Digital Photo storage especially for Apple peeps

[peggyfromwastate]

How do you deal with your digital photos? I know there's a thread on backing up specifically, but I'm curious about how people deal with photos on the computer hard drive.

We have our photos on our PC hard drive. I consider a PC "cheap memory" though. We are getting a Mac, debating which kind, but I consider Macs to be "expensive memory" and so I'd not want to have every digi photo and video file on the hard drive. BUT the attraction of having a Mac is using the iMovie and iPhoto suite to edit the photos.

So what do you do? Do you download your pictures, edit them up, then save them on a backup device? Then delete them from your Apple memory? Is this what the MobileMe thing is all about? It annoys me to have to pay any type of fee for a photo storage system honestly. But I don't want to clog up the memory of the computer hard drive either. And I don't want to lose the features of the iPhoto such as facial recognition bc if I only keep about 4 months worth of photos on the Mac, what's the point of having the "fancy" editing software.

I also am bothered that iPhoto seems to not back up to the computer hard drive- if you use Costco in order to print up photos, you have to copy them to another file on the computer- you can't take the photos from iPhoto and upload directly to Costco at least how I understand it?

I am pretty much clueless about all this stuff- so if this post has you slapping your forhead and screaming at the computer about what a dunce I am, no worries! Totally agree!

[SuzySunshine]

I download my pictures and movies to iphoto and imovie and leave them there until I start having space issues - aside from my normal backing up to the external and DVD for safety reasons. When I start having space issues I just delete the ones that I know are backed up twice, the only reason I keep them on my computer in the mean time is because I find myself going back and looking for comparison pictures when I'm blogging, etc.

As for uploading, do you mean uploading online or taking them to the store? You can directly upload out of iphoto to most, if not all, online picture sources. I've never tried Costco because we don't have one but I upload to Picasa, Facebook, Snapfish and walmart.com without issue.

The other option is to get a Time Machine enabled airport and then you can back up regularly and you will be able to access the faces, etc. We don't have one of those which is why I back-up the way we do. I can open the backed up photos on my external drive and it opens them just like another iphoto library and the faces, etc. are all there so if there is something I need on the external its not that hard to get to.

[SoonerTexan]

I also am bothered that iPhoto seems to not back up to the computer hard drive- if you use Costco in order to print up photos, you have to copy them to another file on the computer- you can't take the photos from iPhoto and upload directly to Costco at least how I understand it?

Yeah...it's annoying. I have 10000 photos I need to get into lightroom, but the library thing is confusing.

The other option is to get a Time Machine enabled airport and then you can back up regularly and you will be able to access the faces, etc.

This is pricey, but I would do it if you can afford it. For my own use, I'll probably back up to several external drives once I get around to it. I'm using Lightroom, not iPhoto anymore, though.

Google "iphoto external storage" there are enough geeks out there on forums that you will find a lot

[Deebs]

We have a Time Machine, and love it! It just makes me feel secure that everything is protected (although DH recently bought me a Mac Air, so if it gets dropped, it shouldn't be such a problem like when my last laptop was dropped).

[MissCrabette]

I'm a little rusty since I'm using my Windows 7 laptop more and more. I didn't do this with iPhoto, but I moved most of my Aperture library to the external hard drive. The default was for the photos to be stored on the laptop's hard drive. When I was done with a collection of photos, I simply set them to be referenced from the external hard drive. Now I realize that doesn't help you since you're asking about iPhoto, but you should be able to do something similar with iPhoto. What I would do is keep the most recent photos on the laptop while you're still editing them and sending them out to friends and family. Once you're done with them, offload them onto the external. Here's what I was able to find online, and I remember using this a long time ago to keep separate iPhoto libraries.

Get "iPhoto Buddy" and you can keep your iPhoto library wherever you want. You can have multiple libraries and switch back and forth whenever you want. I just offloaded a 25GB library to an external drive and told iPhoto Buddy where I put it. When I need more HD space I will offload my current iPhoto library to that same drive. If I ever want to go back for old pictures I can plug in the drive and review the libraries as needed.

I'm probably less informed than you are, but I use a Mac, so I'll tell you my setup.

When I first switched to Mac about three years ago, iPhoto's file management bothered me. Somebody had suggested Adobe products, so I ended up downloading their 30-day free trial of Photoshop Elements, followed by a 30-day Photoshop CS trial. (They also have a Lightroom 30-day trial, if you want to try that.) Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS both come with Adobe Bridge, which is an awesome photo viewer/file browser. Bridge requires no importing or duplicating of files - you can view, organize, mark, tag, and group any existing photos on your computer, without actually moving them to different folders. When you double-click a photo in Bridge, it opens in Photoshop for editing.

If you try any of these and decide to buy one, you can probably get up to 80% off by buying through an educational store with Adobe's student/faculty discount. Photoshop Elements would be fairly affordable with the major educational discount.

For backup... My ancient Mac laptop was a hand-me-down that crashed a year and a half ago, so we got me a different Mac. On the new one, Time Machine came included. It automatically backs up to the external drive that we designated during the computer setup. But Time Machine is intended to back up the files that are still on the computer, so for your purposes, you'd need to create a separate, non-Time Machine file on the external drive and manually move over any photos that you don't want to store on the main computer. (Bridge would be able to browse and open any of the files that are on the external drive.)

I also store our favorite photos to CD or DVD, as a second source of backup. I'd like to do off-site backups, but I haven't set it up yet.

Sorry if that didn't answer your iPhoto question... When I used the version of iPhoto that was available three years ago, I couldn't make it work well for me, so I haven't used it in a long time. I'm not familiar with new features.

[peggyfromwastate]

Thanks everyone!

I feel like I'm drowning in digital photos!!!