For amateurs like me, organizing is a lot easier if you realize that a main skill is honesty in what must be kept and what should never have been downloaded. I like birds and have many keepers of a species but ten are better than the rest and all I really should be saving. You have a great photo showing a bird with prey perfectly positioned in the mouth. To me, such photos make the thousand other pictures of that species eating totally worthless. Destroying all copies of very good, very sharp and very 'also ran' images, while painful, makes it easier to find those which we want to define our work. You mention many complicated steps to cataloging but none of them are as important as the skillful use of 'delete'. When we are gone, our legacy will not be judged by the terabyte.
I reorganized my LR catalog a few years ago,( recovering from a hip replacement), it was a mess and daunting. But I found using the Metadata search in LR a huge help. Setting up all the key words takes much longer, but easier after I did a massive cull. As I was guilty of keeping everything but the worse shots. I was culling similar to you but in April I started using Photo Mechanic 6. I find it helps clear my cards faster and I do my initial cull in PM6 and import my selects into LR. It's much quicker as I dont have to wait for LR to build the previews etc upon import. Like you I shoot a lot of birds and can have huge numbers of 50 mp images to cull thru. Thanks for all you do!
Thanks! A lot of info here, I'll have to watch several times. As a former IT person specializing in data storage, you make me happy. The scientists I supported ~never~ backed anything up, and I would spend long, often unfruitful hours, trying to recover their lost files. As an amateur, I use Canon Digital Photo Professional 4, which is free. While it may not have all of the features that Lightroom has, it is adequate for my uses. I supplement with GIMP, which is also free.
FYI, one of the most important features to take advantage of whenever you're using a NAS with more than two drives in a redundant array is called periodic "scrubbing". This means the system periodically scans all your files and detects and corrects errors using the redundancy built into they array. Otherwise you may find your files silently "corrupt" over time. Though I use a ZFS system which has it native, I believe QNAP and Synology both have a similar feature available. It was uncanny but a few years ago a few big content creators all around the same time found they had silent corruption across their backlog of media...definitely don't want that to be you
Thank you so much Simon for sharing your experience and wisdom on this. Your professional setup has given me some ideas to incorporate into my amateur setup. What I find most useful in culling is to select for composition, action or personality first then going through those for sharpness and then choosing which to edit. So 2 passes before any edit and it’s not necessarily the sharpest images that get selected. I also find it helpful to leave the image for a day or two since editing can lead to loosing sight of what makes the image work for you.
For many years I have been using a hard drive dock to use multiple bare drives for multiple backups. I have a double slot that takes ssd and hdd, even full size drives. Yes I would swap out my 'off site backup' at mom's but she's gone now. I have a safe deposit box at my bank with 2 copies of EVERYTHING although I don't have Petabytes of RAW (yet). Thank you for everything!
Thank you Simon for another great video! I have a Synology DS918+ with four drive bays that I purchased new in 2017. In my case all four bays have a 4 TB drive, and the NAS is setup as a RAID5 configuration, meaning that each drive is partially backed up on the other three drives. If one drive fails, I can simply replace it and reproduce its data from the other three drives, thus creating another form of redundancy.
Excellent video. Many thanks I can confirm I bought a Synology DS920+ in February and found it amazing, at the moment I'm using 14tb Toshiba Hard Drives and have 3, use it for my photos and media files. Have a DAS as a primary storage with a separate hard drive for my photos only I can access my NAS from anywhere, recently visited the Lake District and copied all my files to the NAS. I can certainly recommend one
Some great advice in the video Simon, thanks! I just started getting serious with my photography hobby but luckily I've been recording music here since the year 2000. That has resulted in a rather massive buildup of powerful Mac computers some of which are in storage here. My main 2 areas are a MacBook M1 area that I mainly use for video and an iMac area for the main recording of guitars, keys, bass and such. All KRK audio monitors and subwoofer, Audient and Blacklion audio interfaces, and storage with mainly Sansdisk and Samsung SSD external drives plus Lacie HDD backups. I have Lightroom and Photoshop on both systems and my main video editor is Screenflow 10. I'm glad I already had all this "stuff" now that I'm getting serious with photography.
Great video with super info. I was so glad to hear that you delete large numbers of photos from an outing. I really struggle to delete sharp images and keep only 1 or 2.
I just wanted to give you a big thank you for all your wonderful content. I’m trying to jumpstart my love for birding and photography. Looking forward to your online course.
While I'm an enthusiast photographer for 45 years, but I was already an IT pro before that. Hence, I'm well versed with storage & backup methodology and best practice. Now I've downsized to one file server, multiple DAS (USB drives) and three NAS for backup only.
with the ammount of times i have upgraded my pc and reinstalled windows i have lost a lot of catalogues. i was looking through my photo archive the other day and realized i had never made an external backup up a lot of my exports. which means that if i wanted to use those photos i would have to go back and re-edit them. kinda sux but at least i still have the raw files so might be a project for a rainy day. been binge watching your videos. i dont know how i hadnt found this channel earlier. its top notch content.
I definitely agree with the caption idea. I myself found a few months ago that if I couldnt find a caption then I was not too keen on the photo anyway. It just came naturally.
Great video! Did you know that enabling "Caps lock" enables Auto Advance and disabling caps lock disables Auto advance. I am surprised that you don't appear to write your edits into xmp files. If your catalog gets corrupted and your backup is corrupted as well and you have to create a new catalog if you have written your edits into XMP files you will not have to re-edit your images. This happened to me and because I write change into XMP I was able to create a new catalog with all of my edits. It did take lightroom 3 days to create the new catalog but I consider myself lucky it could have been alot worse. My cloud backup is with Backblaze.
Built my own "NAS", basically a Linux computer with RAID5 disks. I also formatted it with BTRFS filesystem which stores CRCs of some sort per block, so I know whether a bit rot happened upon fsck or reading. It was more work to get started, but one knows what exactly is in his storage box.
Simon.. you the mohn (man). Can't ever thank you enough for the inspiration and insights you've given to me and countless others on our photographic journeys. This is just what I need. Personally, I film and shoot so much more than I edit, print and share. This is just what I needed. Thank you!
For those who don't like Lightroom, Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits is a great program for culling, organizing, rating and adding/editing metadata, and there are none better for its speed of viewing large files. It is considered industry standard for photojournalists. Even a lot of lightroom editors start with Photo Mechanic.
Another great video. As an amateur, I already do most of what you do but scaled down. I have all of my images on one 4-TB drive that I mirror to another 4-TB drive. The first drive and my computer are backed up to the clouds. One tip for you. In LRC, if you go to Catalog Settings (adjacent to the Preferences), go to the Metadata tag, and in the top "Editing" section, check both the 2nd and 3rd checkboxes. What this does is to set any adjustments you make and add them to the Metadata. Thus, if you lose your catalog, what you actually lose is the History, but that's it. These corrections, like all LRC corrections, are reversible, so you do not burn your adjustments to the file, but they can be read by LRC or ACR. The extra space these take is obviously very small and does not affect your storage in any significant manner. Enjoy!
Great video! Backup power is crucial, especially during outdoor adventures. I highly recommend the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series. With its massive capacity, waterproof design, and fast recharging capabilities, it's perfect for keeping your devices and appliances running for extended periods. Stay prepared and enjoy uninterrupted family time in the great outdoors!
Thank you Simon for pointing out this video, I thought I looked thoroughly enough through your work to find something like this... apparently not, sorry. Of course I watched it now and again you never disappoint, the info is massive and right to the point, thank you Master 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 also everything very clear... work for me to do 😊
Simone Wow, you just identified a problem I have and couldn’t figure out why. I backed up photos from my full hard drive in my Mac to an external SSD drive and then erased some files from my Mac hard drive to make room for more. Result, Lightroom can’t find those photos. I can see the preview but can’t access the photos. I only have 40,000 photos so my needs are much smaller than yours. I need a simpler, smaller system and workflow that I can afford now and expand later. I think that a video on knowing what you know now: where would you start as a beginner on a budget and how you would build it as size requirements and cash flow grows might be helpful to a lot of us. Thank you for all the valuable information you share. It is very much appreciated. Dal
Thanks Simon. It is great to see other practical examples of method that works for intended purposes - and clearly well. For me I usually think of things along events vs species and as such the folder structure by date in Lightroom is pretty good when supplemented with keywords and also using the catalog features and smart catalogs. I like to use the ‘export function’ to create sub folders that export a ‘frozen copy’ of the file for various purposes - a sub folder with jpg and a folder with jpg that is watermarked, a sub folder with high resolution tif. Essentially baking in the changes I had made in the original file into something that can then be used and is a much smaller file. I was surprised perhaps you did not mention associating your efforts with Smart catalogs in Lightroom which in combination with good key words can be very powerful to pull things together. Metadata as you show is very important and thanks for sharing your way to make sense of many terabytes of data! Video strategy is more challenging because they can get so darn big so fast. Many times for me we supplement photos with short videos and as such Lightroom can catalog them and we can put them in that same date oriented folder, using our program of choice like Final Cut Pro to pull in clips and turn Canon Log video into something we want to watch for short. But when video becomes the main focus that is a real change. Going to the next level is where my thought are focusing then to manage larger video related efforts -create content video that may have separate sound, multiple video inputs, photos. I also like Atomos and like Frame.io as a tool as well. Now that I am adding large storage to directly hold and work on the files is helping because you can reference very large files and relink them. I would be interested to hear more about your video efforts and choices. Clog3? H264. Raw? High speed? Time lapse? File management for video projects. These darn things get huge and redundant if we don’t figure out some good way to not have redundant files - i do of course know they can make reduced sized ones to work with and we can relink them when it is time to create the full video. As have fumbled around learning new tools I surely have created some really big files with Final Cut Pro as I have tried to figure out strategies that work efficiently. ==>Great channel and content, I really enjoy watching your videos.
Fantastic video. Important to note that disk mirroring with large disks needs special care, and like you said, should never be considered a backup. I'm a software developer and use Linux as my main OS, so am a bit more restricted as to which software I can use. I host my own server for backups and a Nextcloud instance for my laptop syncing. For backups I use Borg Backup (which works similar to Apple's Timemachine. Borg offers great protection against accidental deletion and, hopefully, against a cyber attack which makes your local files inaccessible (since it stores all previous files with a defined schedule). None of this is perfect and I'm actually developing my own photo management software because I don't like any of the available solutions :)
Thanks for this useful tutorial. It may be worthwhile for people to consider the smart culling feature that Capture One has recently added. This allows you to group photos by similarity, so you can look at all the photos that were taken in a burst to select the best ones.
The NAS is great. Wish I'd gotten one years ago! LoL Actually, I recently got a Synology DS223, and had two 12TB drives in it. This let me backup all my images and a number of video files. But...that space shrank faster than I thought it would! So, I just replaced it with a DS1621+, moved the drives over to it, and inserted another 12TB drive. A couple days ago I had 15TB free. Today after moving some Final Cut libraries over I'm down to 10TB. Fortunately, there's still room to grow. :)
For an Amateur like me, I’m going to follow your advice about light room and drives. This is an area of my photography where I need to improve, So thank you for your advice 👍
Thanks for another great video, Simon. As a newbie, your tip about formatting cards instead of just erasing them was an eye-opener. Great work as usual.
These are great tips. I don't a NAS yet, but I do save my photos in multiple hard drives. For those like me who aren't a professoional, the mainstream cloud storage solutions might be too expensive, which is why i recommend using a cold storage solution like amazon glacier. Google and microsoft azure also have similar solutions. I pay a few cents every month to keep my files stored. If i ever need to retrieve them I'll pay a significantly larger amount. I've lost around 50% of my photos in the past due to drivers failling. $70 and a few hours later i had all my files again.
Great video! I haven't checked if you have already done a video about printing photos, but if you haven't, I would love to learn from you the quirks of the process.
Always interesting to see how others do it, thanks! Concerning your last tip (Lightroom and location of photos), a word of warning: The other day I had switched my hard drives so my usual hard drive got an other letter than usual. Even as the catalogue was on that same hard drive, Lightroom told me it could not find my photos! Not very smart and something to keep in mind. -- Another thing: As a 128 GB SD card (+2000 exp.) today costs the same as one color slide film (36 exp.), it is worth considering your SD cards as your negatives and store them instead of reformatting. Now I don't shoot 1500 pictures on one morning, so for me it works a an additional safeguard...
Was just watching your two previous videos when this one went up. I wasn't expecting this much detail and it definitely gave me some really useful tips, thanks so much! 😄
Great job, Simon! While just an hobbyist, I use a similar system to download and store my files. I am especially glad you spent so much time on backing up ones data. I use the 3-2-1 system with Backblaze and it does give me peace of mind. Enjoy your trip to Botswana and give us a report on how the Tilly hat worked out! After all, it’s made by persnickety Canadians! Bon voyage!
Culling is so important. I came to learn this a few months ago and have been going through my back catalog of 86,000+ photos and slowly culling them. Also getting better at culling new photos I shoot. One other thing I think is important is tagging photos. This way you can easily find all shots with umbrellas or hats, or shots with umbrellas and hats - I do street photography FWIW
Good advice! I use Linux. I name the folder/directories based on date-lens then I have a 2rd folder for post-processing called post-processing-date-lens. I delete photos from camera's SD card. I use Rawtherapee for post-processing similar to LIghtroom.
Excellent video again. It confirms my strategy. I've owned a DS218+ for a few years now and organize my pictures in a similar way. I also use HyperBackup, which does the job very well. I laughed very much about your sentence "if my PC goes kaputt". I don't know if that was the plan. Kaputt means broken in German. Thank you very much! Greetings from Germany
This is golden! It is easy to shoot (and fill up a memory card or three), but having a solid and logical way of dealing with your trigger happy shutter finger afterwards is what we all need. One extra hour of thinking before you set out on changing your existing method/process will pay off. I work solidly in Canon's DPP for now, but my aim is to change into Capture One (soon-ish), and having a good way of working before will also make it easier for me to change into and adopt the very specific ways of Capture One. This will be marked with all kinds of stars and bookmarks so I can check back to see if I'm logical or just a crazy lunatic.
Just one important correction: the 3-2-1 rule is 3 copies on 2 different storage mediums with 1 off-site. It is important that each copy is on different types of storage (hard drive, ssd, blu-ray, memory card, cloud, etc) in order to add more resilience.
Nobody uses 2 different storage mediums anymore. The new 3 2 1 means 3 copies, 2 methods, like an external drive and NAS would count as 2, and 1 off site. This is because nobody uses discs anymore, and memory cards are not a reliable long term storage solution.
Hi Simon, I really enjoy your videos a lot. They are golden. One information I was hoping to catch from this video: If you take 1500 photos one morning and 30 of them are keepers, do you save all of the rejected photos for "possible later use" or just delete them straight away?
Hey Simon, I want to thank you for such excellent videos, clear and specific, on every important detail, as well as the recommendations, they are fantastic. Excellent work. Thank you very much for that. In this video you talk about the way to store and how to manage information. More specifically, images and videos. At 12:21. More exactly you show the hard drives from Seagate. I'm about to buy additional storage and I'm assuming you're using Seagate. On the other hand, I've searched Amazon for 4TB in 2.5-inch, but it's not available from Western Digital, which is the brand I've used for years. Seagate BarraCuda has 4/5TB 2.5 form factor which is good for my Dell7070 bays. I have a question: Could you tell me about your experience using Seagate hdd? Thanks a lot.
Do you use GPS tags on your photos? One thing I love about some of my phone photos is that they are geotagged. I think spatially, so organizing by location of photo would be great. Especially for travel and my landscape photos, thoughts?
what he should have said, is as because he has a synology NAS. He should use synology drive sync and it will allow the lightroom catalog to sync between his NAS and his computer. So its getting backed up
i would have loved to know how you deal with noise. how and what do you use to remove noise and at what stage of editing do you do it. i always cull, select my raws, process them in Dxo which creates another dng folder, edit my keepers, delete the rest, and finally export my final jpegs. I use C1 and I find this process a little redundant and longer than necessary imho. I'd love to hear about your process Simon :) great video as always and thanks for the great content you're giving us from Africa ❤
Hi Simon at 4 minutes you talk about using the previews generated by your camera. I’m using the latest version of lightroom and I could not get the option you suggested. Please could you expand on how to set it up. Cheers Mike
I don't pay for cloud storage. I have a Synology NAS and another at my brother's house. We both have fiber internet. We use Resilio Sync to sync the files but if you delete them from one NAS it deletes it from the other if you're not careful.
Playbook also has 4 terabytes free storage. I store a lot of finished jpegs there. I also store png pictures there from AI stuff. I started making AI paintings based on photos I have taken. I also have Ai and Photo layered hybrid art. Fun stuff but anyways, storage is always a big deal for me.
Hi Simon, awesome and useful, straight to the point, as usual!! Btw, you did a video on Topaz AI a week or so ago but it seems to be gone now. Any way I can see that one? Thanks.
Thanks for this useful info. What is your strategy for creating and naming your Lightroom catalogs? Do you create a new catalog for each outing, month, year, other?
Great video, thank you. One question though. You mentioned doing your video editing on the 923. Can you also do that on the DS220, and if so was the performance acceptable?
My major hurdle has been processing handheld video without any IS (5D IV). My go to lens has been the EF 24-70 f/2.8. No in-body or lens stabilization. Hopefully the new R5 will streamline editing video (arriving today). I use ShotCut for video and DDP for stills and import them into Movie Marker. My system works for my needs and all the programs are free.
Hi Simon. Thanks for another informative and well produced video. Please would you consider making a video about Canon Picture Styles for JPEG shooters like myself? I usually use the Standard style on my 6D with colour saturation set to +2 and sharpness set to +5. Since I am colour blind I'm never sure whether my colour saturation setting is too high for those with normal colour vision. I also like the consistency of look which using just one setting JPEG brings to my portfolio. I also sometimes use the Faithful style, which is a good style for JPEG editing within Apple Photos since it is neutral but with faithful rendition of outside light. If I am using Faithful it's because I am expecting to post-process, so I leave the settings at default. I use JPEG and Picture Styles because I get lost trying to edit RAW files, never being sure whether what I am doing will look strange to those with normal colour vision... Any advice would be gratefully received.
Most desktops have more processing power and larger screens to see more detail, but I like a laptop for the mobility benefit...you just need to make sure you get one with processing power, a good GPU, lots of RAM and a good monitor, preferably calibratable.
Thank you for your content, I have enjoyed your videos tremendously! Would you have recommendations on the types of subjects/content best suited for Bright Day photos? I'll be travelling to an artic locale with long daylight periods and would like to maximize my work time. Thanks again,
Thank you Simon again for sharing those tips. I have myself a Synology 4 drives bay and store my CR3 photos in it. My question is where or how do you manage Lightroom at this point? Lightroom won't allow me to edit photos directly on the NAS drive, so in the meanwhile I just make my catalogs and my edits on my SD drives. Thanks!
Great video with tons of information! One question , I’m getting ready to purchase a new computer. It’s 32 gigs of ram sufficient or would you bump it up to 64?
Hey im a beginner and i wanted to know if i have to buy a professional camera or for now can i just stick with the one i have which is canon Eos 600D since i just started it i dont know much stuff and i dont want to regret buying anything too expensive
Im really jealous of that wood duck photo you have. I have a pair of wood ducks in my back pond but they are super skittish and I can never get close enough to get a good photo of them.
Great video! Ironic you should mention wildfires in California and then they occur much closer to home...literally for you. I'm assuming you created that part of the video before the fires?
with the price of m.2 ssd being so cheap recently (2tb is probably best for many reasons), i stop using classic sata drives. an enclosure with a m.2 is easy way to back up ur data as well...nas system still expensive
The "W" word. Work. The digital age has made photography seem like and be called "work". Photography used to be fun but now it means lots of computer work which I am not fond of but I do it. I'm almost 70 years old and teaching this old dog new tricks is not always easy or fun but I do it. I bought all the nice gear, the kind of set-up I had dreamed about for 50 years except it is digital now. It wasn't easy for me to make the switch over, but I did it...because I love photography. Or I loved it 50 years ago. Computer work makes me sit at a desk for way too long, I am an outdoorsman and have to be enjoying the outdoors or my soul is dead. But I do it. I feel that the digital age has ruined photography with the help of social media which I have mostly quit having reduced that to a minimum. Posting on UA-cam is a rarity and made an exception in posting this. I quit Facebook. Maybe I should have stayed with film. Photography has become "work", but I do it.
For amateurs like me, organizing is a lot easier if you realize that a main skill is honesty in what must be kept and what should never have been downloaded. I like birds and have many keepers of a species but ten are better than the rest and all I really should be saving. You have a great photo showing a bird with prey perfectly positioned in the mouth. To me, such photos make the thousand other pictures of that species eating totally worthless. Destroying all copies of very good, very sharp and very 'also ran' images, while painful, makes it easier to find those which we want to define our work. You mention many complicated steps to cataloging but none of them are as important as the skillful use of 'delete'. When we are gone, our legacy will not be judged by the terabyte.
Honesty is the best policy
This. Definitely an underrated comment. 🏆
I reorganized my LR catalog a few years ago,( recovering from a hip replacement), it was a mess and daunting. But I found using the Metadata search in LR a huge help. Setting up all the key words takes much longer, but easier after I did a massive cull. As I was guilty of keeping everything but the worse shots. I was culling similar to you but in April I started using Photo Mechanic 6. I find it helps clear my cards faster and I do my initial cull in PM6 and import my selects into LR. It's much quicker as I dont have to wait for LR to build the previews etc upon import. Like you I shoot a lot of birds and can have huge numbers of 50 mp images to cull thru. Thanks for all you do!
Thanks! A lot of info here, I'll have to watch several times. As a former IT person specializing in data storage, you make me happy. The scientists I supported ~never~ backed anything up, and I would spend long, often unfruitful hours, trying to recover their lost files.
As an amateur, I use Canon Digital Photo Professional 4, which is free. While it may not have all of the features that Lightroom has, it is adequate for my uses. I supplement with GIMP, which is also free.
FYI, one of the most important features to take advantage of whenever you're using a NAS with more than two drives in a redundant array is called periodic "scrubbing". This means the system periodically scans all your files and detects and corrects errors using the redundancy built into they array. Otherwise you may find your files silently "corrupt" over time. Though I use a ZFS system which has it native, I believe QNAP and Synology both have a similar feature available. It was uncanny but a few years ago a few big content creators all around the same time found they had silent corruption across their backlog of media...definitely don't want that to be you
Thank you so much Simon for sharing your experience and wisdom on this. Your professional setup has given me some ideas to incorporate into my amateur setup. What I find most useful in culling is to select for composition, action or personality first then going through those for sharpness and then choosing which to edit. So 2 passes before any edit and it’s not necessarily the sharpest images that get selected. I also find it helpful to leave the image for a day or two since editing can lead to loosing sight of what makes the image work for you.
For many years I have been using a hard drive dock to use multiple bare drives for multiple backups. I have a double slot that takes ssd and hdd, even full size drives. Yes I would swap out my 'off site backup' at mom's but she's gone now. I have a safe deposit box at my bank with 2 copies of EVERYTHING although I don't have Petabytes of RAW (yet). Thank you for everything!
Thank you Simon for another great video! I have a Synology DS918+ with four drive bays that I purchased new in 2017. In my case all four bays have a 4 TB drive, and the NAS is setup as a RAID5 configuration, meaning that each drive is partially backed up on the other three drives. If one drive fails, I can simply replace it and reproduce its data from the other three drives, thus creating another form of redundancy.
RAID 5 is a much better option than what Simon is suggesting IMO.
Excellent video. Many thanks
I can confirm I bought a Synology DS920+ in February and found it amazing, at the moment I'm using 14tb Toshiba Hard Drives and have 3, use it for my photos and media files. Have a DAS as a primary storage with a separate hard drive for my photos only
I can access my NAS from anywhere, recently visited the Lake District and copied all my files to the NAS. I can certainly recommend one
Some great advice in the video Simon, thanks! I just started getting serious with my photography hobby but luckily I've been recording music here since the year 2000. That has resulted in a rather massive buildup of powerful Mac computers some of which are in storage here. My main 2 areas are a MacBook M1 area that I mainly use for video and an iMac area for the main recording of guitars, keys, bass and such. All KRK audio monitors and subwoofer, Audient and Blacklion audio interfaces, and storage with mainly Sansdisk and Samsung SSD external drives plus Lacie HDD backups. I have Lightroom and Photoshop on both systems and my main video editor is Screenflow 10. I'm glad I already had all this "stuff" now that I'm getting serious with photography.
Great video with super info. I was so glad to hear that you delete large numbers of photos from an outing. I really struggle to delete sharp images and keep only 1 or 2.
I just wanted to give you a big thank you for all your wonderful content. I’m trying to jumpstart my love for birding and photography. Looking forward to your online course.
While I'm an enthusiast photographer for 45 years, but I was already an IT pro before that. Hence, I'm well versed with storage & backup methodology and best practice. Now I've downsized to one file server, multiple DAS (USB drives) and three NAS for backup only.
with the ammount of times i have upgraded my pc and reinstalled windows i have lost a lot of catalogues. i was looking through my photo archive the other day and realized i had never made an external backup up a lot of my exports. which means that if i wanted to use those photos i would have to go back and re-edit them. kinda sux but at least i still have the raw files so might be a project for a rainy day. been binge watching your videos. i dont know how i hadnt found this channel earlier. its top notch content.
I definitely agree with the caption idea. I myself found a few months ago that if I couldnt find a caption then I was not too keen on the photo anyway. It just came naturally.
Incredible that you had this video ready to go during your time in Botswana!
Great video! Did you know that enabling "Caps lock" enables Auto Advance and disabling caps lock disables Auto advance. I am surprised that you don't appear to write your edits into xmp files. If your catalog gets corrupted and your backup is corrupted as well and you have to create a new catalog if you have written your edits into XMP files you will not have to re-edit your images. This happened to me and because I write change into XMP I was able to create a new catalog with all of my edits. It did take lightroom 3 days to create the new catalog but I consider myself lucky it could have been alot worse. My cloud backup is with Backblaze.
Built my own "NAS", basically a Linux computer with RAID5 disks. I also formatted it with BTRFS filesystem which stores CRCs of some sort per block, so I know whether a bit rot happened upon fsck or reading. It was more work to get started, but one knows what exactly is in his storage box.
i m using LR for years bt never dive deep in other option than colour grading...today i got to know it has so many features... thank you
This is one of the best photo videos of all time
Appreciate this Simon, thank you
Simon.. you the mohn (man). Can't ever thank you enough for the inspiration and insights you've given to me and countless others on our photographic journeys. This is just what I need. Personally, I film and shoot so much more than I edit, print and share. This is just what I needed. Thank you!
I could kiss you for this. :) I have been waiting for this for a long time. It is fun to take pics but the workflow afterwards can be a real drag
For those who don't like Lightroom, Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits is a great program for culling, organizing, rating and adding/editing metadata, and there are none better for its speed of viewing large files. It is considered industry standard for photojournalists. Even a lot of lightroom editors start with Photo Mechanic.
it’s got a great reputation for sure.
Another great video. As an amateur, I already do most of what you do but scaled down. I have all of my images on one 4-TB drive that I mirror to another 4-TB drive. The first drive and my computer are backed up to the clouds. One tip for you. In LRC, if you go to Catalog Settings (adjacent to the Preferences), go to the Metadata tag, and in the top "Editing" section, check both the 2nd and 3rd checkboxes. What this does is to set any adjustments you make and add them to the Metadata. Thus, if you lose your catalog, what you actually lose is the History, but that's it. These corrections, like all LRC corrections, are reversible, so you do not burn your adjustments to the file, but they can be read by LRC or ACR. The extra space these take is obviously very small and does not affect your storage in any significant manner. Enjoy!
32 GB Ram 😮
???@@Photo_doctor
Excellent Simon. Merci de partager cela avec nous. Really interesting.
De rien!
Great video! Backup power is crucial, especially during outdoor adventures. I highly recommend the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series. With its massive capacity, waterproof design, and fast recharging capabilities, it's perfect for keeping your devices and appliances running for extended periods. Stay prepared and enjoy uninterrupted family time in the great outdoors!
Thank you Simon for pointing out this video, I thought I looked thoroughly enough through your work to find something like this... apparently not, sorry. Of course I watched it now and again you never disappoint, the info is massive and right to the point, thank you Master 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 also everything very clear... work for me to do 😊
Simone
Wow, you just identified a problem I have and couldn’t figure out why.
I backed up photos from my full hard drive in my Mac to an external SSD drive and then erased some files from my Mac hard drive to make room for more.
Result, Lightroom can’t find those photos. I can see the preview but can’t access the photos.
I only have 40,000 photos so my needs are much smaller than yours. I need a simpler, smaller system and workflow that I can afford now and expand later.
I think that a video on knowing what you know now: where would you start as a beginner on a budget and how you would build it as size requirements and cash flow grows might be helpful to a lot of us.
Thank you for all the valuable information you share. It is very much appreciated.
Dal
Thanks Simon. It is great to see other practical examples of method that works for intended purposes - and clearly well. For me I usually think of things along events vs species and as such the folder structure by date in Lightroom is pretty good when supplemented with keywords and also using the catalog features and smart catalogs. I like to use the ‘export function’ to create sub folders that export a ‘frozen copy’ of the file for various purposes - a sub folder with jpg and a folder with jpg that is watermarked, a sub folder with high resolution tif. Essentially baking in the changes I had made in the original file into something that can then be used and is a much smaller file. I was surprised perhaps you did not mention associating your efforts with Smart catalogs in Lightroom which in combination with good key words can be very powerful to pull things together. Metadata as you show is very important and thanks for sharing your way to make sense of many terabytes of data! Video strategy is more challenging because they can get so darn big so fast. Many times for me we supplement photos with short videos and as such Lightroom can catalog them and we can put them in that same date oriented folder, using our program of choice like Final Cut Pro to pull in clips and turn Canon Log video into something we want to watch for short. But when video becomes the main focus that is a real change. Going to the next level is where my thought are focusing then to manage larger video related efforts -create content video that may have separate sound, multiple video inputs, photos. I also like Atomos and like Frame.io as a tool as well. Now that I am adding large storage to directly hold and work on the files is helping because you can reference very large files and relink them. I would be interested to hear more about your video efforts and choices. Clog3? H264. Raw? High speed? Time lapse? File management for video projects. These darn things get huge and redundant if we don’t figure out some good way to not have redundant files - i do of course know they can make reduced sized ones to work with and we can relink them when it is time to create the full video. As have fumbled around learning new tools I surely have created some really big files with Final Cut Pro as I have tried to figure out strategies that work efficiently. ==>Great channel and content, I really enjoy watching your videos.
I learn so much from you, thanks. I hope you are safe from the fires.
Fantastic video. Important to note that disk mirroring with large disks needs special care, and like you said, should never be considered a backup. I'm a software developer and use Linux as my main OS, so am a bit more restricted as to which software I can use. I host my own server for backups and a Nextcloud instance for my laptop syncing. For backups I use Borg Backup (which works similar to Apple's Timemachine. Borg offers great protection against accidental deletion and, hopefully, against a cyber attack which makes your local files inaccessible (since it stores all previous files with a defined schedule). None of this is perfect and I'm actually developing my own photo management software because I don't like any of the available solutions :)
Thanks for this useful tutorial. It may be worthwhile for people to consider the smart culling feature that Capture One has recently added. This allows you to group photos by similarity, so you can look at all the photos that were taken in a burst to select the best ones.
It's always very interesting to see how others organize their files and keep their backups.
Great video! Thank you!
The NAS is great. Wish I'd gotten one years ago! LoL Actually, I recently got a Synology DS223, and had two 12TB drives in it. This let me backup all my images and a number of video files. But...that space shrank faster than I thought it would! So, I just replaced it with a DS1621+, moved the drives over to it, and inserted another 12TB drive. A couple days ago I had 15TB free. Today after moving some Final Cut libraries over I'm down to 10TB. Fortunately, there's still room to grow. :)
For an Amateur like me, I’m going to follow your advice about light room and drives. This is an area of my photography where I need to improve, So thank you for your advice 👍
Have fun!
Great Video Simon , great help , appreciated , cheers from NZ
Glad you enjoyed it
Excellent information here! I need yo get my act together and this was a great help. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks for another great video, Simon. As a newbie, your tip about formatting cards instead of just erasing them was an eye-opener. Great work as usual.
These are great tips.
I don't a NAS yet, but I do save my photos in multiple hard drives.
For those like me who aren't a professoional, the mainstream cloud storage solutions might be too expensive, which is why i recommend using a cold storage solution like amazon glacier. Google and microsoft azure also have similar solutions.
I pay a few cents every month to keep my files stored. If i ever need to retrieve them I'll pay a significantly larger amount.
I've lost around 50% of my photos in the past due to drivers failling. $70 and a few hours later i had all my files again.
Glacier tip is amazing, I'll look into this! Thank you for sharing 👍
Backblaze is better. Check it out
Great video! I haven't checked if you have already done a video about printing photos, but if you haven't, I would love to learn from you the quirks of the process.
Great information, Thank you. Stay well..
Always interesting to see how others do it, thanks! Concerning your last tip (Lightroom and location of photos), a word of warning: The other day I had switched my hard drives so my usual hard drive got an other letter than usual. Even as the catalogue was on that same hard drive, Lightroom told me it could not find my photos! Not very smart and something to keep in mind. -- Another thing: As a 128 GB SD card (+2000 exp.) today costs the same as one color slide film (36 exp.), it is worth considering your SD cards as your negatives and store them instead of reformatting. Now I don't shoot 1500 pictures on one morning, so for me it works a an additional safeguard...
Was just watching your two previous videos when this one went up. I wasn't expecting this much detail and it definitely gave me some really useful tips, thanks so much! 😄
Subscribe, every video has useful information
Game changer! My workflow is chaotic. It works for me, but this could help my organization out big time. Always appreciate your work Simon🤙
Great job, Simon! While just an hobbyist, I use a similar system to download and store my files. I am especially glad you spent so much time on backing up ones data. I use the 3-2-1 system with Backblaze and it does give me peace of mind. Enjoy your trip to Botswana and give us a report on how the Tilly hat worked out! After all, it’s made by persnickety Canadians! Bon voyage!
Culling is so important. I came to learn this a few months ago and have been going through my back catalog of 86,000+ photos and slowly culling them.
Also getting better at culling new photos I shoot. One other thing I think is important is tagging photos. This way you can easily find all shots with umbrellas or hats, or shots with umbrellas and hats - I do street photography FWIW
Good advice! I use Linux. I name the folder/directories based on date-lens then I have a 2rd folder for post-processing called post-processing-date-lens. I delete photos from camera's SD card. I use Rawtherapee for post-processing similar to LIghtroom.
Lightroom Classic is very useful specially if you have your main pc/ laptop and don’t need an internet and if your not do editing on iPads or iPhone.
Excellent video again. It confirms my strategy. I've owned a DS218+ for a few years now and organize my pictures in a similar way. I also use HyperBackup, which does the job very well. I laughed very much about your sentence "if my PC goes kaputt". I don't know if that was the plan. Kaputt means broken in German. Thank you very much! Greetings from Germany
Always very informative and explained in a manner that we all can easily follow 👍
Very comprehensive review! I wish I had this knowledge a few years ago when I first began saving images.
Another helpful, informative video that'll help a lot of people 👏
This is golden!
It is easy to shoot (and fill up a memory card or three), but having a solid and logical way of dealing with your trigger happy shutter finger afterwards is what we all need. One extra hour of thinking before you set out on changing your existing method/process will pay off. I work solidly in Canon's DPP for now, but my aim is to change into Capture One (soon-ish), and having a good way of working before will also make it easier for me to change into and adopt the very specific ways of Capture One.
This will be marked with all kinds of stars and bookmarks so I can check back to see if I'm logical or just a crazy lunatic.
Just one important correction: the 3-2-1 rule is 3 copies on 2 different storage mediums with 1 off-site. It is important that each copy is on different types of storage (hard drive, ssd, blu-ray, memory card, cloud, etc) in order to add more resilience.
Nobody uses 2 different storage mediums anymore. The new 3 2 1 means 3 copies, 2 methods, like an external drive and NAS would count as 2, and 1 off site. This is because nobody uses discs anymore, and memory cards are not a reliable long term storage solution.
Oh my gosh, I'm going back to prints.
Hi Simon, I really enjoy your videos a lot. They are golden. One information I was hoping to catch from this video: If you take 1500 photos one morning and 30 of them are keepers, do you save all of the rejected photos for "possible later use" or just delete them straight away?
Merci Simon! Priceless information to me.
🇺🇸💛🇨🇦
Excellent advice!
Hey Simon, I want to thank you for such excellent videos, clear and specific, on every important detail, as well as the recommendations, they are fantastic. Excellent work. Thank you very much for that. In this video you talk about the way to store and how to manage information. More specifically, images and videos. At 12:21. More exactly you show the hard drives from Seagate. I'm about to buy additional storage and I'm assuming you're using Seagate. On the other hand, I've searched Amazon for 4TB in 2.5-inch, but it's not available from Western Digital, which is the brand I've used for years. Seagate BarraCuda has 4/5TB 2.5 form factor which is good for my Dell7070 bays. I have a question: Could you tell me about your experience using Seagate hdd? Thanks a lot.
I’ve used them for a couple of years and theyre great. no concerns.
@@simon_dentremont ordered already 4 units - thanks
Thanks Simon, great advice!!
Do you use GPS tags on your photos? One thing I love about some of my phone photos is that they are geotagged. I think spatially, so organizing by location of photo would be great. Especially for travel and my landscape photos, thoughts?
I don't no, and usually disable GPS features to save battery. A good feature for those that want it though.
Merci Simon pour cette vidéo.
Hi Simon, thanks for another great video you shared with us.
When we can expect you to publish your work from Botswana?
what he should have said, is as because he has a synology NAS. He should use synology drive sync and it will allow the lightroom catalog to sync between his NAS and his computer. So its getting backed up
i would have loved to know how you deal with noise. how and what do you use to remove noise and at what stage of editing do you do it.
i always cull, select my raws, process them in Dxo which creates another dng folder, edit my keepers, delete the rest, and finally export my final jpegs. I use C1 and I find this process a little redundant and longer than necessary imho.
I'd love to hear about your process Simon :)
great video as always and thanks for the great content you're giving us from Africa ❤
Another good video and tips Simon.
Hi Simon at 4 minutes you talk about using the previews generated by your camera. I’m using the latest version of lightroom and I could not get the option you suggested. Please could you expand on how to set it up. Cheers Mike
I don't pay for cloud storage. I have a Synology NAS and another at my brother's house. We both have fiber internet. We use Resilio Sync to sync the files but if you delete them from one NAS it deletes it from the other if you're not careful.
Great videos and great information.
I'm sure, I'll find out after seeing more of your videos, but on case you I miss it, what card readers do you use?
Prograde, same as my cards
Happy to see the modestly priced LG 27" display and Synology j-series NAS - if they're good enough for Simon they're clearly good enough for me ahah
Playbook also has 4 terabytes free storage. I store a lot of finished jpegs there. I also store png pictures there from AI stuff. I started making AI paintings based on photos I have taken. I also have Ai and Photo layered hybrid art. Fun stuff but anyways, storage is always a big deal for me.
Hi Simon, awesome and useful, straight to the point, as usual!! Btw, you did a video on Topaz AI a week or so ago but it seems to be gone now. Any way I can see that one? Thanks.
Thanks for this useful info. What is your strategy for creating and naming your Lightroom catalogs? Do you create a new catalog for each outing, month, year, other?
Thanks. Would appreciate if you could give a detailed written list of computer specifications and if you also use a desktop system specs.
Great video, thank you. One question though. You mentioned doing your video editing on the 923. Can you also do that on the DS220, and if so was the performance acceptable?
not sure, but I think so
My major hurdle has been processing handheld video without any IS (5D IV). My go to lens has been the EF 24-70 f/2.8. No in-body or lens stabilization. Hopefully the new R5 will streamline editing video (arriving today). I use ShotCut for video and DDP for stills and import them into Movie Marker. My system works for my needs and all the programs are free.
Superb video and informative 👌. Greeting from Ireland 🇮🇪
Excellent!! I admire your persistence!!
Hi Simon. Thanks for another informative and well produced video. Please would you consider making a video about Canon Picture Styles for JPEG shooters like myself?
I usually use the Standard style on my 6D with colour saturation set to +2 and sharpness set to +5. Since I am colour blind I'm never sure whether my colour saturation setting is too high for those with normal colour vision. I also like the consistency of look which using just one setting JPEG brings to my portfolio.
I also sometimes use the Faithful style, which is a good style for JPEG editing within Apple Photos since it is neutral but with faithful rendition of outside light. If I am using Faithful it's because I am expecting to post-process, so I leave the settings at default.
I use JPEG and Picture Styles because I get lost trying to edit RAW files, never being sure whether what I am doing will look strange to those with normal colour vision...
Any advice would be gratefully received.
Very useful information as usual.
Thanks for the video, great info. I do have a question, which is better for post processing: laptop or desktop, and why. Thanks a.
Most desktops have more processing power and larger screens to see more detail, but I like a laptop for the mobility benefit...you just need to make sure you get one with processing power, a good GPU, lots of RAM and a good monitor, preferably calibratable.
Thank you@@simon_dentremont
Thank you for your content, I have enjoyed your videos tremendously!
Would you have recommendations on the types of subjects/content best suited for Bright Day photos? I'll be travelling to an artic locale with long daylight periods and would like to maximize my work time.
Thanks again,
Another great video. Thanks 😊
Cool, I have the 5 bay Synology with Acronis back up and 8tb drives x 5
Do you use an app like DxO Photolab for sharpening/denoise? If so, whats your workflow between your sharpening software and LR? Thanks
Great video Simon, did you actually say you processes your photos off your Synology drive, or do you just back them up to Synology? Thanks Rick
Thank you Simon again for sharing those tips. I have myself a Synology 4 drives bay and store my CR3 photos in it. My question is where or how do you manage Lightroom at this point? Lightroom won't allow me to edit photos directly on the NAS drive, so in the meanwhile I just make my catalogs and my edits on my SD drives. Thanks!
I keep my catalogue on my PC, but the CR3 files on my NAS, and that works for me.
Do you buy protector screens or gorrilla glass for yours cameras??
I don’t.
Great video with tons of information! One question
, I’m getting ready to purchase a new computer. It’s 32 gigs of ram sufficient or would you bump it up to 64?
Hey im a beginner and i wanted to know if i have to buy a professional camera or for now can i just stick with the one i have which is canon Eos 600D since i just started it i dont know much stuff and i dont want to regret buying anything too expensive
Thats interesting that you're video editing directly off that NAS device. Are you using SSD drives in your NAS for video?
Im really jealous of that wood duck photo you have. I have a pair of wood ducks in my back pond but they are super skittish and I can never get close enough to get a good photo of them.
Hope you’re okay with the wildfires up there. The smoke is coming down here to nyc so I can only imagine how bad it is up there
Are you using btrfs on your ds923+ ? Your old NAS didn’t supported that
Great video!
Great video! Ironic you should mention wildfires in California and then they occur much closer to home...literally for you. I'm assuming you created that part of the video before the fires?
Synology HyperBackup to BackBlaze cloud service is a very affordable option that I use.
If I'm not mistaken using the HP dock for your laptop will bottle neck your ethernet speeds.
with the price of m.2 ssd being so cheap recently (2tb is probably best for many reasons), i stop using classic sata drives. an enclosure with a m.2 is easy way to back up ur data as well...nas system still expensive
10:48 Network Aaaatached Storage
The "W" word. Work. The digital age has made photography seem like and be called "work". Photography used to be fun but now it means lots of computer work which I am not fond of but I do it. I'm almost 70 years old and teaching this old dog new tricks is not always easy or fun but I do it. I bought all the nice gear, the kind of set-up I had dreamed about for 50 years except it is digital now. It wasn't easy for me to make the switch over, but I did it...because I love photography. Or I loved it 50 years ago. Computer work makes me sit at a desk for way too long, I am an outdoorsman and have to be enjoying the outdoors or my soul is dead. But I do it. I feel that the digital age has ruined photography with the help of social media which I have mostly quit having reduced that to a minimum. Posting on UA-cam is a rarity and made an exception in posting this. I quit Facebook. Maybe I should have stayed with film. Photography has become "work", but I do it.