So recently I was asked about my photo storage and organization system. So I thought I would detail the evolution of my systems up to what I currently have.

As I have posted elsewhere, my first cameras were all film cameras. As I was a kid and didn’t take more than a few dozen photos that actually turned out before I was 16, storage was easy. Originally it was a cool wooden cigar box a friend’s dad had given me for the purpose. I told him I was using a shoe box and he gave me one of his cigar boxes instead. Said my memories deserved something fancier than a plain old box for shoes.

Later, when I had a stable job and a camera of my own that worked better, the number of photos grew. Soon, I used a combination of photo albums, that cigar box, and shoe boxes. I would take the photos I thought were really good, or meant something and put them in an album. Duplicates or special photos when in the cigar box. Everything else (including negatives) where left in the envelope from the lab and put in a shoe box.

When I entered the digital photography age in the early 2000s, I just put them in a folder on my computer. I didn’t really organize them well. In the beginning I just numbered the folder sequentially (1, 2, 3, etc) and dumped all the photos from the card. After awhile, I started pulling some out into named folders, but named for events like ‘4th of July at Joe’s House’ or ‘Sledding’. Later, a created a website on my webserver called albums and put select groups of photos online. This was before we really had the social media photo sites. It was just people dumping photos online and sharing links.

I had a scare at one point when my PC wouldn’t boot. It powered on, but the disk wouldn’t spin. Luckily, it was a bad power supply, but I learned my lesson. I started burning my pics to disks. At the time, my cameras were only creating 500K jpgs. So my 120 GB secondary hard drive had plenty of space for pictures. CDs burned 650-ish MB, so over 1200 pictures a disk. Even with my developing Photoshop skills, I had plenty of room. That was, until the D40 entered the chat.

The D40 was taking pictures that were 1-2.5 MB a shot. This started pushing up against disk sizes. That 120 GB drive started looking kinda small. I was working at a computer store, so I bought a cheap little USB to IDE drive caddy and some older 40GB 3.5 inch IDE drives. I would backup to the drive, then label it and then stick it on a shelf. Hurrah I solved the problem. Except… I just made it worse. Remember how I said that I was labeling things chronologically (1,2,3 etc) or by the event (“Party at Justin’s”)? My little disk-o-rama system made that really hard to go back and find things. I had to remember when it was relative to other things to know to goo back 5 folders or forward 20. Or know which events were on what disks. So, new Filing System V2.0 rolled out.

Filing System 2.0 consisted of moving to a two vertical approach. For unedited or group pictures, I adopted a folder for the year (yyyy), subfolders for date (mmddyy), then the pictures. For edited or grouped photos I had a folder for the year and then either put the photos in directly or had sub folders for the events. I spent Labor Day weekend 2009 eating pizza, drinking rum and cokes out of a Clasico spaghetti sauce jar, and reading the exif data on thousands of individual photos. To be honest the first day was spent trying to get a script using an early version of Powershell to work until I gave up at the 8 hour mark and went back to doing it manually.

This new system worked so much better. I had a separate back up disk for what I called the named images vs the raw photos. I could label the disks with the raw images with date ranges. Between the hard drives and binders of CDRs (later DVDRs) I thought I was set. As I got new cameras, yes the files sizes increased, but I just got more cheap hard drives and binders. Till I had to move and almost end up losing it all when someone (possibly me) left the box with the binders in someone else’s car and someone else (not me) dropped the box with the hardrives down the stairs. Luckily most of the hard drives still spun up and I was able to get data off of them. Only a couple where smashed. And the friend who discovered the box of CD binders in their car kindly returned them to me via another friend coming up the east coast to visit a significant other. But for about 3 weeks I was in a mild panic that I lost all my historical images. A better way had to be discovered.

So, when in doubt, go to Microcenter and sort it out. After a sizable dent in my available credit, I had a pair of new, shiny 1TB Western Digital external hard drives, a USB 2.0 powered hub, a bottle of Bawls, a new monitor and a plan. I would hook both drives up and copy all of my backups from all of my other media to one of them. Then, I would write a script that would clone one to the other. After that, I would pull the cords from one and stick it in the safe. As part of my workflow, I would copy from camera to the local hard drive and then to the USB drive. Once I was done editing, I would do the same with the edits (local disk, then USB). Once every so often, I would pull out the special drive, hook it up, and sync the two with my script. That worked surprisingly well. During the great lightning storm of 2013 when my one drive did an R2-D2 impersonation across my desk, the system worked out as I didn’t loose that much as my local disk was ok and the offline disk was good too.

A long the way I made some tweaks to my filing system. I changed the dates from mmddyy to yymmdd to make sorting them easier. I added a step in the folder progression, adding a camera make/model to the hierarchy (\2015\151231\D80\..). I also codified a format to my edited images. I used a format like this: yymm-camera-[optional place or grouping]-name_of_the_picture_or_object-number-size.format. Example: 1512-d80-ocnj-moonrise-02-lrg.jpg I even used this format of scanned photos, substituting the word scanned for the camera name.

I kept up this system for awhile, buying a new drive every year of so and making that the new offline storage drive. I still had plenty of other things to store on USB drives, so having a few spares never hurt. By this point I had both a desktop Photoshop machine as well as a laptop. The laptop was a Microsoft Surface tablet that I used like a Cintiq tablet. This was great, but as my backup was USB based, it was a little cumbersome to move back and forth between machines, and sometimes folders and images wouldn’t be transferred for weeks. The wireless router I was using at the time had the ability to hang USB off of it, so I tried that. It was very slow, but it made it slightly easier to move files around, but it was still a multipart process.

I saw a Synology come up on my Prime Days deals when I was actually looking for a Corkin filter holder. It was a ds220 without disks for 40% off. I was intrigued. Here was a real NAS with RAID 0. I had set up a bunch of RAID arrays at this point. In fact I had used a SCSI RAID 5 array for about 6 months as a test for a client before installing it at his studio. I had a kinda stalking a 4 disk model at, you guessed it, Microcenter but it was considerably more. So I pulled the trigger along with a pair of 8TB disks and a 8 TB external USB drive. After the parts came in, it only took about an hour to unbox and set everything up. Soon I had a 1Gb connection from all my devices to a 7.something TB NAS share with disk mirroring and a USB automated, weekly backup device.

That little NAS is now one of two I am running. I sync a copy of my edited files to a 2Tb mobile USB drive I take and place in a secure location so an event at home doesn’t lose me everything. I priced using something like Glacier to store everything, but that monthly cost, even for extremely low access, adds up and the cost to export your data back keeps going up and up. One day I might get a third device and put it at a friends house and do the “sync over VPN” that Synology offers. Or maybe I’ll find something else. But either way, I know the Tyranny of Too Many Photos isn’t over quite yet. Especially as my daughter started her own shutterbuging.