As the old year has come to a close, I'm launching into my fresh New Year clean-up with projects and projected projects. I begin with backing up my cell phone photos and most recent photos so that I can clear the camera SD cards for future shooting.
As I progress on the digital scrapbooking, I've found myself slowed by the scattered nature of having shot with multiple cameras over the years. All my photos are organized by date, but then subdivided by camera. Most of our "people" photos were shot with point-and-shoot cameras, and most of my DSLR were scenic or wildlife, however there are some people shots buried in my DSLR files as well. And then there are the cell phone images. This would be less of an issue had I been keeping up with scrapbooking as I offloaded images, or if my computer had a hard drive large enough to hold 600GB of images all at one time. As it stands now, I find myself having to import the point-and-shoot photos a year or two at a time, and then dig through the external hard drive to find the "people" shots in my DSLR files. (At least for 2009 the DSLR shots are in jpg so there is a preview in the folders... somewhere around December of that year I switched to shooting all RAW format, so I'm going to have to dig using Adobe Bridge to find all the people photos.)
As to the burn... here is my photo back-up process.
Although I tend to offload my images from the SD cards to my computer regularly, I do not delete them from the SD card until they are fully backed up twice. I first burn the images to DVD-R's, then offload the images to my external hard drive organized by date and camera. By this time I usually have 3 copies of the RAW images, one on my computer, one on DVD, and one on the external hard drive. It it time consuming and seems like overkill, maybe, but I've had to recover more than one set of photos from the DVDs when my old external hard drive corrupted the images during the transfer. Once all the images are backed up twice, I reformat the SD cards and I am good to go.
I dream of the day when I can come back from an outing, offload the images shot, edit them the following weekend, and then update my site and/or update the current scrapbook. Until then, at least I can blog while I wait for the CD's to burn.
A place to talk about the hobbies which bring me joy.
