One of the things that both digital and analog photography have in common is you have to be able to find the originals (negatives or files) before you can do anything with them. Most folks don’t want to spend the time organizing their files and it can come back to make life a bit more complicated. As Brooks Jensen says, time spent organizing files is time well spent. My analog files were impeccably organized, but somehow, in the transition to a digital world, my organizing skills have fallen off. The Hell’s Half Acre project is almost five years old, so I had to go looking for the original files. I checked both auxiliary (external) hard drives and they weren’t there. I was beginning to sweat. I did find them on a set of CDs that I had burned to preserve these files.
I’m not getting any smarter, actually. In fact, I might be getting more stupid. Almost ten years ago I recognized that organizing digital files was a worthy activity. I did organize my files several different ways, with several types of nomenclature which causes me more problems as I go back to search old files.
Remember when hard drives were expensive? We burned our files on to CDs because we couldn’t afford hard drives. Well, that’s changed hasn’t it? I spent a lot of time last year going through the old CDs and importing old files to my hard drives. This just added to the confusion in nomenclature and file naming. When I purchased my second Panasonic Camera I didn’t even consider that both cameras use the same file naming convention. I have several thousand digital files with the same name made from two different cameras.
I don’t even want to talk about the state of my LightRoom Catalog.
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