Once you are back from the field with your compact flash cards and/or digital wallets filled, it is time to transfer these files to your computer. Be aware that this requires a lot of disk space. Converting some of these images to 16-bit TIFFs makes even more demands on disk space.
Maybe you should start thinking in Gigabytes and soon in Terabytes. We currently have about 1000GB of storage in our network (needs organization and with duplicates sitting somewhere). A good starting point is 80GB as a minimum and adding some external Firewire drives as backup.
Most cameras today come with an USB or a Firewire interface. Many use these camera interfaces to transfer the files to the computer. We do not use these camera features, as it does not help a lot once you use multiple cards and/or digital wallets and we also don’t think cameras are the most robust CF card readers.
We have a USB 2.0 card reader installed with our main PC (we use PCs
but the same is true for Macs) and copy the images from a days shoot
to a new directory in our "inbox" folder. We use many different
cameras and the goal is that every image has a different name (even
if we use two cameras of the same type). The following explains the
file hierarchy:
* all raw files from all cameras for 2003 fit here
* this is the first DVD set (or you may also use CDs) for 2003. We
always create a new folder if the content exceeds about 4GB to fit
on one DVD (or 600MB for one CD)
* this is a folder from one photo session in Los Gatos (actually
better name it “Los_Gatos” as some archival tools can filter out the
names.
* The name contains the date yyyymmdd for easier sorting
We rename all image files to: 300d_nnnn_mmm where:
* 300d stands for camera type
* nnnn is a sequence number (starting at 0000) and then incremented.
What is this for? You might have two 300D cameras and still all images should have a unique filename. Also after 9999 the camera will restart at 0001. The sequence number will allow again unique file names. If we later work on our files in Photoshop we save the results as a master TIFF file. The file name will keep our original “300d_nnnn_mmm” file name and we append some more descriptive text to it.
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