Monday, September 15, 2008

Workflow and Saving Images

Lots of people ask me the process I go through when working my images. Here are the steps I follow when I am downloading images(note, this is how I do it, other people may have better ways, but it works for me!):

1) Download the images from the card to my hard drive on my computer to a folder called ORIGINALS.

2) Copy them onto a backup hard drive into an identical ORIGINALS folder.

3) I then make a copy of the originals and put them into a folder called TO CORRECT

4) Make my corrections to the images, then save them in a folder called CORRECTED. Depending on what the client requires, I will save them as TIFF or JPEGS.

5) Copy the corrected images onto the backup hard drive in a folder called CORRECTED.

6) Once i have over 4 gigabytes of images, I will burn them to DVD, making two copies just in case something happens to a DVD.

This way, i've got three or four copies of the images in a variety of places so if my computer crashes, I've got a copy somewhere else.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Noel:

I follow a similar pattern, except I create a sub-folder inside the main folder created when I download the pics, and then I edit only the ones I want to bother editing (likely far less % than you edit! ;-) and save the edited files there.

Rather than burn to DVD (which I despise doing for some odd and unexplained reason... call it some kind of DVD burnaphobia...), I back everything up to a second hard drive inside my machine, then once every few weeks, I back up the entire second hard drive to an external drive that I use exclusively for backing up of all my files. That external drive then moves to my office at work for safe-keeping in the event of fire, theft, etc.

This doesn't guarantee 100% recovery, because I only backup the external every few weeks, but if the it is much better than losing everything!

Of course, this solution wouldn't be effective in case of a nuclear attack, since everything would likely get wiped from all my magnetic drives, but if that were to happen, recovering my digital images of the boat show or trips to the zoo might seem less important... :-)

Chris