Back up digital images

Filed away
I find it useful to organise my photos by date. At the beginning of the year I create a folder and name it, for example 2008, and create 12 folders within it, one for each month. When I download a photo session it goes in its own sequentially numbered folder within the folder for the current month. I don’t bother renaming individual files and if I edit an image I save it in a subfolder called ‘edited’.

If you plan to keep the original file names for your photos, and your camera provides the option to use sequential file numbering rather than resetting each time you format or insert a new card, then I’d advise you to make use of it. That way, all of your photos will have unique file names and the potential for confusion and mishaps will be greatly reduced.

The only other thing I do at this stage is to add a copyright line to the relevant IPTC metadata field and add keyword tags. Applications such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Mediaone (included with Paint Shop Pro Photo X2), Google’s Picasa 2 and professional applications including Adobe Lightroom and Aperture for the Mac all provide routines for backing up and restoring your photo library.

Photoshop Elements allows you to back up the Organizer catalogue and image files to optical media or to a separate hard disk or partition and will do incremental backups ­ archiving only modified and new photos that have been added since you last backed up.

Like most photo library applications it also keeps track of how much time has passed and how many photos you have added since the last backup, providing timely reminders or, if you like, nagging you to back up when appropriate. One of the advantages of backing up from a photo library application is that the file database is saved along with the photos.

The database contains a copy of the thumbnail and metadata for each image, speeding up display and search and retrieval operations. It also keeps track of what’s been backed up and when, so that incremental backups can be done.

If nothing else, one of the big advantages of backing up this way or using a backup application rather than simply dragging folders of photos from one place to another, is that you avoid duplication. Another plus is that it makes life much easier when you upgrade your PC ­ installing a new hard disk, or replacing the machine altogether.

Restoring your photos to a new drive using the backup routine puts everything back exactly where it was, complete with the catalogue. Photoshop Elements’ backup routine also lets you restore to a new location while maintaining the original internal file structure. There are a couple of things it’s worth knowing about if you use or plan to use Elements to back up your photo library.

The first is that if you back up to a folder on your hard drive, Elements renames the files to prevent multiple files with the same name occurring in the backup folder. The original names are restored when you restore the files from the backup, but you won’t be able to identify the files (from the file name), at least by examining the contents of the backup folder.

The second thing is that if you use backup and restore to transfer your photo library to a new machine, the catalogue files, thumbnail cache and other important data are stored in the default location C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Catalog Folders.

If you want to move this, say to the location you restored the catalogue to, select Edit>Preferences>files, click the Browse button next to ‘Folders for Saved Files’ and navigate to the desired location.