My Digital Workflow
Traveling to obtain wildlife photos is expensive and you don’t want to loose your investment in the images. Good preventative image storage techniques are essential to a business, but also provide insurance that your personal memory photos wont get lost either. Below is a summary of my workflow which has been designed based on experience in corporate IT, the techniques of other photographers, and some ideas forged through tragic loss.
My Digital Workflow while at home goes like this:
From the camera into my Epson P-7000 viewer
From the camera into Lightroom 2.0
I take a quick look at the files and file data to gleam any sign of a card malfunction. The memory card can be cleared now
Lightroom copies to my 1TB storage drive, renames files, applies basic metadata and some keywords.
I begin the culling, more metadata related to location, keywords, make basic corrections, then apply to catalogues and collections. An alternate method is to use the Epson to cull some photos before loading to Lightroom which minimizes deleting from the storage drive and resulting fragmentation of files.
Once or twice a week the drive is backed up to a separate drive and the files are converted to a DNG file format . A Lightroom catalogue backup is done once a week or more often. Software, data, and system state on all the computers is backup no less than weekly and before every trip. Noncritical and personal data is removed from my laptop before travel as well incase of loss or theft. I keep copies of the “money makers” on my webserver as well so I have some backup that is completely off site.
Why convert and store as DNG (digital Negative)?
DNG format is not proprietary. This means that it is fully documented and thus will be able to be read by anyone that wants to far into the future. If your photos taken with an older digital camera are not converted, someday you will not be able to read these formats because the proprietary file format has been forgotten and is unsupported. This is happening already. DNG has a lot of big name supporters and may soon become an ISO standard like PDF is today.
The file format encapsulates the RAW image file, metadata, and a preview all together into a single file with no sidecar file to get lost.
Other advantages are:
You can choose how large the embedded preview will be and it can be updated to show image adjustments you have made
Programs that use embedded previews will see the adjusted preview instead of the original
Updates are nondestructive so the original RAW file always remains untouched
DNG has lossless compression which results in a smaller file size and ultimate savings on storage space.
Conversion to DNG can be a check for corruption in a file. If there is a problem with the file, it will not convert and you are given a warning.
Adobe makes a DNG converter so DNG files can be used with older versions of their software.
On the negative side, DNG is not supported by manufacturer’s software. I have never been happy with any manufacturer’s software so I look at this as a positive reason to try better tools. There are a few advanced reasons to still have a disk with the manufacturer’s software on it, for instance if you want to check the focus point, but it can stay in the drawer until I start having a hardware issue that needs diagnosed. My backup copy in RAW format gives me the best of both worlds if I need to access data that is not well supported with tools like Lightroom.
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