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BACKING UP YOUR FILES
by
Heather Shimmin

This podcast was recorded (Click here to Listen) by Gino, a talented Multi-dimensional actor who does film, theater, voice work and much much more.

I’m sitting at the coffee shop on a Sunday morning in a leather Manhattan chair. My soy latte is cooling on the end table to my left. The Shins are playing in the background as I wave to a friend who just walked in the door. I’m working in PhotoShop, removing a few pieces of lint from the model’s black blazer when my mouse freezes. I can’t force quit. I can’t ctrl+alt+del. I hold down the power button to shut off the machine. I wait 15 seconds and turn it back on. It seems to be booting up just fine. Then, the blue screen of death appears. I’m not too worried. I reboot. Blue screen. I reboot. Blue screen. I’m sweating now. I have 6 photo shoots on there which have not been delivered to the client. I don’t have a backup of my contacts. I have dozens of emails which have vital information from my job search. I haven’t backed up for months.

Gone. Everything was gone.

I had to wipe my hard drive clean and rebuild my laptop for the third time that year. I lost data, images, a portion of my professional network, all of which I had no way of retrieving. I still don’t have it.

There is no excuse for not backing up. It’s quite painless, really. I make it a point to not only backup on an external hard drive, but to store information in multiple places. There are many places online to keep a second or even third copy of your data. Here are some of my favorites:

GOOGLE DOCUMENTS is a great place to store docs, spreadsheets, and other text documents. It’s free, and you can share the document with others.

GOOGLE PICASSA makes organizing, editing, storing, and sharing your photos simple. You can make photo albums, slide shows, add tags, and share your pics effortlessly (I should get a kickback from Google for all my promoting efforts).

FLICKR.COM and MYSPACE are other options for backing up, albeit, the space allotted you is limited. I use these sites for portfolio pieces.

Editor Note- Many of the online companies mentioned above are good, but none are great, many of them do impose size limitations, to date I don’t know of an online service that offers backup at a good price with the amount of storage a typical photographer might need.  Many Photographers resort to using backup that is located in their studio, office , or home office, external hard drives work great but they too are limited in size. Drobo or some other type of Mass storage is the way to go if the Photographer had a large number of files to store, currently I am at 2 terabytes of images , and that is after deleting rejected images.The highest level is to purchase a SAN or a NAS , if you do go this route use a device that supports iSCSCI, which essentially treats the storage device like it is attached directly to your computer. I you like more info on this drop us a line.

HOTMAIL, GMAIL or who ever hosts your email has their own platform for adding contacts, their phone numbers, email addresses, and other vital information. That way, when, not if, your computer crashes, you won’t lose all of that valuable data. Finally, there are many online backup companies out on the Internet, MOZY and Carbonite are just two, but in my opinion they are some of the best.

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MANAGING YOUR digital images
by

Heather Shimmin

Managing your Digtial Image Files-Podcast

Your shoe boxes are full of them. They are falling out of your albums. And now they are stuffed into one gigantic folder on your computer, eating up memory like a linebacker at Chuck-A-Rama. You need help, fast.

Managing your digital images needs, well, management. Ignoring it will not make it go away. The longer you wait, the more daunting and painful it will be. And perhaps you are already at that point. If that’s the case, start with future shoots and then go back and do the other digital images in smaller chunks.

Managing your digital images is a process, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes painful. But you’ve got to do it . And staying current is the only way to keep the little buggers from creeping up on you.

TRIM THE FAT

The first step in your management process is to trim the fat. You do not need to, nor should you, save every digital image you take. Every batch of downloads has worthless digital images – out takes, the one little Joey took of your foot, or the one where you chopped off your daughter’s head in the group shot. Edit, edit, edit. Look at your digital images with a critical eye and delete the bad ones, and believe me, there are a lot of them.

SORT INTO FOLDERS

Now that you’ve trimmed the fat a wee bit, you need to start organizing your digital images, putting them into folders based on the photo shoot. This could be a sub folder of a month and year. Create a system which works for you and stick to it!

RENAME AND RESAVE

Once you’ve organized them, you now need to rename and re-save them as anything but a JPEG file. Without going into too much detail about JPEG, they are the devil and should never be used. JPEG files are compressed files and information is thrown out every time you save it in order to reduce the file size. I recommend you save them as as tiff. Renaming your files will help you to find them at a later date and give meaning to the shot. What does IMG_983.tiff tell you about the photograph? Nothing. Joeys_8th_005.tiff on the other hand lets you know this a shot from Joey’s 8th birthday party. Again, use a naming system which makes sense to you. There is another option, and that is to use Adobe’s DNG format, this format is ubiquitous, and will be around when many of the others fade away.

INPUT META DATA

An digital image’s meta data is vital. You may not think so now, but it is time well spent. META DATA helps you and search engines find your digital images . Meta data houses such information as the photographer, contact information, location of the shoot, the date, keywords, copyright information, website address, a description of the event, and so on. If you fill out the metadata immediately after each download, it will not be so overwhelming and will save you time and headaches in the long run.

BACKUP

Whether you are caught up in your organization process or not, you need to back up frequently as to not loose any of your digital images . I backup every Sunday. Have a set day to do it. Set an alarm or write yourself a note. I cannot over emphasize how important this is. My hard drive crashed three times last year (stupid PCs) and I lost a lot of digital imagery which I can never recover. With digital images , you have no negatives stuffed in a shoebox under you bed to fall back on. An external hard drive is your shoebox.

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MANAGING YOUR IMAGES AND NAMING FILES
by
Heather Shimmin

NAMING FILES-click here for the Podcast

With film you could get away with being disorganized, of having that just-throw-them-in-the-shoebox attitude. When you needed to find an image you could just pull down the overflowing shoebox from the closet shelf and sift through the images until you found what you were looking for. This is not the case with digital photographs. In fact, if you have continued this practice of throwing your images into your digital shoebox, I call you to repentance. You penance, however, is not as simple as saying ten Hale Mary’s and an hour of community service. You have some work do. But you’ll thank me in the end (yes, Mother). When it comes down to it, there are really only two things you need to worry about when managing your digital images: editing and organization.

THE EDITING PROCESS

The editing process is taking a critical eye to your images and deleting the bad ones, the out takes, the out of focus shots, and anything else that is not worth keeping. What isn’t worth keeping are the shots with poor composition, poor lighting, bad exposure, or are just plain boring. Your first impulse to either keep it or delete it is usually accurate. The more you stew about it, the more you think that the shot isn’t so bad and you end up keeping crap. You cannot fall into the trap of being a digital pack rat, saving and hoarding every image you take. It’s about quality, not quantity. Delete, delete, delete. We don’t need more imagery. We need more creative, innovative, and inspiring imagery. When it doubt, delete it. Now, I know you think this is harsh, but really, do you need 500 images of your trip to Paris? Do your friends want to sit through a slide show of 500 pictures from Paris? (In case you’re wondering, the answer is no.)

MAKING SENSE OF CHAOS

Now that you’ve whittled down your 500 shots from your jaunt to Paris, you need to put them in their appropriate place. How you organize your images is up to you, but you do need to create a system and stick to it. Here is a snap shot of how I do it. This system works for me. Under the pictures folder I have categories as well as folders with the name of the shoot. These are the projects I’m still working on. They might still need to be edited, delivered to the client, or are awaiting a model release. Whatever the reason, I know that I’m not finished with them. This way I can see exactly what projects I need to work on: Alyssa, San Juan Island WA, and Xagave. When I am finished, they go into a category folder and then sub folder, or into another folder called finished projects, where it awaits being transferred to my external hard drive to be archived. The finished projects folder is for images I don’t need to access frequently (e.g. my portfolio or website) and therefore don’t need to be taking up valuable space on my hard drive. And speaking of backing up, you need to have a specific day (for me it’s Sunday) to back up your files.
The second part of organizing your images is to fill out the meta data for every image. Meta data makes an image or file more search able by you and the search engines. This information is invaluable and is a necessity. Your computer and search engines (when you upload images) crawls the meta data, archives it, and catalogs the information. Here is a snap shot of the meta data form in Adobe Bridge. This gives you an idea of the completeness of the information you can attach to a file. You can create a template with information that doesn’t change (creator, phone number, website, etc., and apply it to every image and then just fill in the fields which do change (keyword, description, location, etc.).

FILE NAMING

First of all, you can’t leave the name of your file IMG_245 because that does not tell you anything about the image. Renaming your files helps you know what the image is of and it helps your computer in its search for that image. Like the filing system you have created for your images, you also need to pick a system of naming your files, such as Disneyland 2008_003.tiff. Or can you get even more specific and name it Bryan_and_Mickey.tiff. It is a little tedious, but most software out there has a batch rename feature, so it’s no big deal.

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FILE TYPES
by
Heather Shimmin

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of file types out there. But for digital imagery, you only have to worry about a small handful. I’m just going to talk about the most common and universally accepted file types. Knowing the different types of files, what they do, and how you can use them to your benefit will greatly increase the efficiency of your digital work flow.

THE FILES TYPES

Let’s start out with the most common extension, JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). It is laughable that the E in this acronym stands for experts because JPG is the worst possible format you could save your pictures in. JPEG uses Loss Compression in order to reduce the size of your files. In order to compress the image, information is discarded and lost forever. This happens every time you save the file. With each save, the quality of your image decreases and information is thrown away.

One of the most widely supported and Lossless (does not lose information) file formats for saving bitmap images on both PCs and Macs is the file extension TIFF (Aldus Tagged Image File Format). TIFF graphics can be saved at any resolution, full color, CMYK, RGB, black and white, gray-scale and no information is thrown out. This is my favorite format.

BMP (BitMaPped graphic) is the standard, non-compressed format for saving bitmapped images for Windows.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a new format for saving bitmapped images which will replace the GIF format. GIF uses a patented data compression algorithm called LZW. In contrast, PNG is patent- and license-free and is universally accepted. PNG uses lossless compression, supports index color, grayscale, true color, transparency, and is streamable, thus is the best compression method for the web.

RAW is the digital equivalent to a film negative. It is the data as it comes directly from the CCD detector. RAW files are so named because they are not yet processed and ready to be used with a bitmap graphics editor or printed. RAW file formats may vary, depending on the brand of digital camera. NEF is Nikon’s digital SLR RAW format.

WHAT YOU SHOULD USE

When shooting, use RAW. If your camera does not shoot RAW then use anything BUT JPEG. If JPEG is your only choice, then resave as a TIFF or BMP. When preparing for the web (email or website) use PNG.

There, that wasn’t too bad. The main thing to remember is that you want to use file formats which use a Lossless Compression, wherein you will not lose data or image quality when you save.

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