Backing up my images has always been important, and as I consider moving to a 10 megapixel camera, and shoot more RAW format images than ever before, the amount of disk space becomes an even greater consideration.

My current workflow is this:

  1. Take photos - this seems like a good first step ;-)

  2. Upload images onto MacBook into Lightroom

  3. Use the Library view and delete the duffers and tag the keepers

  4. Use the Develop view with all remaining and make any adjustments

  5. Export all remaining photos to a folder on my desktop, and include a contents.txt file indicating keywords for photos within that folder to allow for quick searching on the server

  6. Decide if I want to make an album for them for janeandrichard.co.uk and if so, then copy them to a different area on my machine, open up a web browser and run a home-grown (well Richard grown) script to create an album. Then ftp it up to the server.

  7. Copy the folder from my desktop to the photos area on our server. (Richard runs a backup from the server to an external USB drive now and again - for a long time we backed up to CDs but its got a little bit out of hand now...)

I'm about to add a new task, which follows on from item 7 above which is

  • Upload the folder to flickr tagging the photos as appropriate and putting into their own set.
I'm unsure at this stage whether to make these private or public, and to some extent it will depend on what my decision was at item 6. This then means that there should now be 3 copies of all photos at this stage, one on the laptop, one on the server and one on flickr.

I don't have a good workflow for cleaning out images off my MacBook at the moment, but I guess realistically there is no need to keep images that have been processed, backed up and are "infrequently accessed". This is an area I need to get better at as at the moment I have over 6GB of images on my laptop.