[AfterPentax Mark II]

Never look back . Store it on a NAS and a back-up on a portable disc. Sorted by camera and year. But to be honest, I take far too much pictures there are so many that I am no longer capable to sort it out....

[Dartmoor Dave]

The key thing for me is that I don't delude myself that my photos are some sort of precious artworks that must be preserved at all costs. I delete all raw files apart from the frames that I have actually decided to process, although occasionally I might keep one or two that I'm not 100% sure about. Then, at the end of each year, I also delete the Photoshop files so that all I'm left with are the original raw files of my "keepers" and uncompressed tiffs of the finished photos. Maybe a hundred or so arty-farty hobbyist photos and another hundred family snaps.

Consequently, I don't need a massive amount of storage. I keep copies of everything on an external hard disk, and at the end of the year I also save that year's snaps onto a third backup -- a 1tb hd that has got every photo I want to keep on it and still has 350gb of free space.

Online backups don't really work for me, because every couple of years whichever online service I've been using will do something that really annoys me and I'll end up deleting everything. I've already done that three times with Flickr.

[GUB]

The key thing for me is that I don't delude myself that my photos are some sort of precious artworks that must be preserved at all costs.

I feel the need to be deluded otherwise why bother
Who knows - Gub may be be the new Leonardo the world is yet to discover

(And Dartmoor Dave as the Tom Rowden reinvented!)

[Dartmoor Dave]

I feel the need to be deluded otherwise why bother

I'm going to get that line printed on a t-shirt!

[Sakura]

I simply has directory per year with subdirectories for each location and in that directory the date(s) I visited that location.

I backup locally to a second harddrive in my computer and to 2 different USB drives which I rotate every month and store at a fiscal different location (like my garage box).

[JohnX]

NAS, which I also back up to a single external drive

[newmikey]

I use Rapid Photo Downloader by Damon Lynch to import my SD cards. I've set it to create a directory structure, create directories for whatever camera the card comes from, split raws and jpegs into different directories and rename files using a job code (which I have assigned when importing) and the ISO. This ends up looking like this on my local harddrive (see attached screenshot).

I then regularly upload to a 5Tb harddrive which is connected to a USB port of my home router so it act like a kind of NAS and I download from that NAS drive to an identical 5Tb hardrive which I have 'parked" at my brother in law's house. That harddrive will, after many years, start looking like the other screenshot.

The content of a single job (or single day SD download) folder will look like the third screenshot.

Attached Images

     

[Fogel70]

By storing them on a NAS and Categorize image folders by Camera>Year>Subject>Date

I use pretty much the same, and I found it to be the most convenient solution with low enough risk for sleeping well. But I'm thinking of upgrading to a second off-site storage NAS in case of a major disaster.
Right I just use single disk external drives for off-site storage, but it not the most reliable solution.

[madison_wi_gal]

A lot of folks are mentioning external SSDs as their backup devices.

I'm not so sure - unless you power them up from time to time, and maybe even copy some data back and forth.

I do love SSDs, and they comprise all my active drives. But for the most permanent off-line storage, I think an old-fashioned magnetic media hard drive should be in the mix.

Every now and then, I find a 15-20-year old hard drive (I've been using PCs since the very first IBMs - more than 40 years ago*). All the files there on have been still readable! I'm not sure that will be the case with an SSD that has sat for 20 years.

* a few years ago, I revved up a genuine IBM PC/AT that had sat idle for at least 30 years, before I sold it on ebay. It worked perfectly with the vintage 30 MB (!) hard drive.

This is not for permanent/archival storage but a working location for curating aggregated image files. SSD technology will be fine. The original drives aren't going anywhere.

[VictorDA]

My photos are stored in 2 folders (one for raws, one for final exported jpgs) on my main (quickest) internal SSD.
I use Lrc as well, with one big catalog for everything, but still feel the need to organise folders in a structure by year / event (this makes it possible for my wife to find her way into the collection). I do not separate by camera in the folders but rename the files to put them in chronological order.
I also make a point of deleting all pictures that are not worth keeping, to keep the size compact. I would say I retain approximately 800-1000 pics/year (probably too much already).

Then, my backup system is 2-fold:
- real time syncing with onedrive (on my 1 To office 365 subscription)
- monthly backup to an otherwise offline external ssd.
This is not perfect but sufficient for my amateur needs

[kypfer]

I categorize by camera and date and backup to external (detachable) USB drives as well as keeping a copy on a local drive.
I also keep a local "album" where all "favourite" images retain their original camera-generated prefix (personalised where possible to KP, K70, K3 etc.) and have a descriptive filename … eg K70_1234_grandpa.jpg
I can search the album for "grandpa", come up with an appropriate list, choose the image I want and recover a copy of the original in a few seconds.
In the event of potential duplication of file prefix, such as with the older IMGP-prefixed images, I'll use Irfanview (my default viewer) to check the EXIF to ascertain which camera was used.
Other shots taken at the same time will (obviously) then be immediately available.
My negative scans are similarly categorised, by format and/or monochrome or colour.
Mostly, on the odd occasion where I actually "need" to generate an image from an original, it's the work of moments to find it.
All very amateurish, very basic and very cheap, but it works for me and is totally non-reliant on any external web-based service (which have been known to "disappear" or become very expensive)

[madison_wi_gal]

I categorize by camera and date and backup to external (detachable) USB drives as well as keeping a copy on a local drive.

Sounds like me, but I have 10+ USB externals (with lots of duplication) that I need to consolidate and curate. I've watched quite a few Lightroom specific YT vids and I think I know what I want to do - make master folder on the ginormous drive (whichever that may turn out to be) and then make folders for the 4 camera bodies.

The trick (and why I need a ginormous drive) is curating the duplicates. I suspect I'll use exiftool to rename the files with sortable tags. names.

[BarryE]

By storing them on a NAS and Categorize image folders by Camera>Year>Subject>Date

Almost me to, except for Subject I use Location. I don't bother with tagging etc, as I know it will not be kept up and date and location is enough to jog my memory.

Then external Raid 1 storage - with encryption off. As you're in IT you'll know why. My w/station has Raid 1 storage too. Offsite is tricky for me as I have poor broadband, so I use a weatherproofed storage device for critical data, which is stored in an outbuilding.

Finally for general storage philosophy each shoot/trip I create a backed up selection and a not-backed up selection, reasoning the poor shots might get lost. This has reduced my backed up storage to a manageable amount.

An associated point, I have a high spec UPS to secure the power for PC/storage. Gives me good surge current protection. Power issues are often the cause of data failures.

Can't say I'm satisfied with my approach, borne of necessity and implemented in a hurry. What I'd really like is a hierarchical database management system where the exif data could be stored as separate fields, as would one or more images (e.g., both the JPEG & raw, or five shots representing a bracketing approach), as well as any tags or comment data I choose to associate with a particular record. All searchable other than the images themselves.

But what I'm actually doing is storing all the pictures on an SSD with external hard drive backups, where the folders simply represent particular years, and sub-folders identified by specific date and location/subject contained in the folder name, with both raw and JPEG's in that folder organized by the last date on which I made any edits. I think of it as a transitional mode.

[reh321]

Leaving the technical storage part aside, I use a simple year/month folder structure and manage it in LR (still using LR6). For me that's just the simplest way to do it and it makes finding things fairly easy. Inside LR I have a number of Smart Collections (photos by camera, photos by lens, photos by specific keywords etc.). Smart Collections are a great feature.

My photos are JPEGs classified by subject; for example the higher level is divided by where we lived, and within each place there are collections by subject {home, nature, etc}, then by subject {one for each location}, then by each year. My heirs can keep the whole “tree”, or only the branches they care about. In general, they started out for me.