Handling new work with a Photo Bucket Workflow

[whitemiata]

In order to facilitate backing up my photos I've adopted a bucket storage system.  Basically I ingest all photos into an "ingested" folder, where I do the initial cutting of the bad photos, and some rating.  I also rename in a way that gets me the photo date and camera model in the name.

The photos are then moved to my New Photos folder.

This folder is constantly synchronized to an external USB drive, a portable drive that then syncs to my office PC, and I do some more culling.

Eventually this folder reaches about 4 gb at which point I archive it to Dvd, rename it bucket0X (X being the next bucket number) and create a new New Photos and continue.

I'm looking at 2 possible problems:

1.  I could open one of the files, pull it into photoshop, edit it, and accidentally save the edited version into the bucket folder.  Unfortunatelly there's no way I'm familiar with to have Windows forbid adding files to a folder.

2.  Even if I don't make the "save into a bucket" mistake, if I open a CR2 file and do some adjustments in Camera Raw, the XMP file wil be updated, and saved into the bucket folder.

Any thoughts on how to properly handle these problems?

Alessandro  

[pvonk]

Wouldn't making files in one of these buckets read-only protect them?  If you do need to make another "version", you could first copy the file (make it read-write) to another folder for editing.  Once changed, then.....?   The problem is how to handle different versions (perhaps add a suffix like "-2" for version 2, etc.

I can't say I like this idea as it requires a lot of file rights manipulation.

- Pierre

[peterkrogh]

In general, I don't worry too much about the adjustments I make to individual files after I adjust them once and put them away.  If I need to readjust, then I do it to the Primary copy of the DNG and save the file back into its bucket.

1. This does not happen to many files for me, since I try to get a good adjustment before I make the DNG, so comparatively few files need to be readjusted once they have been put away. (This will change as RAW file adjustment tools get better.  We will, for instance, want to save multiple versions of a file, like B&W and Color).

2. Most of the readjustments I make aredone when creating a Master File, and in these cases, the Master File (and its flattened derivatives) are what I would generally prefer to work from when I need to come back to this image.  Because of this, I wouldn't be too sad if I lost the DNG readjustments, and therefore, I don't feel like I need to backup the readjusted DNG just to save the ACR settings.

3. I expect that we will see the ability of DAM software to harvest and save RAW file adjustment settings before too long, which will make it much easier to manage this data over time.
Peter