Storage, workflow, etc

I think this stuff has been touched on in various threads, but things seem to have moved on a bit...

I've not used a proper camera very much for the past few years, and since getting a new one I have very quickly found myself with masses of images / data to deal with. In the old days when I was doing a mixture of work and personal stuff (when I could charge it all to the company) I think I did it all on Phase One with a load of hard drives.

Anyway. I've been going round in circles slightly trying to work out a plan for how to deal with it all now. I filled up the 100gb included with my CC subscription within a couple of days of arriving in Font, and would prefer to find an alternative to having to upgrade that.

One option seems to be to do a fairly rigorous cull of images initially, and upload the remaining ones to Lightroom.

I used a Dropbox system for all my illustration / work related stuff and don't mind upgrading that to unlimited storage (if necessary), so I was thinking of doing a two level cull, with the best stuff going into Lightroom, and then the other images that I might end up wanting to look back at could go into dated folders in Dropbox (so I can always dig them out again someday), and then erase the rest.

Does anyone here do anything similar? Or are you all using a mixture of physical drives with cloud backups?

I do my initially culling with FastRawViewer as DXO (LR alternative) is just too slow to scroll through quickly. I've been trying to get more brutal with the initial culls...

How about a hardware solution? You can pick up a 2Tb SSD for a good price now. If you're on PC then pcpartpicker is a good website for finding the best price / performance.

I normally shoot "RAW + JPEG" as a default, which slows buffering and eats storage, then I'll normally do an initial daily in camera cull, either binning both, or just keeping the JPEG if it's a shot i want to keep, but don't intend doing much editing on.

Reluctant to commit to a cloud as a long term storage solution, so store to a large hard drive, and back it up to a spare one every few months.

Got a "lite" dropbox for sharing large files with others, but it synchs very slowly with our low speed broadband.

Should have added, I use onedrive to back all my stuff up as I have 1TB included after buying office etc.

I've stalled with photography but before I did my backup solution was cloud based (Drive) and only backing up images with certain ratings/flags.

I just used export in LR using whatever the Adobe RAW format is (can't even remember) and an original sized JPEG to the Drive folder.

Everything else is 'backed up' on large external drives but they're at the same site (my house).

I have a 1TB external HD with all my RAWs on, that gets backed up to my 10TB RAID. I use the Apple Time Machine software. When I save something as a jpeg I put it on Dropbox too.

I don’t delete RAW files unless they’re blurred ones of the floor from when I’ve caught the shutter accidentally. Photos don’t seem very big when you’ve worked with video files!

Physical drives, backed up to other physical every few months. I organise everything in Lightroom (pre-subs standalone) in a folder structure based on location, plus keywords for names, stars for publishable quality. Strongly recommend this approach, I can always find stuff but I have a memory for places. Like Mike I don’t delete anything other than misfires. Amazing how useful otherwise junk shots often turn out to be. I also keep a catalog of the starred selects on cloud.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I spent AGES trying to figure out something that might work, esp considering that I typically embark on this kind of thing expecting to be super organised and then muddle things up a bit.

I tried Narrative for doing an intermediate selection / cull, but though I can appreciate how it might be useful for people adding new stuff regularly, it just seemed like another layer of unnecessary complexity that would probably be more of a hindrance than a help.

I also gave up on the cloud version of Lightroom as I could see I'd end up paying loads if I tried to store everything.

What I finally figured out seems to be a pretty decent system. I've put all the images and videos into a folder on Dropbox separated into year folders, and then into separate folders for the day / trip / event. I've then used Lightroom Classic to create a catalogue, with the catalogue files in a Lightroom folder in that same photo / video folder. This means that I can use LR on both my laptop and my desktop to open and work on stuff, and the same catalogue files get updated whichever one I use. The only thing I have to remember is that sometimes it takes a little while for the catalogue file to sync across Dropbox, but seeing as I'd usually be using one computer or the other, I don't think this is going to be an issue.

I was going to look at using another cloud backup on top, but Dropbox (esp Plus, which I'm currently using) seems to be more geared up for backup as well as more general cloud access / sharing these days. (Both computers now also individually sync to Dropbox Backup now.) But I think I'll also have a physical drive attached to the desktop to backup the whole of my Dropbox once a week or something.

Hopefully this should let me keep everything, whilst also maintaining a decent amount of organisation. It also means I can upload everything to the final location whilst I'm away, vs storying it on a drive on my laptop and uploading it all when I get back. Fingers crossed.