No room at the inn

I was uploading pictures to my iMac from my camera when I got a warning from Aperture that my computer was running out of space and that if I didn’t do something immediately to advert catastrophe, my library would be corrupted. Well, ok, the message wasn’t that dire, but I was still out of space.

I just don’t have the room on my iMac to hold all the data I want there. I was storing it there, then time machine was making a copy on it’s external drive, then I had two other external drives that I would sync with my pictures (not often enough) and finally I would send my pictures to the NAS so they would be available to anyone on the network. Well, this just isn’t working anymore, and frankly, creates too many copies of my images.

I am now in the process of moving all my images off my computer, to use the two external drives (seagate free agent’s) to hold all my pictures as referenced images. They were already referenced images on the iMac within Aperture. Now, I will have no images (just the library and it’s previews) on my desktop. I will still need to create a strategy to sync my images to the other drive. Maybe just using rsync.

This will also stop all the images going over to the time machine drive. Then we just have the NAS. I have a problem with this. The original idea was that all the images in the house would exist here so that anyone could see them. The problem with this is that I am now shooting in RAW (or will again once apple updates the RAW converter for the D90). No one else can see them easily. The only ones I really need over there, that anyone else wants, is pictures of the kids. Right now I am thinking of creating an action that takes the images that are rated 3+, getting jpegs, and sending those over. That would be less space. If I did end up loosing the originals, I would still have those jpegs.

The last thing that I am mulling over is off site storage. I have that now by rotating the two free agent drives, and I will continue to do that, but still. I am thinking about some online service to put the photo’s. But not all of them. Just my real keepers. I only get a couple a week, so that shouldn’t cost too much. I can’t use flickr, because I would like to put the raw file up there. I am thinking about Amazon’s S3 network, but I am not sure how convenient that will be yet.

Ah well, that part can wait I suppose.