I’ve been working on getting my photo library, um, organized and available for viewing. Sigh. I’m rapidly approaching twenty five thousand pictures. Compared with the pros it’s not that many, I know, but it’s hard enough managing this many that it makes me cry like a little girl. I pity the fool who has ten times this number. At this point, every other sentence from Bunny is “are the wedding pictures done yet?” Can’t blame her, but this shiznit takes me forever. I’m trying. I really really is.
This is interesting – here’s how many pictures I’ve taken broken down by year:
- 1998: 5 (this is how many digital pictures I have from that year, though I shot some film).
- 1999: 89 (started going digital with a Nikon something or other. I think it was 10 pixels. That’s right. No mega.)
- 2000: 719
- 2001: 334
- 2002: 2006
- 2003: 759
- 2004: 289
- 2005: 1684
- 2006: 3087
- 2007: 2533
- 2008: 13038 (no, that ain’t a typo)
I’m trying to go through them, choose a minimum bar for quality, keyword them (I’ve done a lot already), at least make sure the white balance is correct, and upload them to our pictures site. I’ve also renamed them and organized them on disk.
Now I have so much data that my 1TB disk for my Time Machine backups isn’t big enough for a single Time Machine backup. Damn. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that yet.
In the short term I’ve turned off Time Machine, which I’m not happy about, and I’m mirroring everything to my server (a homemade Windows Home Server box) using Synchronize Pro. I still have 2.5tb free there and everything is duplicated so I’m not worried for the moment. It does worry me, though, that I don’t have versioned backups.
If only Time Machine (reliably) worked with SMB mounted volumes (Mike shakes fist in direction of Cupertino) so I could use Time Machine with my server…
I’m now eyeing the new HP MediaSmart Server. They’ve fixed this problem (so you can back up to it with Time Machine). I want one but I have to spend my money on other mildly important things like food. (Did you know that weddings are expensive? Who knew!?) I figure I’ll eventually get one (unless Apple fixes this problem in Snow Leopard) and use it for my Mac backups and use the current Server as a file share and PC backup.
I also don’t have a good, eh, any offsite backup at the moment. God forbid my house implodes because I built it on a Indian burial ground. (I hate it when that happens.) Not many things I own are irreplaceable. My pictures are pretty much at the top of this list. This includes all the slides and analog photographs I have in boxes in the garage.
I think it’s best not to think too hard about this or I’ll have to start breathing rapidly in and out into a paper bag and pound some sort of conscious reducing substance. And that wouldn’t be pretty.
