My digital cameras have progressed from a simple 1.5 MP Epson camera to the 3MP Canon D30, the 6MP D60 and 10D, to the 8 MP 20D and 16.7 MP 1Ds MkII. All those increasing megapixels have meant larger files.

I have always worked with RAW files on my Canon DSLRs. The number of JPEGs I have shot on purpose are 0 and by mistake I've shot fewer than my fingers and toes. With PS CS, my unflattened working PSDs have grown, both as I have moved from the 10D to the 20D and the 1Ds MkII and as a result of PS CS supporting most features in 16-bits. Even a simple adjustment layer for Levels or Curves, if it is your first layer, will more than double your file size. I often find myself working on unflattened PSDs that are 450-650MB. It is not hard to get there when a Canon 20D image starts off at nearly 50MB and a Canon 1Ds MkII image at nearly 100MB.

RAM and scratch disk space are big considerations for efficient processing of large digital images. But that's another discussion. As my image library has grown, it has become impractical to keep my entire library of digital images on my internal hard drive.

Offline Storage Basics

I make multiple backups of my images. I use an external hard drive as one storage medium and an external DVD/CD R/RW drive as another storage medium. I use DVD +R/W disks for larger libraries and CD R/W disks for smaller libraries.

Using two output media -- one magnetic and the other optical -- gives me added protection against data loss.

Why DVD +R/W? My extendal drive can handle both DVD -R/W and DVD +R/W. I am on the road a lot. My laptop has a R/W DVD/CD. It reads and writes DVD +R/W disks.

I limit a particular library to 100 images. I find this is an efficient size for storing images on a R/W DVD. I tend to keep most of my shots, unless I figure they cannot be salvaged: out of focus, exposure ghosts, etc. So I tend to work with a fraction of the files in a library. A single DVD gives me enough room for the RAW files, Adobe .DNG digital negatives, working files, masters, and output files.

A library typically has five subdirectories: DNG, Master, Output, RAW, and Working.

As I load the images off a CF card, I load them into a directory named DCIM. I rename them. I use the Batch Rename feature of Breeze Browser. It's about the only thing I use BB for these days. I do my RAW processing with Adobe Camera RAW II. You could use Photoshop CS or some other tool to rename your images. The images get copied to the RAW subdirectory of their intended library.

The next step is to convert the Canon RAW files into Adobe .DNG digital negatives. I use Adobe's free converter. It's a free download from Adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html

My goal is to be able to work with my digital images decades from now. That means staying current with storage media technologies and backing up my files on newer media as they become widely used and supported and storing my digital negatives in formats that are widely accepted. The new DNG initiative from Adobe is an example of a new storage format that is designed to be an industry standard for storing RAW image data, regardless of the camera that originally took the image.

I store my working files in their own directory. With earlier versions of Photoshop, I often had multiple working files for a particular image. Limited support for 16-bit images was the cause. Photoshop CS changed my workflow, so now I often have only a single working file.

My master files are flattened TIFFs. My working files are PSDs. I make my master files into TIFFs because they are more portable to other programs. For example, I use ImagePrint Lite as my RIP for my printer. It expects a JPEG or a flattened TIFF.

Output files are also TIFFs. They are sized and sharpened for their intended output. They are sometimes tweaked. A slight Hue/Saturation adjustment, for example. After all, soft proofing only goes so far.

To make it easy to find images on the collection of DVDs and CDs, I use Thumbs Plus! from Cerious Software. Each time I archive images, I rebuild my Thumbs Plus! database from the DVDs and CDs. This makes is quick and simple to find, for example, all of my camelia images, which are spread across several DVDs. Thumbs Plus! displays thumbnails for queries even when the image files are stored offline. No need to browse the files on severals disks for the image you have in mind. Just find the thumbnail in your Thumbs Plus! database and grab the right disk everytime.

If you are new to digital photography, it is best to get organized from the start. You might decide on a different way of organizing your files than I use. But take it from someone who waited a long time to move from files named something like RAW0001.CRW in a bunch of directories and then had to spend a lot of time renaming those files and moving them to new libraries and subdirectories.

Cheers!