All my photos are in Documents/My Pictures as I suspect are everyone's. If I then copy over photos into the Media folder I then have duplicates. Which means you could potentially have over a hundred or more!
I know it's recommended to copy over media files, but I am just interested to know peoples thoughts on this and what others do; to copy or not.
Many thanks
Sue
ID:6190
* Photos.... to copy or not
- tatewise
- Megastar
- Posts: 28410
- Joined: 25 May 2010 11:00
- Family Historian: V7
- Location: Torbay, Devon, UK
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Photos.... to copy or not
It is something of a personal preference, perhaps governed by other circumstances.
If you want all your Family History records in one consolidated set, then clearly they should all be within the Family Historian Projects sub-folders.
This allows them to be more easily backed-up, or synchronised with another PC, or exported to an interested relation via a CD, DVD, or pen-drive/memory stick.
It also depends on what type of Media is involved.
From your posting, you focus on family photos, but others have images of Census & BMD documents, etc.
I have over 1,000 media files in Media sub-folders (small compared with some users).
Only a minority are photos, and some of those are of churches and other places of family history interest.
Disk storage is so cheap these days, that it does not matter too much if you have duplicates.
Also photos cannot be recreated, so having extra copies is useful in case any get damaged.
If you want all your Family History records in one consolidated set, then clearly they should all be within the Family Historian Projects sub-folders.
This allows them to be more easily backed-up, or synchronised with another PC, or exported to an interested relation via a CD, DVD, or pen-drive/memory stick.
It also depends on what type of Media is involved.
From your posting, you focus on family photos, but others have images of Census & BMD documents, etc.
I have over 1,000 media files in Media sub-folders (small compared with some users).
Only a minority are photos, and some of those are of churches and other places of family history interest.
Disk storage is so cheap these days, that it does not matter too much if you have duplicates.
Also photos cannot be recreated, so having extra copies is useful in case any get damaged.
- Jane
- Site Admin
- Posts: 8514
- Joined: 01 Nov 2002 15:00
- Family Historian: V7
- Location: Somerset, England
- Contact:
Photos.... to copy or not
Any photos I use in FH I copy over, even if they also exist in my Photography database, disk space these days us cheap.
Source images I simply download attach to my project and then delete from downloads, so I only ever keep one copy.
Selected family photos get put in both my Lightroom database (currently 35,000 images and counting) and into FH.
The main reason I do this is to ensure if I share my project or part of my project with someone, or move it to another computer (we currently have 5 PCs in this house) I know everything related to the project is there and linked correctly.
Source images I simply download attach to my project and then delete from downloads, so I only ever keep one copy.
Selected family photos get put in both my Lightroom database (currently 35,000 images and counting) and into FH.
The main reason I do this is to ensure if I share my project or part of my project with someone, or move it to another computer (we currently have 5 PCs in this house) I know everything related to the project is there and linked correctly.
Photos.... to copy or not
Thank you for your comments. It's given me something to think about.
It's good to hear other opinions and how others use FH.
Many Thanks
Sue
It's good to hear other opinions and how others use FH.
Many Thanks
Sue
Photos.... to copy or not
A minor variation on the suggestions made already:
I use DropBox to access my project from both my Notepad and my PC. As such I am restricted by DropBox's maximum storage capacity which when I started using it was 2.5Gb. This got me into the habit of reducing the size of family photos from their original size of say 2.5-4.5 Mb to about 800Kb and saving this new copy as PhotoTitle-small.jpg thus keeping the original photo at it's original size and location but with the newer smaller copy in the project folder.
Hope this isn't confusing but it works for me.
Dagwood
I use DropBox to access my project from both my Notepad and my PC. As such I am restricted by DropBox's maximum storage capacity which when I started using it was 2.5Gb. This got me into the habit of reducing the size of family photos from their original size of say 2.5-4.5 Mb to about 800Kb and saving this new copy as PhotoTitle-small.jpg thus keeping the original photo at it's original size and location but with the newer smaller copy in the project folder.
Hope this isn't confusing but it works for me.
Dagwood