Quote:All quite nice and sorted, Rover, but the disadvantage of your system is the inflexibility and also the redundance of the fullsize or low-res copies, therefore a lot of diskspace is needed. That might work with 8-16 MP, but 45 MP 16bit TIFs are eating a harddrive for breakfast.Inflexible how? I'm not bitching, I'm genuinely interested in how to make the system better.
To me, there's only one, "sacred" original RAW - all other interpretations, crops, b/w versions are basically just duplictaed and variied settings. I'm used to cross-referencing and I'm also used to keep a good DAM in order. Downside: If the DAM is so poorly programmed like the one of Capture One, your way appears to be the better one
I know that there's only so much description one can cram into a folder name - after all, the full path needs to be at most 255 characters long - but once I tried making file_id.diz text files for every folder/shoot and it did not work for very long - I just got bored quickly. Right now I can find the required photos - and I'm at times amazed that photos which seemed utterly irrelevant and unnecessary may end up being used years upon years later - with reasonable accuracy. That doesn't mean I don't want to improve the whole thing. Since I'm not shooting in RAW, I only have to store the source JPEGs and the edited versions. The latter are usually not a size issue because for where I'm working now 2000*1333 is usually fine (and each file is therefore sub-1MB). Even for the newspaper work, unless I was aiming to use the shots for an exhibition later - a very rare occurence - I was slightly compressing the end results after levels / cropping / tilt adjustments / dust removal. So those are not the chief offenders.
Regarding backups, I'm running two external HDDs - one for everything just as it is appearing, another only for the well-sorted / culled / described data. The contents of the latter are mirrored (mostly) in the cloud, although there I'm already close to running out of space.