Photo management

posted by Jeff | Monday, November 13, 2006, 11:59 PM | comments: 2

I spent part of tonight burning copies of photos for Stephanie before she moves, and it's kinda weird to see that some of the older discs are discolored around the edges. That concerns me.

But in the mean time, it's interesting to note how easy it is to burn photos from iPhoto. Seriously, for being "free" with OS X and every new Mac, it's far from a lightweight. It just works, and it works so well.

I do wish it did a little more in terms of modifying images, but I realize that's what Aperture is for. Probably the neatest thing about that program is the way you can copy and paste tweaks between photos. It's really the ultimate digital light box, that's for sure.

When I go back into my photo collection, it's interesting how we didn't take a lot of pictures unless it was a big vacation, presumably due to the cost of film and processing. But even in Hawaii, I only shot 230 photos. I shot half that number in four hours at the Columbus Zoo the weekend before last!

Digital is so freeing. Looking at some of the counts, Steph shot 120 photos of my kids in Baltimore in 2004, and 350 at my cousin's wedding. I snapped 122 at Medieval Times that year, and about 130 at Mackinac this summer.

I still have a lot of concerns about backing this stuff up, of course, but I'll have to come up with a strategy for this. If I can find backup software that can map to a network drive (namely my Web server) for OS X, I'll be all set.


Comments

Craig

November 14, 2006, 7:51 PM #

The details aren't very clear on how you can back up your files, but Time Machine looks like something worth using once OS X Leopard comes out.

Walt

November 16, 2006, 1:38 PM #

I'm facing the daunting task of backing up not only more than 15,000 RAW files, but also adding scores of scans and eventually moving hundreds of hours of 8mm film and VHS to digital. I don't trust a DVD or CD for something on that scale, and it's would take too many anyway. I think I'll probably come up with some rotating hard drive setup, where one always lives in a safe deposit box, another one is always off-site somewhere else, and a third at home. Even though hard drives don't last forever, with more than one copy I know I'll always be able to transfer it to whatever medium is necessary in the future.

Plus with everything in one catalog, I'll be able to find photos and video of specific family members from specific dates. It'll be nice to have that library so I can fulfill requests.


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