Don't Lose Your Photos! My Travel Backup & Workflow

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here this time around i want to talk about my strategy for backing up and keeping my images safe on the road and how i get them from the road from the field all the way back home to my computer so the first thing we have to think about are the devices that we're going to use to make that happen now there's a variety of choices out there personally i like using a laptop and i have either two or three external hard drives that i back my images up to now whether it's two or three all depends on the quality of the trip i guess if you want to think of it like that if i'm on a trip that's kind of a once in a lifetime trip you can bet i'm gonna have three external hard drives and i'm backing up to all of them if i'm on a short trip to a national park i'll probably just take two so the big question is what kind of drive do you use because there's a variety of different options out there obviously have the big spinning ones the ones that are about like this and they have a spinning platter in there and the problem is those are really susceptible to breakage i've had several workshop participants accidentally drop those drives from very short distances and they are completely toast after that they just don't work all those images completely gone here's what i use i use these little samsung t5 ssds this is a solid state drive i don't care if you get samsung or somebody else these go up to two terabyte but they're very durable there's no moving parts i can drop that without fear that i just wrecked that drive there's no way the drive is just fine i've dropped them multiple times on much harder surfaces than my lawn let me grab this real quick they work out great they're very durable and i've never had one fail now that doesn't mean they're infallible that's why i use multiple copies but they do work really well now they are more expensive than the other ones but you have to ask yourself you know what are my images worth you know if you want to take a chance on a cheap 50 drive then i guess go for it but these are more expensive but they'll outlast them and they're much more durable the other nice thing about these is that they're faster than your typical spinning drive your data transfer from your card over to your hard drives is going to be much quicker and if you're in a crunch for time which a lot of times does happen on photo trips it's nice to be able to get lots of data from your memory card onto these little drives very rapidly the third thing i like about these guys is their size as you notice they're not very big at all they're roughly the size of a credit card just thicker and they're very very pocketable i could keep one on my person at all times which kind of leads me to my next point you want to keep your drives separate at all times and you don't want your drives and with other valuable items so let's talk about that a little if you have two drives three drives they should not be anywhere near each other you don't want somebody to be able to break in your car or into your hotel room grab one item and have all of your stuff all of your images when they do so so usually what i do is i have one of these in a zippered pocket on my person when i'm out and about and then i have another one locked in a hotel safe or someplace kind of tucked away in my car somewhere if i'm on the road just you know doing a road trip so just make sure no matter what you do and no matter how many of these you're using they are all separate from each other so if you do have a break-in or something you're not going to lose all your data the thing is the way i look at it all my equipment is insured if someone steals my gear i'll get new gear if they steal my photos i don't have them anymore so let's talk about exactly how i back up to these when i'm on the road so we're going to take a look on my laptop right now i'm going to give you a quick little simulation of how i do this i'm going to use lightroom for the demonstration and then we'll take it from there okay so here we are looking at my laptop and as you can see the t51 and t52 drives are already attached as is the memory card for my camera in this case the sony a92 and i just have some kind of random mediocre photos on there for us to work with it'll it'll serve our purpose so let me show you how i would do this i'm going to show you two different ways to handle your backups the first way is just a very simple backup if you just want to back your images up to your drives and you're not real concerned about looking at them right now in your raw editor and i know a lot of people like to do that personally i like to look at things in lightroom so i would import into lightroom and back up from there but i'll show you that in just a moment for right now let's say that you were out shooting and you popped your memory card into your computer and you're ready to back up those images so i'm going to hit t51 just double click it and open it up and i'm going to create a new folder here so you can right click and go new folder or you can do it from the little action menu up here and if you're in windows i'm sure there's a very similar thing for creating a new folder there and i know in windows you can also right click so i'm going to rename this to i'm going to call it costa rica just cr my computer's set to auto fill that in and then i'm going to put a folder inside of this one for the date of the images so i'm going to double click this action new folder and i'm going to call this one these were back in july on the 25th i believe so we'll do that july 25th you can put 2021 after that if you want doesn't really matter whatever works for you so what i'm going to do is i'm going to open this folder up and i'm just going to take the images it's under dcim and under that other folder there most cameras are going to be similar to this and once i dig down to where my raw files are on my memory card i'm going to hit command or control a depending on whether i'm using a windows or mac machine i'm just going to drag these right over into that july 25th folder that'll only take a second because there's not too many of them and at this point i might spot check a few of these just give them a double click see what opens up make sure it looks like that your files are loading and usually just one or two is enough just to verify that you do indeed have your files there and that they are working and that they were copied successfully so right now we have costa rica and if i dig down you can see i have the july 25th as i went and shot more days like the 26 27 28 i would add folders to this and put my images from those dates in those folders now as far as backup this is really really easy when i initially do this with this first folder here i'm just going to go to t52 and i'm just going to drag the whole thing over and it's going to copy it and i'm going to have costa rica and july 25th if i had july 26th in here the next day i would just grab the july 26 folder drag it over here and so on so forth so then i have two copies of everything and again if i was on like a once in a lifetime trip i'd plug a third drive in there and i'd copy one more time just to make sure that i had it however most of the time that's not how i work most of the time i'm going to use lightroom because i want to do a little image culling and maybe a little bit of editing even when i'm on the road that i can then use back of my computer back home but i want it all to stick i obviously don't want to do a bunch of editing on the road and then go back to my home computer and have to start all over so let me show you exactly how that works it's actually pretty easy lightroom has a pretty nice function built right in for it okay so this time around i want to show you the actual workflow i use because i use lightroom within my storage and backup workflow and i want to show you how that all kind of comes together because i think it's a more efficient way of doing it you can kill a couple of birds with one stone so the first thing we want to do is fire up lightroom and on my computer it's going to generate an error message and it says the lightroom catalog was not found that's because i usually keep it on my primary external hard drive which is this t51 drive right here and i realize that you probably have yours on your laptop's hard drive and i'll show you how to deal with that in just a moment but we really want to have our catalog and our images on an external drive and the reason for that is it makes it a heck of a lot easier when we get home to merge our catalog and our trip photos with our primary catalog on our primary computer on our primary drive back home so in this case i just need to make a new catalog so i'm going to click choose a different catalog and then create a new catalog right here and that will allow me to do it i'm going to just pick my drive from the list here in this case it was t51 it was already selected which is fine but just select whichever external hard drive is your primary one and i'm just going to name it lightroom cat it really doesn't matter because it's a temporary catalog that we're just using for this trip hit create and lightroom will fire up now i realize you may have a catalog on your laptop and lightroom you know kind of fires up and just goes straight to that and again we don't want to do that we want to now have our catalogs on our primary external drive so if that describes your situation and lightroom just fires up without any error messages there go to file new catalog and then create a new catalog on your primary external drive just like we did before i would just type in lightroom dash cad up here make sure t5 one in my case is selected and it would create it here since we already have it going to cancel out but that's how you that's how you do it so next we need to do some importing so i'm going to click the import button and as you can see lightroom found all of my rather mediocre yellow crown heron shots and what i want to do is i want to copy these over so that's selected over here and what i want to do over here on the file handling panel is normally lightroom is only going to copy it to the t5 onedrive and it's going to put it down here where i tell it to but the thing is i also want to make a second copy and there just so happens to be an option for make a second copy two right here if we give that a click and then click this little line right down here it will give us an option to pick where we want to back our information up to so in this case again it is the t52 drive that's my secondary drive and again here's gonna be called something else but this is my secondary ssd drive i'm gonna choose that and that's all i'm gonna do i'm not gonna make any folders or anything like that because lightroom will make folders by date and just dump the raw files right in there it doesn't even if you convert to dng it only dumps the raw files it's a straight copy from your memory card there's no catalog there there's nothing it just makes those straight copies right over there for you so i'm going to go down to file renaming real quick just put cr and give that close out i just want the cr there i have a little template that i've created for my file names down here and by the way if you would like to learn more about not just the import dialog box and all the different settings and options that you have here but the entire lightroom library module make sure you check out my video workshop for the lightroom library module it is 10 hours of tips tricks and workflow techniques that it's really going to change your life you're going to stop struggling with lightroom stop struggling with a catalog and you're going to understand how to do everything you're going to be a lightroom wizard before you know it so make sure you check that out and you'll learn every little detail of every little piece of both the import dialog box here and of course the library module itself but anyhow let's move on to the destination panel down here and this is pretty default looking here for lightroom basically it wants to do it by date it wants to put it on your hard drive your laptop hard drive the apple hard drive here in this case so what i want to do and just close the apple hard drive up there and what i want to do though is i want it just into a single folder the way i organize my photo trips is on my main computer back home i have a primary folder for the year for 2020 2021 there'll be one for 2022 etc and under that folder i put all of the different trips with just a single name so in this case it's going to be costa rica so in order to do that the first thing we want to do is organize into one folder like so and then we want to click this little plus right here and create a new folder and what we're going to do is we're going to tell it to put it on the t5 onedrive so that's my primary external hard drive and what i'm going to do is just put new folder in costa rica and create and then i'm going to click choose and if you notice this is where the images are going to go these images here are going to go over to this costa rica folder right here when i click the import button but it's not just going to go there they're also going to go because we set this over to our t52 drive so we're going to have a second copy of them over there so very very cool i'm going to click import and let it do its thing and there we go so let me minimize this and let's take a quick look at what we have we have our costa rica folder this is the t51 this is my primary external hard drive and you can see i have all my costa rica images there now if i go to the t52 drive you'll see that lightroom has created a folder just imported on august 6. that happens to be when i'm doing this part of the video and if i give that a down click i can see all my raw files are there as well of course it never hurts to spot check stuff like this just to make sure it's all there you know check file sizes and things like that but anyhow if i wanted to put it on a third drive i would just plug the third drive in and i would grab this folder right here and just drag it over to the third drive very easily and then i would have a third copy of my images so we close these out and the real big advantage of doing it like this is that if i go into the develop module and i make some changes to some of these images and in fact i'll do that off screen here so that we don't take a lot of time doing it but when i make these changes anything i do here on the laptop because i'm going to merge this catalog with the one at home anything i do in this catalog is going to transfer over so any flagging any cropping any exposure adjustments everything is going to transfer it's really really handy is a great way to manage your workflow when you're on the road you get some of the stuff done on the road and then you can bring it back home and all that stuff is still there when you import it into your primary catalog very handy okay so now let's say you're back home and you have all of your photos backed up under your little drives and now it's time to merge them with your main catalog in this case again i'm going to use lightroom for the example but i'm sure other raw processing software has similar methods for you to merge catalogs and put images from one place to another so let's take a look at that okay so you're back home you plug your external hard drive that you were using on your laptop as your main drive in my case that's the t51 drive you can of course call it whatever you like i have that plugged in and what i want to do is i want to merge that catalog in all my trip photos with this catalog this is my primary lightroom catalog that you're looking at right now all of my images are in here and i want to merge those trip photos with this so how do we do it it's actually pretty easy we go to the file menu and import from another catalog is the selection we're looking for give that a click a little dialog box will come up and we simply drill down to wherever our catalog is so here's the t51 drive lightroom catalog it's going to be under that folder and there it is the lr cat file is the one we're looking for we're going to hit choose and a little import from catalog dialog box is going to come up and there's a few things here the first is what folders do we want to import if we had multiple folders from our trip we would have a little list of them here that we could check or uncheck i only have one folder costa rica folder and it is checked so just make sure that that's checked next we go down to file handling and we need to either copy new photos to a new location and import or add new photos to the catalog without moving in this case we're going to do the copy new photos to a new location and import them because we want to move them off of that hard drive if you want to leave them on your hard drive you can do so just do the add new photos catalog without moving the other option is you can do the add new catalog to photos without moving option up here and then you can later drag and drop them from whatever drive they're on to your main hard drive here so that's easy enough so right what i'm going to do is i'm going to just use the copy new photos to a new location import i think it's the easiest one to show you and then i need to just pick that import where is it going to copy these images too so i'm going to choose so what i'm going to do is i have an external drive called photos this is a big raid drive i'm going to give that a double click and i keep all of my images for each year under that year's folder in this case i have a 2021 folder with it that has a bunch of different options under here i'm going to give that a double click and you can see we have all of these different folders under that 2021. i'm going to actually create a new folder in this case because this is just a demo so i'm going to call it costa rica demo and hit create and then i'm going to hit choose making sure that that's the one that's selected and lightroom is going to take all of the images from that catalog from our road trip catalog and it's going to put them into this costa rica demo folder so i'm going to choose and that's all we need to do at this point and import there it goes and there are the images so if we go down to the photos hard drive right here and i do a little bit of drilling down i can find my 2021s way down here and sure enough there is a costa rica demo folder that has all of these images in it if i go just to this other one you can see it's different images so it's all here and as you can see i made some wild edits on this one's really really bright and i think i have another one here if we look some of these are flagged there's a five star rating here those were all done on the laptop and they carried over all those edits all the tagging anything that you do in the other catalog will transfer over and you'll be able to save those edits which is really really great when you're on the road you have some time to kill you can do some culling you can do some editing and some flagging whatever you like and all that information is going to be there when you get home and you merge those catalogs together it's super handy so there you have it that's my system and it's worked really well for me over the last few years i used to keep stuff right on the laptop's hard drive but as my file sizes and my frame rates continue to climb it gets harder and harder to do that i'm just producing so much data right now so these little external hard drives work really well and as you can see it's not a very complicated process to bring it all together and have your stuff on the road go into your lightroom catalog and have all your edits everything you did while you were on the road is all right there so it's really really handy and by the way if you're a lightroom user make sure you check out my library module video workshop it's over 10 hours of workflow tips and techniques and by the time you're done with this you're going to be so much more efficient in lightroom it's going to blow your mind so many people struggle with lightroom's library module they don't know how to import properly they don't know how to get the most from all the different keyword management stuff and the collections and all that good stuff that you find in the library module i have 10 hours of video that's going to show you everything you need to do very easy to follow along you can see everything step by step by the time you're done with it you're going to be an expert in the lightroom library module and you're going to be able to find any photo you want anytime you want it's going to make life so much easier for you i hope you'll check it out and of course make sure you also stop by my site sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss any of these videos any of my articles or any of my workshop opportunities and finally make sure you like subscribe and get notified thanks so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 20,186

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, photo backup, travel photo backup, backing up photos on the road, backing up photos on vacation, photo travel backup, travel photo workflow, Lightroom merging catalogs, keeping photos backed up when traveling, workshop photo backup, safari photo backup, travel photo security

Id: 0uX0ca3VuvM

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021