A Christmas Gift: How to upload and store those precious new images SAFELY!

In the first book (and movie) of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf the Wizard grabs Frodo (a hobbit) by the shoulders and asks, "Is it secret? Is it safe?" It's a rather dramatic moment. We actually want as much security and safety for our photos as Gandalf wants for The One Ring, whether they are family or professional/client images. But we DON'T want any drama about them, and we DON'T want them secret or hidden!

Learning how to handle images safely is simply a process. It has steps, and they are all easy enough. Like any journey, all it takes to start are a few steps. The first step is simply to ponder what the "down-stream" results are or may be from any step you take now. Not trembling in fear, just out of curiosity.

For the "secret" part, we should have a fairly simple and easily-findable folder structure to "house" our images, that is identical whether in the "back-up" location or the "working files" location. These should be on two separate drives, one of which is perhaps stored somewhere else much of the time, or perhaps even two separate drives and also burned to "write once" media, whether cd, dvd, or blu-ray disc.

If these folder structures are on the "root" of the hard-drive, with an OBVIOUS name, like "SnelsonFamilyFotos" for the top folder, anyone looking through the computer could find them, and this is GOOD.

Under that top-level folder, I'd suggest making folders for years, such as 2008, 2009, and now 2010, and in each of these, sub-folders by month or perhaps event. I like by month for personal images, by event or job for professional images.

I re-name personal images by YYYY_MM_(three digit number sequence).(file extension), so the fifty-first family shot in July of 2009 would be named "2009_07_051.dng", The "dng" extension is because I now convert on upload to Adobe's 'DNG' file type. A professional image would be re-named "(CLIENT)_(NUMBER SEQUENCE).dng". The seventh image of a portrait session for the Snelson family would be "Snelson_007.dng"

So, my personal images are filed with a "folder tree" from the root of the hard-drive down to the specific image names that looks like this:
"HaugenFamily / 2009 / 2009_07 / 2009_07_051.dng"

Or stacked "vertically" to view, the structure looks like thus:
HaugenFamily    (main folder on the root of the drive)
2009                 (the year sub-folder)
2009-07            (the month-of-the-year subfolder)
2009_07_051.dng    (file-name)

My professional images are filed like this:
rNeilProfessional / 2009 / Snelson / Snelson_007"

For the "safe" part, we all know that we are supposed to back up our photos after we've uploaded them from memory cards or the camera into the computer. If you are like me, you upload them into some sort of file structure, then maybe do a bit of looking at them, perhaps adjust the "look" of a few, rename them, maybe even add tags or keywords (metadata), then ... IF we're being good that day, we back them up.

Do you see someplace that could be problematic with this schedule of events? No? Looks like a good way to do it, right? Um, wrong, actually. (And yes, that's me in the photo to the right, looking as ditzy as I felt when I  learned the error of my ways!)

I didn't even see the rather obvious error, until I recently read Peter Krogh's second edition of "The DAM Book" on digital asset management. (Just as an aside, ANY photographer would be wise to get this book!) Peter notes, that there is an inherent problem in this workflow ... you don't know that your back-up copies weren't bunged up by the computer! And rather than a lot of work, there is a VERY easy fix to the order of events that takes care of this.

Peter strongly suggests a slight but very important change in the order of uploading. Upload by copying from your memory cards FIRST to your back-up file location, THEN copy those files to your "working" files location. That way, as you open the files to look at them in your browser, you will see if BOTH the files in the back-up folder AND the working copies of the images are good or not, just by looking through the working copies! As the "working" images are COPIES of the back-ups, if the copies are good, so are the files in the back-up folder.

It does mean that you need to either re-name in the initial uploading-step, which most "uploading" utility software can handle, or before copying from the back-up folder to the working folder. There are a number of upload utilities that can handle this pretty much automatically. They can rename, copy to the one location, then from there to a second location while you go play. I like that!

This simple reversal of the uploading order is a blindingly simple concept, and in eight years of professional digital image work and maintenance, I'd never thought of nor heard of it! Upon reading this, I felt blindingly enlightened and terribly stupid all at the same moment. And so many of the steps to improving our file handling, processing, and storing methods are like this. There are better steps that are no more work than what we do now, or can be done with computerized automation, that greatly improve the safety and relability of our image files.

Peter Krogh calls the whole process of handling our digital images a "data-stream". It's a good metaphor. We want to keep the stream flowing smoothly, and we don't want either floods or dams. So ... design a simple folder and files structure to "house" your images, use the same structure for both your backups and your working files, and upload to the BACKUP location first, THEN copy to the "working" files folders for immediate viewing in your browser of choice. Not that hard of a start, is it?

Yet if you do this, at this point you know two things: your images ARE safe (for now, at least!), and they are certainly NOT secret, lost somewhere in your computer's drives!

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