A little backstory, I am a prolific photographer, and I take way too many photos. Both for personal use and for work. So I find myself with, oh I don't know, a Terabyte of digital data. This spans the gamut from iPhone camera to RAW files from a Nikon DSLR.
Currently, personal photos are on an external hard drive. (three actually, a master and two backups) and work photos are on a different external drive, (which is manually copied to the server as a backup). So none of the photos are taking up space on the Macbook Pro or being backed up up with Time Machine. In both cases, folders are grouped into years, and then sub-folders are named by event.
This worked fine under the PC (I edit in Photoshop) but three years ago I moved to Mac and I know that there must be a better way. I have iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop and Lightroom. I am thinking that I can manage all of my personal photos in iPhoto (including PhotoStream which is all personal) and use Aperture for work. (I could use one program for both, but I like having a distinct difference for clarity.)
I hesitate to follow the advice of moving all of my photos into the Apple libraries. This is a lot of data to move, and it makes me nervous. Can I import but not move the old stuff, and then use iPhoto normally moving forward for new stuff?
Outlook kept all of your mail in one big master file, and one small issue would erase access to years of saved data. I don't want the same issue with my iTunes Library file. Can I make one Library per year or something? Can I export new stuff from iPhoto into traditional folders for backup?
I am looking for a "best practice" advice from photographers and hoping to move my last bastion of PC tendencies over to Mac.
Currently, personal photos are on an external hard drive. (three actually, a master and two backups) and work photos are on a different external drive, (which is manually copied to the server as a backup). So none of the photos are taking up space on the Macbook Pro or being backed up up with Time Machine. In both cases, folders are grouped into years, and then sub-folders are named by event.
This worked fine under the PC (I edit in Photoshop) but three years ago I moved to Mac and I know that there must be a better way. I have iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop and Lightroom. I am thinking that I can manage all of my personal photos in iPhoto (including PhotoStream which is all personal) and use Aperture for work. (I could use one program for both, but I like having a distinct difference for clarity.)
I hesitate to follow the advice of moving all of my photos into the Apple libraries. This is a lot of data to move, and it makes me nervous. Can I import but not move the old stuff, and then use iPhoto normally moving forward for new stuff?
Outlook kept all of your mail in one big master file, and one small issue would erase access to years of saved data. I don't want the same issue with my iTunes Library file. Can I make one Library per year or something? Can I export new stuff from iPhoto into traditional folders for backup?
I am looking for a "best practice" advice from photographers and hoping to move my last bastion of PC tendencies over to Mac.