ImageIngesterPro Workflow Diagram
Marc Rochkind has posted a wonderful article titled How to Back Up Your Personal Computer. I feel this is a must read for everyone who uses a computer. I’ve heard way too many stories of people losing all of their data for one reason or another. Very few users have bullet proof backup strategies, because it is more complex than most users know.
Marc is also the developer behind three very useful programs for managing image files: ImageIngester, Image Verifier, ImageReporter and SpanBurner. I’m using ImageIngester Pro and ImageVerifier, which together will cost you only $40. ImageIngester is saving us a ton of time processing files and Image Verifier is finding corruption in some of my early image files.
Marc is also very active on The DAM Forum which is Peter Krogh’s very educational Digital Asset Management forum.
It’s a shame to make a wonderful digital image and lose it. The pictures that I’ve missed or lost for one reason or another haunt me, so I have a healthy fear for the safety of every image I make. They say, “there are two kind of computer users, those who have lost data and those who WILL loose data.” At this point it’s probably more like those who have lost data and those who will loose data again, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Please post some comments on interesting ways you’ve lost data: Our most recent loss of data was from opening tiff files using Adobe Camera Raw(ACR) then saving them after adjustments. ACR opened these 17Megapixel files in 2.8Megapixel size, then we saved over the large files. We had to start over from the RAW files; two days of work down the drain.
An important part of photography technology these days is the media on which you store and access your images. Although some photographers are diehard DVD burners, I primarily archive my images on hard drives. I only use DVD’s for delivery; everything else is on hard drives in triplicate. I do get a lot of questions about hard drives, so I’ll answer them in this thorough post on hard drive technologies.
Solid-State drives are definitely the future. On a Solid-State drive Flash memory is used instead of, or in addition to a spinning disc. There are some hybrid 2.5” notebook drives coming on the market that have built-in flash memory. There are also notebooks being developed that run off of flash memory instead of a spinning hard drive. Vista has a feature called Ready Drive that allows the use of flash memory to speed up the system. The windows OS caches lots of data on the flash memory and accesses it from there instead of from a slower spinning drive. This also saves some battery life. I’m testing an Express 54 Card reader with a compact flash card set up with Ready Drive on my M-Tech laptop.
SIZE
Hard drive technology seems to be out pacing file size. Moore’s Law so far appears to still be in effect for drives, but not file size. I don’t fill up a new drive as fast as I used to. I’m more likely to be replacing them for faster drives before they fill up.
SPEED
Drive speed hasn’t dramatically increased in the way other components have. An old IDE ATA 100 drive from 1995 isn’t really that much slower than today’s top drives and a 1995 SCSI drive isn’t that much slower than today’s top Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. There have been plenty of great improvements but amazingly speed just hasn’t been that huge. It may not be physically feasible to have rpm speeds faster than 15k and still be reliable enough to work for at least 3-4 years. This is where solid state flash drives may have an advantage in the future.
PRICE
Storage space doesn’t cost what it used to, so we need to change the way we think about purchasing it. Traditionally it was wise to only purchase as much space as you needed for a short time. I don’t see it that way when it’s only $0.20 per gigabyte. It’s best to buy more than enough space to last 3-4 years. The time it takes to migrate your data to a bigger drive is more valuable than the cost of the drive as this can be time consuming and stressful. You do want to replace those drives after 4-5 years of use because they wear out over time.
Read more…
The Axiotron ModBook is a MacBook converted into a Tablet. I’ve been looking into the Vista tablets and have my sites set on a Lenovo Thinkpad X61. Now Mac users have a tablet option as well. Rumors about Mac Tablets have been floating around for years; this one is real. On a Mac your getting the same functionality as you would with a Wacom tablet, including 512 levels of pressure. There arn’t a lot of specialized applications built for a Mac tablet, but OS X has plenty built in. Inkwell, or simply Ink, is the name of the handwriting recognition technology built into OS X. It’s based on the 1990s Apple Newton MessagePad. Apple has had handwriting technology around since 1993. It’s amazing that this is the first Mac tablet
The ModBook also has an Optional GPS module which uses standard protocols, so it will work with a variety of GPS programs.
If you want to run Windows on a ModBook, you can use bootcamp.
There is a lot to like about this first Mac tablet and I’m sure you can expect tablets from Apple very soon.
B&H is an excellent place to purchase digital photography and Video equipment. They have it all!