A novel idea for image storage and processing

kshapero

kshapero

South Florida Man
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Shoot film, get he res CD scans. insert CD in computer. Use Flickr upload to store in Flickr. Use Picnik (works surprisingly well, never tried advanced version) to tweak. Done. Nothing stored on computer hard drive. Put negs and CD back in envelope and store.
 
Does not work well for digital because you are relying on Flickr to be your sole source of storage.
 
kshapero said:
Shoot film, get he res CD scans. insert CD in computer. Use Flickr upload to store in Flickr. Use Picnik (works surprisingly well, never tried advanced version) to tweak. Done. Nothing stored on computer hard drive. Put negs and CD back in envelope and store.
Click to expand...

It's fine, and it is a version of what I do now.

I shoot film (or digital, more often), scan the negs myself, adjust in The GIMP, add Exif data as required (GPS, tags, info about subject matter) and upload to Flickr.

However, as much as offsite storage is good, it isn't the end of the story.

Sites like Flickr have gone down and gone under or been shut down. People have been given some time to get their photos downloaded - but in some cases, the sites just went dark and that was that. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and that's good for the deep pockets, but who knows what the future holds?

In addition, you can't put RAW photos on Flickr, and I like to store my photos and scans of negatives in RAW or nearly RAW formats, not just JPG.

For me, the solution is external hard drives - I use USB connectors on old internal hard drives that I've swapped out for newer/bigger drives over the years. I back up in triplicate. Two are stored locally, one is swapped periodically for an identical (but out of date) drive I store at my house in North Carolina. I have scripts I've written that do the backups for me automatically as long as I remember to plug in the USB drives.

The goal is not to have multiple redundancy and no single point of failure. Having lost some valuable photos once, I don't intend to do it again. So far, I haven't.
 
Yeah, I have two 500GB external drives I back up to every few weeks...not all that expensive anymore.

It is true though, I'm quite cavalier about film scans, as I often re-scan at higher res anyway, for printing...
 
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If Flickr or any other site you use, goes down you always have your neg and CD scans to fall back on. I would definitely not use this method for digital, though. An external HD would be paramount.
 
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