I recently (end of November) bought myself an early Christmas present: a Nikon D3100. I did this mostly because our first child was due on December 10th (he came December 11th! – photos).
Now, as you imagine, as a crazy happy new dad, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. And I’ve been especially good about making sure they are all backed up. I have them on my laptop, my external RAID array, and now on my in a different state colo’d server.
But, since that D3100 is a DSLR I’ve been playing around with RAW images, and those can be pretty big. So far, just since I got this camera around November 30th I have about 17 gigs of photos already. My harddrive, which is an SSD, is going to fill up soon enough and it would be full now if I had imported all of my previous photos from my previous camera(s).
So, I’ve been looking for a smart way of dealing with large photo collections where part of it is on my laptop and part is ‘archived’ on an external harddrive or in the cloud or wherever.
What I see as a perfect work-flow for this is:
- Take photos with camera
- Import photos to Photo Management Software on your laptop
- Process, tag, export, publish, etc
- Repeat 1-3 many times
- Use a ton of your computer’s harddrive space
- Archive all photos except the last 60 gig/3 months (whatever) to an external harddrive, or nfs share, or cloud storage, etc
- The Photo Management Software knows where those photos are, their metadata, and has a small thumbnail for them as placeholders in the timeline
The killer feature here is the Archive button. Admittedly, Google revolutionized webmail with that button (while getting tons of other things wrong with GMail*), who is going to revolutionize photo management with it?
Do any photo management applications out there do this without having to do stupid painful things like this (which makes me remove photos from one library and add them to a ‘backup library’ where I can’t see them all in the same Shotwell session).
* Like non-threaded email, non-standard IMAP server, etc