My photography addiction has two very real contraints now that I have a child. First, many of the photos are priceless. If I ever lost any of my sons photos, my wife would have my head. A dead blogger makes for a very boring blog. Second, I have very little time to take care of the all important backup. I use to dred popping in DVDs for hours on end backing up the many gigabites of cuteness and occasional artistic shot. Making backups takes away hours that could be shooting. However, through some trial and error, I have, what I think, to be just about the easiest way to make backups. An added bonus is that I get to take care of a few organizational tasks at the same time. Now, this isn’t my full workflow – I won’t talk about photo tweaking, manipulation, printing, etc… in this post – but it’s a very large part of how I deal with my itchy shutter finger.

Step 1: From Camera to Computer Using Nikon Picture Project

This is a pretty easy step. PictureProject has a nice built in function called Transfer. I have it set up to transfer the entire contents of a memory card to a new directory called transfer with the date and time appended to the end (i.e. transfer2006-02-17-193856). PictureProject will also auto-rotate pictures from my Nikon D70, saving me some precious time. I use a USB 2.0 universal card reader for all transfers instead of the camera. No need to waste battery electrons.

Step 2: Tagging with Adobe Bridge

I don’t deal with directories anymore. Thank goodness. Gmail and flickr have turned me into a tagging zealot. Tag and search is WAY easier than sorting through a directory structure. The thing that always annoyed me with directories is that sometimes a photo belonged in more than one place. Now, using tags, a photo can have many tags and it doesn’t matter where it’s stored. I use Adobe Bridge, but any kind of photo management program should let you add keywords to the IPTC data of a photo file. IPTC data is just metadata associated with your file. Now, using Bridge, I can sort by keyword and find any photo I’m looking for. No more wandering aimless through multiple directory trees. No sir, that life is behind me. And it’s freakin’ fast!

Step 3: Arching to flickr using Uploadr

My last archiving step is child’s play as well. Using the flickr Uploadr tool, I just drag and drop, right out of Bridge, the photos I want to upload to flickr. Click upload, add to a set if wanted, set privacy levels, and you’re on your way. With a high speed connection, it doesn’t take that long l to back up hundreds of photos at once. Flickr will also grab your tags from the IPTC data and convert them into flickr tags for easy searching online. One caveat. To do this, you need to have a Pro account ($25/yr). You’ll quickly use up your monthly transfer limit with the free account. But, the ability for almost unlimited backups (2 gigs/month) is worth when you add up the DVDs you’d have to buy over a year.

Now you have a copy of your photos on your local computer and a remote storage host. Both sets are tagged and searchable. You also have access to your photos from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. There are countless other reasons to use flickr in addition to archiving, but I’ll save them for another post.
Now, I’m sure my wife would still say I’m less than perfect, but backups are no longer one of my problems!

Flickr should pay me for this post.