Lesson 6: Organize and Backup

Lightroom Classic screenshot.

Introduction to organization.

So you have shot an image, using all the information from the previous lessons. It is now living happily on your memory card in the form of a weirdly named .jpg or raw file. There’s probably no information in the file name about what trip the photo was taken on, which camera took it, what settings you used, etc. We want to be able to organize your images using the metadata stored within the image file. Metadata is information about data that helps describe, organize, and manage it, such as details about when a file was created, who created it, and its content.

We are lucky to live in a digital world: we no longer need to deal with bulky boxes of negatives. But of course, we still need to index and label our images just as before, or it will be just as impossible to find an old image as it was in the days of film. Any photographer who has been shooting for a while will have tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of images in their library. If you don’t organize your library, and if you don’t do it early, you will have an impossible mess on your hands.

Now you have one of these pieces of software we talk about above, the first part of a digital workflow is called ingestion, basically a fancy way of saying that you’re copying your files onto your computer. This can be done either directly from the camera, or via a card reader.

There are many different ways you can set up your directories, but the general premise is that you should organize your files in a well-defined, well-thought-out structure that ultimately makes sense to you. A very popular way of doing this is simply by date: all files shot today would go in the folder 2024 > 2024-02-05.

Changing filenames is somewhat optional but can also be important, you could name your date and location, which would give 20240205-London-001.nef, or you could include the date, model name and camera e.g. 20240205-Chelsea-Z6-001.nef. This gives you some insurance that you can find your files even if you cannot launch your DAM software. Most DAM software offer means to inject text into the file name so you can take advantage of this and rename on import.

Once all the images are inserted in the library, it is time for reviewing and tagging. You should go through your images in full screen and sort them into different groups, marking the best ones for further work. Most software has keyboard shortcuts so you can quickly assign combinations of flags and number ratings to your images. Culling obviously bad images; be it out of focus, too overexposed, or just simply duplicates is important in this step to reduce the amount of data you collect. Storage is relatively cheap now, so it’s up to you whether you’d like to delete “rejects” or just let them sit in the folder. You should also investigate if your DAM offers previews - these are normally a smaller JPEG version that can be quickly loaded, so it does not have to render the raw for every file you want to quickly view in the culling process.

This is also the step where you should add relevant keywords to your images, to make it easy to find them again when needed, though some DAM software offer this feature on infestation and import. The camera will automatically record shooting parameters (in the EXIF tags) but you should add further information indicating information on the content of the image (location, subject, style, etc). Throughout the editing process, you can also add keywords or tags for the current “status” of the image, whether it is marked as being fully processed, waiting for editing, scheduled for a further look, archived for future use, to be removed, etc. Doing this early will allow you to search through old images quickly!

Another important concept is to use non-destructive editing (NDE). This means that you are never overwriting the original file and always have the ability to go back to earlier stages of the editing process. NDE is built-in in software like Lightroom, Darktable etc where your edits are kept in a catalogue file and you need to export your images for them to be applied. But you need to be careful if you use Photoshop, GIMP or similar applications. Either keep an untouched bottom layer or, better, always work on a copy of the image, never on the original. Your style, your tastes, your skills and your software will all evolve in time, and you will want to be able to return and edit a raw image from scratch.

The caveat to this whole section is that you should find a logical system that works for you and your particular DAM software!

Benjamin Lehman via Unsplash

Introduction to backing up.

The other major component of your digital workflow is backups. It seems like nearly everybody needs to go through one major data loss before getting serious about backing up. Just make sure it doesn’t happen to your most important images. This isn’t an exhaustive discussion on backup by any means, there are plenty of specialised articles which can delve into the nitty gritty details, this is more a primer to have you aware of the basic concepts and media. The blog of cloud storage company Backblaze has a wealth of information if you want to delve further.

All backup options have their upsides and downsides, and the truth is that there is no perfect solution to perfectly store digital files for a long period.

Optical media (CDs and DVDs) only last a few years at best. Hard drives provide a great gigabyte-to-dollar ratio and, when treated correctly, are one of the most reliable storage solutions. They are easily transported if required and scale well into multi-drive arrays using RAID (remember, RAID isn’t immediately a backup method!). That said, hard drives still are prone to failure, often catastrophically and often with no warnings. Tape backups are more reliable than hard drives but still do not last forever and are an incredibly niche media outside of a data centre.

Storing files on the cloud e.g. Amazon S3, Backblaze, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Photos and similar services, are a great option to have the easiest way to have secure offsite storage. Pricing is generally very competitive, though some solutions scale to multiple terabytes better than others, and most also come with a versioning history. A critical factor in the viability of these cloud-based services is they are highly dependent on your internet upload and download speed, upload to move the data there and download to retrieve it in case of an issue with other media. Cloud-based storage is generally the last line of defence if all your local media have failed.

Of course, even a hypothetical immortal media wouldn’t survive fire, flood or accidental erasure. For these reasons, the basic concept of backups follows the 3-2-1 strategy; in that three copies are made of the data to be protected, the copies are stored on two different types of storage media, and one copy of the data is sent off-site. Businesses and working professionals almost always use variations of this, but the 3-2-1 idea holds well for hobbyists and enthusiasts where downtime if a failure were to occur isn’t a big issue.

As to what you should backup, at a minimum, you should backup your raw and processed versions of your best images, though with the price of storage, it is very easy to backup your entire photo library. It should also be mentioned that you want to have backup at both ends of the workflow pipeline, you want to have this process started as soon as you start copying files from your memory card to your computer. This copying stage is often where you are most vulnerable. You also want to ensure all your newly added tags, flags, ratings, non-destructive edits, and file duplicates with destructive edits are backed up as you make the changes within your DAM software.

Here are some recommendations for backup ideas:

We don’t condone it, but the simple start of this could be:

One copy on your computer
One copy on an external hard drive, that every week you bring home from another location, backup your computer and take that drive back to another location. This leaves you vulnerable to loss of files created in this window.

An ideal option is:

One copy on your computer
One copy on an external hard drive in your home. This is always connected to your computer backs up at a regular time interval providing coverage if your main drive dies.
One copy on an external hard drive, left in another location e.g. family, friends, workplace etc. Bring this drive home periodically and swap it with your other external drive at home. This protects you against fire, flood etc. loss in your immediate area, but might not cover your whole city. Since this runs manually it also protects you from ransomware or similar malware.

A more ideal option is:

One copy on your computer
One copy on an external hard drive in your home. This backs up at a regular time interval providing coverage if your main drive dies.
One copy on a cloud-based service, this also backs up at a regular time interval and protects you against fire, flood etc. loss in your immediate area, and will also cover against this happening across your whole city.
In the last situations where you have two backup methods running automatically, you should also have a third, manually run in the case of ransomware or malware that encrypts your devices and locks you from your computer.

In the following weeks, we’ll cover more about how to edit your photos, but this is a start to getting your images organised and keeping them safe.