Northwest Dive Club

What do you do when your dive photo/video collection starts taking up too much space on your computer? how do you decide wich ones to keep? Bob (NW grateful diver), you have so many pics you must have a way of storing them all.... I'm just throwing this out to everyone, looking for a better and more efficent way of storing them. CD's? Photo album? What if you get 3-4 pics of the same subject thaat are all good, how many do ou keep and how do you decide wich one(s)? It's a nice dillema to have, but still... Any suggestions would be a huge help! Pez, I'm sure I can count on you to chime in!

You'll get more "ruthless" with what you keep the longer you keep taking pictures... that will help some.

In the meantime, I bought a 500 gb external hard drive at Costco in June for about $180. Hard drive space is CHEAP... and externals are a great way to go to back up all your stuff, especially your pictures. I have a 500 and a 300 gb external, and my next purchase will be an even larger external. Plus I do cross network backups of my photo archives.

Right along with Tom - I have 2 external 300G drives - plus I have an account with Flickr which keeps quite a few of my pictures online.

But then Murphy is alive and well - so with the cost of blank DVDs, I back up my pics to DVD at least one a month.

Sure Joe, I'll help. Take crappy pictures like I do, and delete them all. I think most people store them on CD.

Tough problem. I still take film. I threw away 3' of printed pictures last year after giving some to local dive classes. I am now down to only 3' of my better ones.

I now may only take 0 to 2 pictures a dive with my old trusty MX 10. Funny how things go. I paid over 10 scuba units for it and I don't think I can get 1 for it today. But it is still a kick ass camera.

I'm with you, Chuck. My MX-10 still beats out any digital camera I've tried so far! In fact, when they were closing them out, I bought a second one to keep as backup for whenever someday my current MX-10 gives up the ghost!

However, in a roll of 24- 36, I usually net about 8-10 good shots - which I then scan into my computer as a very high resolution .tif copy - and then archive it. From that archived copy I make whatever size .jpgs I might need.

I store all my photos on a separate hard drive, which I back up to DVD (they take up too much space to fit on a CD) every so often.

I also have a Smugmug account - I really like how they display the photos - and the black background really makes the colors stand out. They have lots of options for customizing and security. You'll pay for it, but the ease of use for both me AND my viewers is worth the cost hands down. Let me know if anyone is interested - I can get you a $5 discount on the price. Hey, it's not much but it's something.

As far as weeding through photos and knowing what to keep - if I have several shots of the same thing, I only keep one view. I organize the photos into whatever dive # it was, and then take the BEST shots of those, and put them into another folder according to what critter it is.

So if someone needs a photo of a Copper Rockfish, all I have to do is go to my Copper Rockfish folder and choose the best of the best. Quite easy and works great.

Also, to those of you who display photos online - it's really great to weed through your photos and only post the BEST ones - multiple shots with multiple angles and page after page after page of photos makes the viewer lose interest really fast. I usually put my absolute BEST shots on the first page of the online album, and arrange them so the colors are interesting. I know the chances of anyone actually moving on to the 2nd page is slim.

- Janna

I know one of these days I will go digital Janna, but it just seems that there are to many options, then they are outdated within months or you can't get a replacement housing because they discontinued your old one.

Here is a like new one on Ebay with no bids starting at $12.99. Ebay # 260172745137. When my flash flooded a couple of years ago I bought a complete camera package with wide angle, close up and macro lens, case,camera body and flash for $200, sold the camera for $150 and kept the rest.

[quote="Aquanautchuck"]Tough problem. I still take film. I threw away 3' of printed pictures last year after giving some to local dive classes. I am now down to only 3' of my better ones.

I now may only take 0 to 2 pictures a dive with my old trusty MX 10. Funny how things go. I paid over 10 scuba units for it and I don't think I can get 1 for it today. But it is still a kick ass camera.[/quote]

Lovin the scuba units!! I use the same term when justifying the cost of whatever I "need" to buy. Hurts less to say than "dollars". Just ask Dan at NWSD how many times I have handed him my card, turned my back, and politely said "Don't tell me, just ring it up..."

As far as organizing, I used to have a photo file called "Dive pics". You can guess how long that sufficed. I now have mobile critters, immoble critters, and nudi's, wich i have an unhealthy affliction for...
And of those files, I put the best (IMHO) up on my little website thingy for people to see, comment on, and hopefully offer some CC on how to do better. I never photoshop them, I just crop them as best I can. Still, after reading this thread, I am noticing a common theme and will be adding an external storage device of some kind soon. I appreciate all the help, and thanks everyone for taking the time to respond!

Tom and Bill's advice on external hard drives is very good. I have several as well, and "rotate" them to backup my "photos" directory. I recently passed 10,000 raw underwater images, which are stored in a directory structure based on location and date. What became even more difficult than finding the room to store the images, was finding a photo of a particular species of fish when asked.

I found myself spending a lot of time looking for photos that I knew I had taken, but was having hit-or-miss luck at locating them. I finally threw in the towel and now use an application to manage all those pictures so I can find them. There are several on the market (I happen to use Lightroom) which work by tagging your photos so you can search for and find them based on tags (i.e. fish, species, etc.).

What is nice about most of those types of applications, is that they allow you to move your photos to external drives, DVDs, etc., and will still keep track of them for you, usually maintaining a small thumbnail in the database so you can see what the photo looks like.

That's probably more information than you were looking for, but the storage problem just seems to get worse as the years go by.....

I make backups on DVD in addition to my 500 gb external hard drive. If you have oodles of money, get a Blue-Ray drive and store a whopping 54 gigs on each disc!

Scott, this info has helped ME out too!

I have the same problem as you do - not quite to your extent though. But literally thousands of photos that I need to keep track of. I file them according to dive, labeling the folders like: 328dayisland or whatever.

But after awhile, and as my memory starts to fade, I need more help to find a specific photo. Usually I get asked for a photo of a specific species - which necessitated me plowing through a jillion folders to try to find where I saw that critter. And then decide what's the best shot/angle, etc.

My solution was to create species folders, and throw a copy of the BEST shots only, into those folders. So all the BEST Copper rockfish shots are now in that folder and named 328-1 if I saw it at Day Island, and I know I can go to folder 328dayisland if I want to see more views of that fish (assuming I took multiple shots of it, which I usually do)

But this lightroom thing...sounds good!!! The thought of having to go back through ALL the photos and tag them though.....sounds UGH!

Did you find it took you forever to do?

- Janna

How come we can't edit our posts in this forum? Weird. Calvin?

Just my two cents but I picked up a 500 gig external usb hard drive for like $120 at Walmart.

FORGIVE me fellow divers for I have sinned. IT has been 3 months since my last dive.I am so jealous of those who dive like once a week. so what is the water temp now?? I only have a 7mm wetsuit so I am sure diving will be a one time deal if I do get wet.

pogiguy05 wrote: FORGIVE me fellow divers for I have sinned. IT has been 3 months since my last dive.I am so jealous of those who dive like once a week. so what is the water temp now?? I only have a 7mm wetsuit so I am sure diving will be a one time deal if I do get wet.

Whoa! Time to get wet! Temp is around 52F, give or take, depending on where you are. My buddy dives wet (and I did too until last month!) and it's still a comfortable temp for a 7mm.

Yes Janna, Adobe Lightroom rules! I'm a professional photographer (NOT underwater) and use Lightroom exclusively for my photos. I'd recommend downloading the trial and giving it a shot. It's expensive, but it renders the full version of Photoshop needless for everything but hardcore editing.

nwscubamom wrote:Scott, this info has helped ME out too!

Did you find it took you forever to do?

- Janna

Oh yes, when I first started using Lightroom, I imported 8,000 images and then faced the daunting task of going back through them and tagging all of them! Yikes!!!

However, once I got started, it was fairly quick, and I actually discovered that I had several photos of off-the-wall fish species that I didn't even know I had taken. You know those pictures, "what the heck is that, snap a photo for later identification, and then forget all about it".

The main reason I picked Lightroom over the other similar applications, is that it allows me to import my photos in place. So I can keep the same directory structure and filing system that I have always used. It simply tags the photos and organizes them so they are very easy to find.

Seth's advice on playing with the trial version is good. It's definitely a user friendly tool for a photographer.

How does Lightroom compare to Google's Picasa organizer? (which is free)

I already have Photoshop Elements for my photo editing tool - just need an organizer.

- Janna

Hi, Janna. I don't know if you're already using Picasa or not, but I love it!
Besides being free, I tend to use the Picasa editing software more than Elements. It's much easier and gives great results.

nwscubamom wrote:How does Lightroom compare to Google's Picasa organizer? (which is free)

I already have Photoshop Elements for my photo editing tool - just need an organizer.

- Janna

Well, Lightroom allows you to individually edit or batch edit your photos without even opening Photoshop. You can: adjust exposure, white balance, shadow detail, highlight detail, color saturation, color tone, fix redeye and spots, crop and straighten, modify EXIF data, sharpen, remove noise, convert to black and white and sepia, etc. It's far more than just an organizer.

If you just want an excellent organizer, I highly recommend Breeze Browser. Unlike Lightroom, which can be a resource hog, Breeze Brower is extremely "lite", though has virtually not editing capabilities, save RAW.

Download trials of both and see what you need.

Have I ever told you that you guys are THE BEST?!?!??!

Because of this discussion, I've been researching photo organizing software, and since I'm very happy with my current editing program (Photoshop Elements) I only needed an organizer.

Naturally I investigated all the FREE (rhymes with ME) programs first - and landed on Adobe (a trusted name) Photo Photoshop Album 3.2. I've been playing with it yesterday evening and a good part of today, and am THRILLED at the features and how it's organizing my photos.

I first had it search on all the image files on my computer and it came up with something like 35,000 photos larger than 100k. YIKES!!!! That was too overwhelming, so now I'm just importing them folder by folder and tagging them properly.

I have a LOOONG way to go to sort out my dive photos - but at least I'm starting on it, and I'm very excited about this.

Thanks to all of you!!

- Janna