Digital Photo Repro

[NYBG]

I started a blog to keep track of my activities as the imaging manager for the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium.

www.digitalphotorepro.blogspot.com

NYBG has been digitizing plant specimens since 1999 and has an online image catalog of several hundred thousand specimens.

Lately we have ramped- up production  and I am finding the DAM Book extremely helpful as I try to modernize the archive. There are about 15,000 Kodak DCR files, 150,000 Canon CRW files, and 250,000 TIFF files scattered throughout over 100,000 folders. Some have metadata, some do not.

I am trying to corral all the files, take legacy TIFF duplicates offline, and convert all remaining RAW files to DNG.

I hope you enjoy it.

[R. Neil Haugen]

Um ... that's gonna be one heck of a job. Should be a life-time thing, though!   

And to think I think getting a handle on a measly 300 thou images or so is a bit of a task!

Neil

[NYBG]

It is a task. I expect to have the structure of the archive a bit more manageable by the end of the year.

Since the New York Botanical Garden has been archiving before DNG came about, they used the best standards available at the time. They would shoot a RAW capture and archive it, process a production master TIFF file and archive it, and create JPEG derivatives for use in the online database.

The TIFFs, all 7.5 terabytes of them, have never, to my knowledge, been used for anything other than to archive. I have just recently started to archive only DNG.

The TIFFs have all been backed up on tape, and I am in the process of deleting them from the server. As I type this, another 73,597 TIFFs are being deleted.

My next step will be to convert the various RAW formats to DNG.