Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We are very new at learning to handle the digital photos .
My husband got a hard drive and backs up all the photos on his computer
every month or so.
I am confused because if each backup is replacing the previous one and photos have been lost or altered on the computer it seems we are
not actually preserving the originals.
How do you use the hard drive to save the new photos and
not resave all the old.
We are very new at learning to handle the digital photos .
My husband got a hard drive and backs up all the photos on his computer
every month or so.
I am confused because if each backup is replacing the previous one and photos have been lost or altered on the computer it seems we are
not actually preserving the originals.
How do you use the hard drive to save the new photos and
not resave all the old.
Actually the only way they'll get altered is if you open them up in a editing program like photoshop and resize/add or remove color, etc....
Taking a picture and copying it to a hard drive or to 30 hard drives will not alter it at all.
What I do, since hard drives are susceptible to failure just like any other kind of equipment is I upload them from the camera to my hard drive and then burn them onto a DVD.
Yes a DVD can get scratched and go bad, but I take good care of them and don't use them unless I have to restore back from them.
As for editing photos, I open up a photo in photoshop, immediately save it to another directory on my hard drive and then proceed to edit it as I want and save it to the new working directory thus preserving my original that resides in a completely separate directory on the same hard drive.
I save RAW files straight to my computer HD and then to external HD without opening them. After i do processing, i will save processed images to external HD along with RAW files.
If I want to keep it on the HD I will have one folder with the original files straight off the card, another "edit" folder with (surprise) edited photos and that way I have both. Then I might delete files from the "edit" folder that I didn't end up playing with after all.
It's good to have them backed up on an external HD, on CDs or something in case your main drive goes kaput.
How do you use the hard drive to save the new photos and
not resave all the old.
What you need is an incremental backup program that only saves things that are new or changed. If you're using a PC, I recommend this easy to use free program from Microsoft that does just what the doctor ordered. Microsoft Professional Photography: SyncToy v2.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/synctoybeta.aspx - broken link)
1. Process the RAW photos with PhotoShop, and save this processed photo to TIFF format, with leaves the original RAW image intact. I save the original RAW and TIFF images to external hard drives and DVD's. I also save the original TIFF image to the computer's hard drive, since I use this image for making copies of it to post as JPEG and other formats on the Internet.
2. To avoid altering the original RAW and Tiff images, all you have to to is to slightly change the name of the photo as you choose Save As, change the name, and then save. Also, you can save a copy of the original photos to JPEG format, but JPEG compresses the image and some of the quality is lost each time that you change it and save it. For that reason, I always save the original RAW image to TIFF format, since TIFF doesn't compress the image like JPEG does.
3. As example of how to save images without writing over the one you have opened on the computer. I will use a Canon RAW example, but if you are a Nikon user the rules apply just the same. A canon RAW image on my camera or computer will look like this (example):
IMG_6095.CR2 I process this file with PhotoShop (or any other application), and set PhotoShop to never save the image that I have processed to RAW format, but to another format such as TIFF. If the application you are using doesn't allow you to do this, then choose "Save AS," change the photo's name to look like this, "IMG_6095A" and save it. Since you have added the letter "A" (or B, or C, etc.) to the photo's number or name, the application you are using to process the photo won't save the photo over itself, but will save a copy of the RAW image to either another format of your choosing, or with another name.
What you need is an incremental backup program that only saves things that are new or changed. If you're using a PC, I recommend this easy to use free program from Microsoft that does just what the doctor ordered. Microsoft Professional Photography: SyncToy v2.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/synctoybeta.aspx - broken link)
An incremental backup is good as long as you don't alter the original images in the computer. It means that if you have altered the photo in any way, and saved the photo with the exact name or number, when you do an incremental backup the same photo (with the same name name) in the external hard drive will now be replaced with the one in the computer.
But as long as one changes or alters the name of the same photo, the old photo in the backup drive will be left alone, and a duplicate (with a new name) will be added to the same hard drive.
If Kelly is shooting in RAW, the original files can't be saved over anyway. Photoshop can't save as a CR2 file, for example. It can save as a photoshop RAW file but it won't save over the CR2 file so it will still save as a different file. If you've opened a CR2 file, even if you click "save" instead of "save as", it will still prompt you to choose a different file type to save it as.
Kelly, it's hard to answer your question without knowing how or what your husband is backing up every month. Perhaps he already has a system of renaming edited files so both the originals and edits are backed up. Or perhaps he's only backing up the originals and not moving the edits across (so he's only backing up new photos you've taken since the last back up).
An incremental backup is good as long as you don't alter the original images in the computer.
My recommendation is correct for the portion of the post that I quoted. Namely, how to save new stuff without overwriting old stuff. Others above had already addressed the question of dealing with original versus edited images, so I did not go there.
But since you brought it up, I don't understand all the rigmarole you are going through yourself. Photoshop CS and LR don't modify RAW images. The actual raw converter adjustments you make are saved in XMP files. There's no need for you to make extra copies of your images as TIFFs as well as keeping the RAWs. TIFFs are HUGE and unnecessary in this context.
I save my files to an external HD as soon as I upload them to my computer. I almost lost a bunch of them awhile back, believe me I was in a panic, so I went from backing them up once a week, some times every two weeks, to backing them up immediately.
I use a numbering system so I can tell at a glance when the picture was taken and on the edited pictures I will add a "b" in front so I know it's a copy and maybe a letter in back to give me an idea what I did to the picture.
For instance the first photo taken today would be "Image A200908120001" for the original. If I just crop it, then I will "save as" and add a "C1" for the first crop, if I crop it again then it will be "C2". Later I will pick the crop I like best and usually discard the rest. I resize them when I email them to family, so it would be saved as "Image b200908120001 C1 r". Resized copies I usually delete after I email them. The "r" lets me know which copy is the resized one.
I started using this numbering system when I collected our old family photos, some dating back to the early 1900s. I had several hundred photos and this was the only way I could organize them so when I moved them from one album to another they would fall into the right chronological order.
It might be overkill for some, but I like it.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
