Life with 31,000 photos

A few of you emailed me about how I store my photos. Over the last few years, I've tried everything to store them, manage them, and share them. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about because I viewed my photos as the most important thing on my computer.

I realized a while ago that storing photos digitally is challenging because 40 years from now I will want to see them. Think about it, it means my photos will last longer:

• Than the JPEG standard (at least this version)
  
• Than the operating system I use (unless the MSFT domaninace continues - which I hope isn't true)
  
• Than the software I use to manage it
  
• Than the hosting provider I use to share them.
  

I haven't figured out how to solve all of these, but here are the choices I've made through trial and error:

Hardware

I spent a lot of time and money on firewire and USB 2.0 external drives but frankly they tend to crash from time to time. I also found I was spending a lot of time copying photos from my Mac to the drives each week to make sure I always had a backup. So recently I went to a new Raid 5 based system. I have 50 GB of photos and 600 GB of home movies. In my coat closet, which I converted to a server room, I have:

• Apple G5 2.0 GHZ dual processor with 3 GB of RAM and 300 GB HD
  
• Sony P4 2.8 GHZ with 1 GB of RAM and 200 GB HD
  
• Two Infrant Raid 5 SATA 1 TB Network Attached Storage with Gige port
  
• Cable modem and Vonage connected to Gigabit switches
  
• Belkin UPS at the bottom
  

Software

Like most high volume photo users I am not satisifed with any of the programs out there. I currently use iPhoto on the MAC. It is okay, but I don't like how it reorganizes my photos into it's own directory structure. I don't like how slow it is. I don't like how it doesn't really remove duplicates. So today I also maintain a copy of all of my photos in folders on my Infrant server so later I can move to another program if I need to.

Process

Today I load all of the photos into iPhoto from the camera via a USB cable. Once a week I copy the photos to the Raid. Vijay and I share the photos either via my .mac account or via email. I use .Mac because it is easy to publish from iPhoto, but I hate my photos are shown so small and that .mac photo pages can only have 48 photos per album (which is just ridiculous). Email is okay to share, but usually my family members see the photos and email me back asking me to give them all of the photos I have of them, but of course I can't find them all and even if I could I can't easily give them all of the photos (either on the web or via email).