As you make more and more photos, backups become more and more important. And of course you make them. Diligently.

Right?

This is what I do:

Details:

1. My photos live on a 5 TB external drive. When I add photos from a camera, they go there immediately, not to my Mac. Straight onto the external drive.
2. My Lightroom catalog also lives on that external drive – that way, I can take that drive to anyone with Lightroom installed and I have all my work right there.
3. I have set Lightroom’s “Keep presets with Catalog” option ON.
4. When I am happy that the pictures and catalog are good, and ONLY then, I “intelligently” copy the new stuff to a second 3TB drive. I do that only once I am convinced it is good – no sense copying bad data. The script for that intelligent copy is here (link). Intelligent means the script checks all files on both disks, and copies over the differences (anything new gets added to the backup disk; anything deleted gets deleted from the backup disk also).
5. I do not reformat the memory card until after this is done and verified.
6. I also back up my regular Mac, using standard backup software – but since I keep little data on that Mac, it’s not critical.

OK, so I am pretty well backed  up.

Except I am not. All my data lives on the two drives attached to my iMac. That is very dangerous – many things can go wrong. Things like:

• Lightning
• Flooding
• Fires
• Burglary (you think the burglar would take only external disk 1 and leave the backup drive behind?)
• …and more, too much to imagine.

To solve this, there’s a few things not to do:

• I could back up to DVD drives, but that is very expensive, very slow, and very unreliable. Ditto for CDs.
• Cloud backup – too early to be practical (making a full backup at today’s Internet network speeds would take months – literally).
• Keep memory cards – way too expensive.
• Drobo – this is a possibility (RADI drive), but the Drobo uses its own proprietary encryption.

So here’s the solution:

1. Instead of more local backup, I use a third 3TB drive, and once a week everything gets copied to that third drive (again, using an “intelligent” script).
2. And the key: this third drive lives off-site, not at my home studio. So come earthquakes, lightning, or floods, I’m OK.
3. Finally, I have one more set of off-site drives, per year, which I make a full copy to at the end of each year.

A lot of work. But worth it, because I can sleep. Are your memories (or your business) worth less? I didn’t think so – so come up with an off-site storage strategy today. Every hard disk fails. Not “if”, but “when”.

When you travel, so some panorama shots.

You can do them in your iPhone or similar. But you can also do them—and probably at higher quality—with your DSLR. Like this:

1. Camera on tripod. Manual mode. On a day with consistent light.
2. Take a photo on the left of your scene.
3. Rotate the camera around its axis (hence the tripod, too). Overlap 20-30% with previous shot. Click.
4. Repeat step 3 until you reach the right.
5. Take all these shots an put them together in Canon Photostitch, or Photoshop, or whatever other software you have (you can download lots of apps).

Now you get this: click the image repeatedly to see it at  full size:

That’s the Las Vegas strip. In all its glory.

In a forum I visit, a photographer just asked:

Hey friends! I’ve got an external hard drive which is giving me some problems and I can’t seem to pull files from it. My computer recognizes it, but doesn’t let me access the files. There are about 200 that i don’t have backed up elsewhere and I would love to figure out how to get them. Does anyone know any file recovery service which may help?

I am so sorry for her, but on the other hand I wonder why there are still people without backups. EVERY hard drive will fail. It’s not IF—it’s WHEN.

A student in my new Sheridan College course, which started tonight, a student told me she had previously lost two years of her young son’s life in pictures. We have all had this thing happen: please, please learn from these experiences of others, and

1. Go get a new backup drive or two. Now.
2. Make backups, perhaps using simple scripts like the one I have described here.
3. Keep one backup off-site.
4. Print as many photos as you can.

Then you can sleep, as well as enjoy your photos!

Yes. Yes you should upgrade to LR5, and I mean now. For the vignette tool, but also for the healing tool, and especially for the lens correction tool. Corrections are “one click” now: both lens as well as architecture correction. Look: original on the left; corrected with simple click on the right

My 16mm lens is perfect, except of course it does introduce a little barrel/pincushion distortion: barrel on the left. One click and it’s gone. Those clicks are here:

“Enable profile corrections” checks if it knows your camera/lens combo, and corrects for vignetting and distortion. “Auto” corrects for the perspective distortion that exists when you aim the camera slightly up or down. Two clicks and perfect: that alone is worth Lightroom. That way I get verticals that are vertical, im images like this:

Any idea how much time that saves me? 100 times the 2 minutes (if I am very quick) that it would otherwise take me in Photoshop, os that is three hours saved on just this one aspect of my photos. Lightroom 5 is the way to go.

You have read before that I use a utility called EXIFTOOL to read EXIF data embedded in files. And there is much more embedded than you think. One important piece of data: file creation date. Take this, of a funnel cloud over Oakville  few years ago:

Apple INFO thinks;

2009, cool.

But EXIFTOOL gives me the real creation date:

Now in this case, Lightroom would have also given me the right date. But there are many more pieces of information in the EXIF data than Lightroom tells you. Go install EXIFTOOL (search for it) and have fun seeing what hidden gems of information your pictures contain.

This time, I mean size of files. A student just wrote to ask:

“I have taken photos for some friends and used Lightroom for editing and exporting.  I did not shoot in RAW- still learning.  My SOOC images are substantially larger than my exported JPEG files.  For instance, one file is 6.72 MB but comes out 800KB once run through Lightroom.  I am exporting at a quality of 80, length and width of 4×6 and resolution of 300ppi.  My friend has asked me for larger files.  I am under the impression that larger files don’t necessarily mean better images, but perhaps I am wrong? Is this downsizing normal? I have never had any issues with print quality as long as I size in a 4×6 inch ratio and set 300ppi as my resolution.  Am I doing something wrong in exporting that is causing such a dramatic drop in file size?”

This is perfectly normal. A 7MB JPG (or a 14 MB RAW) will indeed be about 800 kB at those settings. Yes, your new JPG is smaller:

• 300 ppi x 6″ = 1800 pixels wide, which is about one quarter of the actual size of the file.
• 80% is going to result in a much smaller size than 100%: compression is the entire point of JPG files.

So if the original file is 6MB, then a quarter of that is 1.5MB, and with extra compression, 800 kB seems a perfectly normal file size: as expected.

Indeed, a larger file means better image quality. This is always the case; whether it is noticeably better is another question, of course.

I tend to think in pixels, Saying “1200 pixels long” is easier than saying “4 inches at 300 ppi”, and it means the same. You can specify either way, but I always prefer the simplest.

Finally: you tell me you are shooting a wedding soon. You should be shooting RAW. What is there to learn? Just select RAW as the filetype instead of JPG. Done. If you use Lightroom to finish your pictures, it will know the RAW format your camera produces: done. Simple.

And yes, sometimes things that appear simple are simple.