Over the last few weeks I have spent some time getting my photographs organized and backed up. Previously they were scattered across multiple iPads, Macs and backed up with a variety of different ad hoc systems.
My latest system is a combination of some ideas I’ve picked up from my friend Johnny and also reading Art Chang’s post on this subject. Thank you both.
I use Adobe Lightroom is organize my entire photo collection. The Adobe Lightroom Catalog and all photos are now stored on this 1TB Samsung SSD.
This little SSD is a true wonder. It’s super light, is less than ½ the size of an iPhone 6 and runs off USB. I haven’t had any performance issues with this setup.
One note: out of the box this drive requires some custom Samsung drivers that will be installed on your Mac if you want to use their encryption. Encryption makes sense in case you lose this SSD and want to protect your data. For reasons I won’t get into right now, I didn’t install the Samsung drivers and ended up erasing my SSD with Apple Disk Utility before using it.
With my Lightroom Catalog and all photos on this highly portable SSD, I can access my entire library on any computer which is really nice.
Like Art, I back up the SSD to a Synology NAS with Apple Time Machine and I use Crashplan for remote backup. I’m am also in the process of uploading all photos into Dropbox so I can get fast access to my photos in case my SSD and Synology NAS somehow fail at the same time since a remote restore from Crashplan would likely be quite slow.
I realize this system is far from the system that Apple iCloud and Google Photos is pushing. Those are fine products but they are really suited towards digital & mobile photographers and for better or worse that really isn’t me.
The biggest flaw with my current system is that there is no way to easily access photos taken by other family members.
To be continued.