In a sense, I’ve been feeling like a bit of a mushroom lately. In the dark, getting fed nothing but…. Well, you know the story. This time of year is like that on the wet coast. The days largely are short, dark and wet.

However, a bit of respite today. In a fit of energy and patience, I spent several hours going through the many storage discs where I’ve squirrelled away photos over the last 6 years or more. Some of it was before I had any idea about the number of images I’d be managing, so it was pretty random in terms of file type, folder names, location, etc.

It was just time to get to it and pull it all together.

Now, most of the photos are managed by year and folder, the folder having a date and a name that tells me a where the photos were taken. An example would be “12-01-23 Green Timbers” for photos taken today at Green Timbers Park. Well, it would be if I had taken any photos today 😉 But you get the idea.

The one problem I haven’t solved is the overlapping file names. With multiple cameras all using the same naming system, I’m bound to get into a situation where I try to bring two of them together with the same name, like _DWS2952. But, we’ll deal with that when we come to it. So far, so good.

After all the work today, my photos are organized and stored both on my iMac and on a Drobo external drive. I also have an Apple Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule and another overnight copy of the iMac made to an iOmega drive. I just have to arrange one more thing, and that’s an offsite storage drive for the whole thing.

Bottom line: I have 4 copies of my photos at home, and those are in danger of being all taken out at once by fire. That last copy offsite is critical, but I’m loath to spend a fortune for cloud storage right now. A physical arrangement will have to do – perhaps rotating drives to a safe deposit box or something.

Ah, the joys of digital data. At least it’s cheap to make copies.