It is easy to drown in your digital downloads. Your desktop can become a dense forest of folders and the unintelligible numbers that your camera assigns to each image. Before you submerge for the last time, lets start to make sense of this new media and how it can and should be managed.
These are some of my methods. It is part of what folks are now calling a digital workflow.
1 – As soon as I download my images, I sort them and place them in folders that make sense to me. If you just label the folder “Vacation to Italy”, it will be hard to locate that sunset picture in Sorrento. Take a few moments to sub-divide your images by categories, like place, date, subject matter, etc. Give the folders meaningful names, like Pompeii Ruins-July 7, 2006, Vatican Gardens -July 10, 2006, etc. The date can be a handy tool later.
2 –The second step should be done immediately! Do not wait. Do not let folders build up on your desktop. Burn them onto 2 CDs or DVDs. That is your digital negative. You will never have more pixels than you have at the moment of capture.
If I later crop, remove redeye, and otherwise enhance the image, that is stored on an additional CD. The first CD is of the pure image capture, as it was downloaded from my camera. If you wait to “fix” the images, tomorrow never comes and you begin to drown in files.
I make 2 copies: one is stored in my home and one is stored in my studio. It makes sense to be redundant. CDs and DVDs are subject to failures. My second copy is my insurance policy. If there were a fire or hurricane damage in one building, perhaps the second one would still survive, and my digital negatives would be intact.
Go forth and lasso those digital dust bunnies. Subdue them into properly named folders and then burn them quickly. Don’t let procrastination wreck havoc with your “digital workflow”.
• More on the fugitive and fickle nature of CDs and DVDs in a future blog.
• NEXT BLOG – More digital housekeeping practices, including external hard drives.
