Digital photography has transformed the genre in ways that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. Do you remember the days of taking photos on film, only having 24 or 36 exposures on a film, of having to drop your photos into the shop and waiting to get them developed, of then realising that only a couple of them were really any good.

Well things have changed I now take over 1000 images on some of my bigger jobs (double that for a wedding when we have 2 or 3 cameras working) and I have the luxury of shooting multiple images of any situation to be sure I’ve truly captured the moment.

The end result of this is that I will always get the good shot, but I’ll also end up with a multitude of shots on my computer. I found this recently when the hard driving I was using was reaching its 4TB limit. I had to do two things.

Go through all my folders and delete the images that really weren’t needed any more.
Upgrade my storage to something more robust.

So I’m now the proud owner of a Lacie 16TB 2Big RAID (A dual disc RAID system which I have in RAID 1 mode meaning that everything is instantly backed up. But I still had to spend hours transferring well over 50,000 images to the new storage system!

So will these images ever be looked at? In most cases its unlikely but I am obliged to keep back-ups of my clients images for at least 2 years. The final images are all stored in the cloud too but I have all the RAW and Photoshop files saved on my new RAID system.

So you may be wondering how I manage, store and catalogue my images, here’s a brief run down of my workflow.

Images are shot on high speed SanDisk SD cards. My Canon 5DIV has 2 memory slots so that I have a back up in camera.
These cards are then put into the computer and downloaded via Lightroom. Lightroom is great at cataloguing images meaning that I can instantly have them stored in a way that grants easy access.
Each year has its own main folder and then each job in that has its own folder broken down by date (MM.DD) and job name. Keywords are also assigned to each job on import to make them easy to find down the line.
Basic edits are then done within Lightroom. Lightroom sets up a smart preview of the image during import which means I can still edit an image even if the original is not present. This can also be done remotely using Lightroom mobile and the creative cloud subscription.
For further edit these images are taken into Photoshop from Lightroom. Once edits have been made a simple saving of the document brings the file back into Lightroom and saves the new PSD file in the same folder.
Photos are further managed in Lightroom using Collections for ease of sorting and reference.
Final images are then saved as JPG from Lightroom and put in a sub folder in the client folder. These are then sent to them client via Dropbox which also serves as cloud storage for these final images.

So now you know, I’m sure there are other ways of working and storing data but thats my way an dit seems to work. let me know if you have better solutions.

Thanks for reading

Storage Solution.