Don’t lose all your photos!

For amateurs like me, organizing is a lot easier if you realize that a main skill is honesty in what must be kept and what should never have been downloaded. I like birds and have many keepers of a species but ten are better than the rest and all I really should be saving. You have a great photo showing a bird with prey perfectly positioned in the mouth. To me, such photos make the thousand other pictures of that species eating totally worthless. Destroying all copies of very good, very sharp and very 'also ran' images, while painful, makes it easier to find those which we want to define our work. You mention many complicated steps to cataloging but none of them are as important as the skillful use of 'delete'. When we are gone, our legacy will not be judged by the terabyte.

FYI, one of the most important features to take advantage of whenever you're using a NAS with more than two drives in a redundant array is called periodic "scrubbing". This means the system periodically scans all your files and detects and corrects errors using the redundancy built into they array. Otherwise you may find your files silently "corrupt" over time. Though I use a ZFS system which has it native, I believe QNAP and Synology both have a similar feature available. It was uncanny but a few years ago a few big content creators all around the same time found they had silent corruption across their backlog of media...definitely don't want that to be you

i m using LR for years bt never dive deep in other option than colour grading...today i got to know it has so many features... thank you

These are great tips. I don't a NAS yet, but I do save my photos in multiple hard drives. For those like me who aren't a professoional, the mainstream cloud storage solutions might be too expensive, which is why i recommend using a cold storage solution like amazon glacier. Google and microsoft azure also have similar solutions. I pay a few cents every month to keep my files stored. If i ever need to retrieve them I'll pay a significantly larger amount. I've lost around 50% of my photos in the past due to drivers failling. $70 and a few hours later i had all my files again.

Great video! Backup power is crucial, especially during outdoor adventures. I highly recommend the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series. With its massive capacity, waterproof design, and fast recharging capabilities, it's perfect for keeping your devices and appliances running for extended periods. Stay prepared and enjoy uninterrupted family time in the great outdoors!

Thank you Simon for pointing out this video, I thought I looked thoroughly enough through your work to find something like this... apparently not, sorry. Of course I watched it now and again you never disappoint, the info is massive and right to the point, thank you Master 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 also everything very clear... work for me to do 😊

Great video! Did you know that enabling "Caps lock" enables Auto Advance and disabling caps lock disables Auto advance. I am surprised that you don't appear to write your edits into xmp files. If your catalog gets corrupted and your backup is corrupted as well and you have to create a new catalog if you have written your edits into XMP files you will not have to re-edit your images. This happened to me and because I write change into XMP I was able to create a new catalog with all of my edits. It did take lightroom 3 days to create the new catalog but I consider myself lucky it could have been alot worse. My cloud backup is with Backblaze.

The NAS is great. Wish I'd gotten one years ago! LoL Actually, I recently got a Synology DS223, and had two 12TB drives in it. This let me backup all my images and a number of video files. But...that space shrank faster than I thought it would! So, I just replaced it with a DS1621+, moved the drives over to it, and inserted another 12TB drive. A couple days ago I had 15TB free. Today after moving some Final Cut libraries over I'm down to 10TB. Fortunately, there's still room to grow. :)

For many years I have been using a hard drive dock to use multiple bare drives for multiple backups. I have a double slot that takes ssd and hdd, even full size drives. Yes I would swap out my 'off site backup' at mom's but she's gone now. I have a safe deposit box at my bank with 2 copies of EVERYTHING although I don't have Petabytes of RAW (yet). Thank you for everything!

Built my own "NAS", basically a Linux computer with RAID5 disks. I also formatted it with BTRFS filesystem which stores CRCs of some sort per block, so I know whether a bit rot happened upon fsck or reading. It was more work to get started, but one knows what exactly is in his storage box.

I reorganized my LR catalog a few years ago,( recovering from a hip replacement), it was a mess and daunting. But I found using the Metadata search in LR a huge help. Setting up all the key words takes much longer, but easier after I did a massive cull. As I was guilty of keeping everything but the worse shots. I was culling similar to you but in April I started using Photo Mechanic 6. I find it helps clear my cards faster and I do my initial cull in PM6 and import my selects into LR. It's much quicker as I dont have to wait for LR to build the previews etc upon import. Like you I shoot a lot of birds and can have huge numbers of 50 mp images to cull thru. Thanks for all you do!

with the ammount of times i have upgraded my pc and reinstalled windows i have lost a lot of catalogues. i was looking through my photo archive the other day and realized i had never made an external backup up a lot of my exports. which means that if i wanted to use those photos i would have to go back and re-edit them. kinda sux but at least i still have the raw files so might be a project for a rainy day. been binge watching your videos. i dont know how i hadnt found this channel earlier. its top notch content.

Culling is so important. I came to learn this a few months ago and have been going through my back catalog of 86,000+ photos and slowly culling them. Also getting better at culling new photos I shoot. One other thing I think is important is tagging photos. This way you can easily find all shots with umbrellas or hats, or shots with umbrellas and hats - I do street photography FWIW

For those who don't like Lightroom, Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits is a great program for culling, organizing, rating and adding/editing metadata, and there are none better for its speed of viewing large files. It is considered industry standard for photojournalists. Even a lot of lightroom editors start with Photo Mechanic.

Thanks Simon, great advice!!

Some great advice in the video Simon, thanks! I just started getting serious with my photography hobby but luckily I've been recording music here since the year 2000. That has resulted in a rather massive buildup of powerful Mac computers some of which are in storage here. My main 2 areas are a MacBook M1 area that I mainly use for video and an iMac area for the main recording of guitars, keys, bass and such. All KRK audio monitors and subwoofer, Audient and Blacklion audio interfaces, and storage with mainly Sansdisk and Samsung SSD external drives plus Lacie HDD backups. I have Lightroom and Photoshop on both systems and my main video editor is Screenflow 10. I'm glad I already had all this "stuff" now that I'm getting serious with photography.

Great video with super info. I was so glad to hear that you delete large numbers of photos from an outing. I really struggle to delete sharp images and keep only 1 or 2.

This is one of the best photo videos of all time

I could kiss you for this. :) I have been waiting for this for a long time. It is fun to take pics but the workflow afterwards can be a real drag

Incredible that you had this video ready to go during your time in Botswana!