Nuts & Bolts by Bill Pierce- The Digital Journalist

This one is for any photographer who wants to preserve his/her images. The sad fact is that there is no fool proof solution to archiving one's precious images. I guess that 'precious images'is arguable because we are drowning in a sea of images and no one gives a damn about our images. Hmm... Yeah, thoughts about saving your images. This article by Bill Pierce is food for thought. Article

My two cents worth:

1. You have to start editing early and just dump the worthless shots. In general, I would say that half of anything I shoot can go immediately into the trash can although I suspect that I can go up to 90%. And be honest, is that portrait of the lady collecting cardboard shot on a wide angle lens from across a football field really any good??

2. I suspect that out of the decent shots that we archive, the shots that we are truly proud to call our own is as rare as hen's teeth. So make a folder of selects and put your best shots, in highest resolution, in that file. This will save you hours of seach time when you finally want to put together a portfolio or exhibition. In my case I am using a portable drive of 100mb. Not that I have so many great images, but because I am giasu and shoot large files.

3. The most common response to archiving is at least one copy on DVD. Uggh. You will have to be very, very disciplined to manage so many DVD's and catalog all of them. I am going to have my images on 2 hard drives. These two hard drives will be placed in different physical locations in case my office burns down or something to that effect. The hard drives will be checked regularly and if one drive fails, I will make a copy from the other drive to replace the spoilt drive.

4. I have not done this yet, but I am going to buy iview media pro to catalog my work. It is getting to the stage that trying to keyword all my images is a nightmare. Thumbnails of what I have and where they are will be invaluable. This is one of the reasons I am taking a sabbatical in the first half of next year. Loads and loads of cataloging.