory structure by date. I upload many shots each week to my website, and caption and keyword them. I pretty much use the website as my index when I am looking for a pic. I find the date and filename on the site and then browse to the right folder in lightroom.

Dave

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I use iPhoto to library my photos. I don't tag, but everything is by date, and my log book (for skydiving) and calendar can point me to any photo I need to retrieve. I don't use iPhoto for editing, but have it set up so double clicking a photo opens it in Photoshop. My photos are on a separate internal drive on my computer.

I am tape based for video (or was until this week, and still will be for skydiving through this year) so I don't keep videos on my computer once I am done with a given project. My tapes are my archive*. While I am working on a given project I have an internal scratch disk and an external Raid array (for speed, not redundancy, I forget whether that it 1 or 0). Once I have captured the video for a longer project, I copy it to both drives just in case (capturing tape is very time consuming), and use the Raid for the video clips while working on it, and the internal for rendered files.

I clone all drives for back up using Superduper by Shirt Pocket (Mac only I think). I love that if I have a drive fail I can simply swap it out and be up and running immediately. I have cloned drives both locally and remote. Local is cloned once a week unless I just imported bunch of stuff, and remote is cloned whenever I get around to swapping the drives (sneaker net). Cloned drives are connected using a Voyager raw hard drive dock connected with eSATA. The system is very fast, automated, and easy to swap out drives (although I wish I had gotten the Firewire dock, as SATA can't be hot-swapped negating some of the speed advantage). I also use Time Machine to back up my system drive (in addition to the clone) for frequent back-ups. But I don't really like it, and hope I never have to use it. Time Machine is a simple background back-up, but 'll bet it would be a nightmare to actually retrieve anything from Time Machine if your drive and system crashes.

If all this back-up and redundancy sounds a bit much, it is actually simple once installed, and anyone who has lost valuable data can attest to what a nightmare it is if you don't have a good back-up plan.

*BTW, I just got a Sony CF Memory Recording drive (HVR-MRC1) for my larger camera, and am dying to use it. But I still like the fact that I have an instant tape back-up. Tapes rock for archival purposes, and I will be sad when they go away unless I can replace them with something similarly cheap and robust. Hell I have old hard drives that I don't even have a way to connect to my computers anymore (SCSI).

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Here's how I take care of my backup strategy: http://www.iwanvanderschoor.com/blog/2010/07/01/pro-workflow-on-semi-pro-budget/

This is my first article on this, and since I am still working on fine-tuning the workflow, and automating more of it.. I will have a second one sometime in the near future.
The thing with backups is.. if you have to think about it, if you have to remember to do it.. you will end up forgetting it. so I want to make sure it happens automagically,

Regarding organizing, I do it similar, but not by dropzone name, since I do a lot of stuff off the dropzone as well:

Year => Month => Project => Day => Camera

I know you said "backups are a drain on your harddrive", two things:

1. no backup means you WILL lose your work
2. dont backup on the same harddrive

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In a folder with the date and place they were taken. Backed up on:

4x 1TB HDD's. All identical mirrors. Stored in ESD pelican cases. Two stored on-site, two stored off-site (overkill). Right now my entire archive (includes skydiving photos, videos, and lots of other photos and important personal data) is 700GB. Once I reach my 1TB capacity I'll have to buy some more disks, but really they're cheap. Only $100 for a WDC Caviar Black 1TB.
www.WingsuitPhotos.com

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I just use the date format for both Video and stills in seperate directories (for now). I keep all my student releases by date also.

I would really like to be able to easily (fast) index or add some metadata that would be easily searchable by people, places, things, evets, etc.


Pat

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Thanks for the replies - some interesting solutions, and it seems that there is no "perfect" solution.

Quote


I know you said "backups are a drain on your harddrive", two things:

1. no backup means you WILL lose your work
2. dont backup on the same harddrive



I do backup, using an external drive that I manually copy the files on to, and also Apple Time Machine.

When I said about "backup copies" I mean the alternate file copies that some programs create - e.g. iMovie doesn't let you work from your own library of .mpg files, but creates its own, and that is a drain on storage space.

It seems Google Picasa is online only - I dread to think how long it would take to upload everything!

I'm going to go through these solutions and come up with a strategy to use from now on - file management can take a looooooong time, especially when you change your storage method!

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A bit of a bump here, as I've finally solved my problems!

Downloading the mpeg 2 component for quicktime allows aperture, lightroom and picasa all to catalogue, thumbnail and play my .mpg files from my CX105.

I now need to decide which of the three I prefer! I think Aperture is out, since it doesn't monitor folders and uses an insane amount of RAM... so Picasa or Lightroom, both of which can now store and play my .cr2, .jpg and .mpg files!

Thanks guys.

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