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File Management

and this is all one of the umbrella, like increasing speed and efficiency and being more consistent. We can't get through that without talking about how we manage our data, our basic final management. And there's two ways that we do it. There's a naming convention we have to come up with. And then there's the folder structure where stuff goes. So we started out with this process, you know, and Jen has her very specific, you know, goal of consistency and continuity in her photos. I have a really big issue with organization and structure, and I like things very clean and neat and structured and easy to find. And I need like to know what they're called and what what project it is. So John is the guy that comes over to your house and looks at your workstation and sees all your tables everywhere. And he's got, like, Twist has and power strips, and he's like, back there organizing everything. I had a kind of his specialty is that cluster mess. So we when we started doing this, we were litera...

lly creating our directory structures by hand and replicating in every single time we would start a new shoot. So in one way, that's really good because we are establishing the rules were following the rules, and we're doing it consistently every time. Problem is, it takes a lot of effort to do that every single time. So we started working in little scripts in little widgets and little kind of in house built tools that would start to automate and streamline some of these things. And now it's actually automation is your friend. It is. When it comes to stuff, these repetitive little tasks, automation is absolutely going to save you. Absolutely. So this took on a life of its own, actually, And we started working with automated work flows, which you might recognize their name. If you've done any automate er, type stuff, they build automata actions. So we've actually partnered with them, and we're building our own up to do this stuff because we've been scripting it and kind of, you know, hacking these pieces together for so long that we decided, you know what? This needs an application, and I want to push a button. I wanted to do it for me consistently every single times you're not constantly reinventing the wheel every time you start a new project because I'm the person that will forget where the dash is and I'll make the whole folder structure and I'll be like, there's a space in front of the death and then I get matter. Yes, it doesn't. Where is when you can automate something like this, Does it for you. You don't have to think about those things anymore, right? So if this kind of application is something interested in, I would definitely recommend go to our site and sign up to be a beta tester. What made a tester has come in beta. Yeah, we're in the very early stages of building. Yeah, but we definitely want to get some feedback and, you know, see who's interested in it. So just just a hot back one second. And the other thing that our whole goal is with this app is that we really want to find something that can really guide you through your workflow from start to finish. There really isn't anything out there like that, you know? I mean, you can jot it down and follow your steps. You can have a whiteboard. Ours is particularly awesome today, but generally you know the idea of having an application that's there on your computer that God's you threw, keeps you from missing steps, keeps you on track and kind of gives you that light at the end of the tunnel of knowing where you are, I think is actually a great thing to have. So I'm really excited to have this tool. Absolutely, absolutely. So naming convention. This is the first, the first key component of this. The This is important. This is actually really important. It's This is how you can keep track of where your stuff is without spending 40 minutes looking for it where it is and what it is. I think that was Those are the two things that we always had trouble with when we started this. The naming convention is critical because you want to very quickly and in a very short, you know, amount of space. Define what the project is, what it's called and make it easy for you to identify later. So what that naming convention actually has to be can be up to you. You know, we have our standard. We have our specific convention that we're using. I'm not saying that this is the only way you can name your folders. It just so happens this is what we have decided on for a number of factors. But the key is it's remained consistent. Once we picked this stuck to it right, go years, right? And that's how we have always done it. When you look back at my weddings from 2007 they are like this. This is easy for me to find them. And if you're a multi shooter studio, you may have to tweak if you have a couple of events happening simultaneously. But generally speaking, this will sort things the way that you want them sorted so that you can find them. Absolutely So the other component to this naming convention on when we're talking about that naming convention By way, this is the name of the top level Project folder for your shoot. When I say project, I'm talking about a shoot. We kind of use the terms interchangeably. That folder will hold all the components of the project. It's gonna hold all the pieces it's gonna hold the files that belong to them. It's gonna fold the catalogue that you're loading your images into all of those sub components should hold. Our should be named rather the same as that top level. So there is some continuity and the reason we do this. And there's there's an alternative method of naming that we've seen where you take your catalog folder in your tiff folder, and it's just called Tiff or Catalog or J. Peg. It's a generic name that if it was separated somehow, you no longer love what it is. You know what it belongs to. So we maintain this naming convention all the way through every single sub folder, every component, so that if for some reason and it may be deliberative, you want to collaborate. If I want to send, you know, my raw Files or D and G's to gentle work on, she's got this folder and it's named with the project. There's no question what it is where it belongs. So do you want to mention about the one project in one catalog? Yeah, it's it is worth Menchaca's were. I know that some of you might do this little bit differently, but one of the things that we stress as a very, very important rule is one light room catalogue Parachute per project. If you shoot a wedding, it's one catalogue. I'm gonna say it one more time. This is very important. Really important to feed. Speeding up your workbook. One catalogue and light room per project or shoot. They're interchangeable terms. The catalog is just nothing mawr than one piece of your project. It is not your project. It's one piece of your project. So if you've got raw files, tiff files, JPEG files, those air pieces of your project, that catalog is just another piece. So it belongs with all of those components right? In that project, in the project, if you do nothing else as a result of watching creativelive and being here, you have got to stop having one catalogue for your whole wedding season. It is going to slow you down. And if that if that catalogue ever corrupts, you will lose so much more information than you would lose if you had one cow log corrupt from a project and that is rare. But it is amazing how much faster you can move when you have one catalogue parachute. Trust me on this. This is awesome. This is so important. This is going to change your life. It's one of the biggest reasons that we do this. We have this naming convention that we have. This project directory structure with all these sub components is a concept of portability. I can now take this top level folder that holds all sub folders of all my components, and I can move it anywhere I need to. I could move it to a working drive. I can back it up to a long term storage device. I can copy it to another workstation. I can share it with Jen. It's portable, and I mean this is just a folder that's not some sophisticated concept. It's literally just a folder. But the fact that it holds every single piece of everything that we need it can move around freely, and you never lose track of what it is right. It's like a puzzle box. You don't want to start moving the pieces around individually because you're going to lose them and you won't be able to make the puzzle. But if you keep everything in one box and that's the way that you transport it, it will always be there for you. So before we jump too far ahead. It is important to talk about storage and how it relates to the project organization and where we put stuff because we talk about how we named it. We've introduced this concept of portability that we can. We can move this thing around, but why do we want to move it around? So we make use of a concept called Tiered Storage, and this is a big enterprise storage concept, and it's got a very complex definition, and basically the idea here is you've got hard drives. You've got storage devices within your infrastructure that have specific purposes they have. They have reasons for being. They have like things that they're good at that you need to use them for No. Two drives with the same no to storage devices are the same. They're good at some things and they're very bad and other things. So that's all we're talking about doing is making use of those tears of storage appropriately and making sure that your project is actually staged or backed up where it needs to be within that environment. So we'll go through what there's three tiers arm and this is a universal thing we didn't want, you know, recommend a specific brand or technology because a year from now it's gonna be completely obsolete. But there's always this top tier of of really fast, high performance but really expensive storage, and it's generally not alone. Space and the In Vogue one would be an SST refuge in DR That would be kind of like the current currently change SSC. It's fast, it's good, expensive expense, and it's small. So here to is always this this middle tier. It's just a generic hard drive that we're all used to storage. Good price. It's your performance standard hard drive and then the long term storage that we talked about, you know, lots of storage. You could get a lot of it. It's lights, blinking lights, lots of blinking lights. I mean, wrong, um, to those of the three tiers. So what do we do with those three tears for that fast high performance drive, which now is this SST? It's your working drive, so you need to think of that drive as more of a temporary place to do work, and when you're done, erase you wipe it off. The project goes on the drive. You take advantage of the fact that it's very fast. That's very quick, that your catalogs will go faster. Your images will be faster to export. Only while you're working on that project do you want it on that drive. But when you're done, clear it off and we're doing that. Remember, because our project is portable, we can move it from location location as we need to. So if you've got this really fast working drive, then what you actually need is a way to back it up. And that's where you can take advantage of that middle tier where you've got a lot, a little bit more storage for a lower price on the performance doesn't have to be all you know as fast as your first year. So what we actually do so I would ingest to this drive. This would be the drive where, when I'm ingesting my cards, that would go on to this Dr. Because this drive has a good amount of space, it works really well for that I would never ingest to the other two. This dr will never be slower than your compact flash cards. Those are usually the slowest so. But what we recommend is is, if you're working on this, this really fast working drive, just have a piece of software, the background that runs a daily or twice daily backup of what you're doing, like a time machine. If anything ever happens, you can always roll back and pick up where you left off. So that's a good use of that of that space, and we happen to use Kronos Inc You can use anything you want to sink on the Mac. Um, way. Don't get any kickback from any of these. Here, I think, is one on Windows. There a lot. There's a ton of absolute, but the concept is make the backup automatic so that third tier is these long term storage. You back everything up to it. That's where you keep everything. Long term. It's not your working. Dr. You're not opening catalogs from that server. You're not, you know, ingesting cards. You're not exporting its just holding your data if you need secret. Sorry to interrupt you, but there are a lot of people at different levels of photography, and they're wondering, what do you mean by catalog when you're describing the catalogue sure this line for the next. Yeah. Okay, so the catalogue is. Remember the appropriate slide for that six. Okay, so we'll go back to this one. So the catalog is It's a light room terminology. If you're using light room, the catalog is just a database. It's a It's a file that holds a record of all the photos in your project. So So when you open up light room, it will say, Would you like to make a new catalogue or open an existing catalog? It's like when you go into any other, like a word processing document, it says, Would you like to open? A new page is document. Would you like to make? You know, would you like to make one? So it's just that particular file format for that program. So that's at the base. That's what a catalogue basic. But it doesn't it doesn't hold your photographs. That's an important distinction is that it's just it's just a database that's pointing to your photos. So if you got rid of the catalogue used to have your photos, you know you're not gonna lose anything if you if you deleted your cattle and you lose your work, you don't delete or lose your photos. Rather, some applications may actually bring your photos in and hold them as one bundle package. So that catalog is just literally nothing more than a database record of all your stuff. So hopefully that that helps Tremendous thank you. And while you're back on the naming convention slide, there are multiple people. Laurel L R. Excuse Me, Laurel H. R J yet and a couple others wondering if you can go back over the naming convention in exactly the steps of there is the basic theory behind why we named the stuff that we named it to us. The date of the shoot was the most important because, as you event photographers, that's really quickly. The date is, yeah, pretty crucial. And if you're a one shooter studio, that is most likely. If it's a wedding, it's primarily for most of us. It's the only wedding you're gonna shoot on that day. You should more than one wedding a day hats off to you, and that's how it sorts. So I mean, putting everything in a date format makes it sort automatically in a final system. So we start with the date, and we obviously we start with the we go year, month, day, year, month, day, right, and we're in this particular example. We're not using spaces in between. Those things were just using dashes number, underscore dashes or underscores that most modern file systems. This is not a huge deal. You could have spaces if you want. We thought visually hyphen between each just was easier to quickly identify in a list of files. So the next section that we have in here after the date you see here is called W E. D. On the slide. The It's an abbreviation for the shoot. It's an abbreviation for what kind of shoot it is. So if you shoot a wedding and engagement session portrait travel photography. If it's a personal project, we thought it would be important to identify quickly. What kind of shoot that ISS. So you may have the same client reshooting engagement session, a portrait session and a wedding, and you need to know which ones are which kinds of shoots. So we came up with this identify, and we're only using three letters just to keep it short, because we can't tie about this huge long description of what kind of shoot it is on then. After that, the name in this case, the example. Thompson is unidentifiable name from the shoot. It could be the bride's last name. The groom's last name. The family name. If it's a family, shoot the name of the client. If it's boudoir, whatever it is that you're doing a client name that you'll remember. But keep it short. This is the key, because you could do you know Meghan and John Thompson, right? It would just be really long. So unless unless you're in a if you happen to be in a country or culture where there's like a lot of the same name, then you might want to consider adding, like a couple of initials or something like that. But for most of us in America, we probably don't encounter the same last name that frequently. But as you go from left to right through the naming convention, you realize that when you look at the date, the type of shoot and then the name, that has to be unique because the odds of you shooting two weddings of the same last name on the same day pretty low. So that's why we sort him in that particular order. And then that's why in the sub folders all follow that same naming convention. The rest of the stuff at the end is really just an identification of what type of file is in the sub folder. So raws tiffs. J pegs that sort of thing. Hopefully, I think it's probably gonna come up online importing my photos in tow light room. I get the 1st 3 naming conventions that you did, but I don't yet know what the rejecting the master in a proxy. I don't even know what that what property means. Good question. We're actually gonna cover. There's a reason why you see, is what you're gonna get excited about. Yeah, but you're changing these names after the initial light room. No, you're building these first. This is before you, even in just your cards, because you wanna have this consistent All of these folders consistently named said that when you get to the next step, it's all there for you. That makes sense, right? Yes. Well, you're gonna answer my question. We're gonna get to I know what you're gonna ask you this is part of like step one workflow, actually, of build project holders. This was more of a coverage of, like, naming convention and having to try to keep people consistently on track. Yeah. Yeah, just this might help clarify, because you were talking about folder naming, but it kind of isn't on this. Someone make sure people understand what we're talking about. For most of this is names of folders, folders, these air folder names. Absolutely. When you first import because I follow something really similar to this where I will have holders very similarly place when you first import or item. Are you changing the actual file them to follow the same convention you're getting there? Yeah, there is this. There is this concept in light room of importing to build the structure versus building the structure and importing into that structure. So we do the ladder. That's a wolf will. Definitely. Okay, so to really your question was spot on with the Internet bythe exactly the same as everyone else is under the filing. Mean that we're doing right now is the actual folders that you are putting the images in there, not the actual image naming right we're setting them up ahead of time because it just saves time, and it has it there for you. So you don't have to stop what you're doing and try to build a new folder. Okay, great. Thanks for clarifying that. Everyone is very excited. There's lots of questions coming through, but I know you have a slide for that covering up. Let's get back to the content. And when we get to ingests and calling, I'm gonna talk a little bit about this again. So kind of go back to where you would start. We wanted to lay up a little bit of the naming convention stuff before we got to the actual. So people stick with us through the like foundation hyperspeed on you will be rewarded and just a little bit thought this creates a speed demon machine. So we were going through what you use these storage devices for, obviously the long term keeping copy of everything. Long term, you're not working off of it. So in this environment, you can do a couple different things like Jen mentioned. You can use that kind of middle tier storage to in just in coal. You don't need a lot of high performance, you know, characteristics of your drive. You just need enough space to put it. If you're not gonna work on it right away, you move into long term storage so it doesn't crowd. You're working, drive and take up space. So it again you can If you're gonna move like work on it immediately, you can move it to that fast working drive. But as long as you understand that it's all eventually migrating back to the long term storage as its final home. So the basic flow is from from left right now, these thes three tiers of storage, this is literally what they look like. You know, two of those drives were sitting in our workstation the fast working drive in that middle to your hard drive. They are in our actual computer there. They're part of that device. So and John installed my SSD and I can tell you everything is tightly crammed in there. Yeah, here's my recommendation. When you buy an I, Mac, have them put the SST or get John to do it for you because it's fun to watch, so the flow is left to right. Everything is It's getting worked on the fast drive, backed up to the middle drive and stays on the long term drive. And it's it's a cycle. It's this constant repeating cycle, and the reason we're doing this is what happens if what happens if the fast working drive that you do all of your daily work on dies. This has happened to us. We've had every failure you could possibly think of with our equipment. We lost a primary working, driving one of our work stations. It went down, but it's OK because we had a daily backup on her middle tier, and then we had a backup on a long term storage. So not only did we not lose the data, but we didn't even lose any work. What is pretty amazing when it's like June and your your stacked up? Not losing a day of work is really helpful. And actually, if you if you really want to get, we might have lost a couple hours of work because we back up twice daily. At the time it failed, Maybe a couple hours of work was lost. Really. What we lost was just a time in getting the crazy thing replaced. So that was the only annoyance factor was just having to deal with getting it fixed. But no data lost. New customers lost their photos the business carried on. So in a worst case scenario, what happens if the entire workstation goes the Max? Sad thing again, This'll again has happened to me, um, two weeks ago. Yeah. I'm the proud owner of a brand new I mac because of this. So if the entire workstation fails, it's OK, because your long term storage devices a physically separate device holding all of your stuff ending your Yeah, the most you could lose is a day. And that would be if you caught it like right before the back up on your computer failed them, most likely just a couple of hours, right? But keep up with your backups. Set the software schedule it, set it up, let it run, and you won't have these issues. And again, like we said, we use currently sink on the Mac. There's other options on the PC. Set it and forget it. Exactly.