How Do You Manage Your SD Card Library? 485
txmadman writes "Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant storage, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose SD card was whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
Horde! (Score:5, Interesting)
I horde my digital media! People. Do. Not. Touch. My. Stuff.
Family members taking personal responsibility to know what is theirs and where it is is the only solution. There is no technological substitute for plain-old responsible living.
Putting labels on cards if they know they'll forget is part of that. Putting their things in their specific corners of the shared domicile are manditory. I infest my bedroom and my computer desk. My dad inhabits his desk of the study and his side of the master bedroom. My brother floats between the sofa, the piano, and his room. My mom Supremely Controls the rest of the house, and of course has jurisidiction as to the aesthetics of everyone else's little corners.
Do what you (hopefully) learned in kindergarten! Put things back where you found them! Develop habits! My keys always go with my wallet and phone and PDA on the articulating arm base of my computer monitor. I never wonder where they are: they're either on me, where they belong, or stolen.
Life is very simple when you take responsibility. It's all black and white, easy to differentiate, and on the whole much more pleasant.
Treat Them as Garbage! (Score:5, Interesting)
Treat your SD cards as garbage! No kidding!
You do this by using a hard disk copy as the "master", and copying to and from SD, considering that the SD is always "ephemeral", and may get bent, may pop out of the device and be stepped on and lost, etc. So, it is never the host for any critical data for very long.
And you make darned sure to back up the disk. These days my short-term backup medium is a couple of 1G or larger SATA disks, which I place in a front-loading holder and put in the fire safe after they're written. Long-term backup media is currently DVD, but will probably go to Blu-Ray when the media gets cheap enough. Some of these are stored in a relative's closet, because having all of your backups in one building is stupid.
Bruce
Dump to disk (Score:4, Interesting)
Dump them to hard disk, RAID array, what not; then threat the physical media as transient and/or a backup.
That way you can also index electronically and what not.
Re:Labels (Score:1, Interesting)
considering the price of a SD card being around 6 euros for 4gb's at most big electronic stores...
and it's flash so won't break like a harddrive :)
Re:Labels (Score:5, Interesting)
He needs to have a number of cards at his immediate use at all times. Large high-resolution raw-format images are big no matter how you spin it, and the prospect of loosing an expensive card (well, probably less expensive now, but rewind five years and let the horror set in) isn't good.
When you're at a shoot, "oops, I somehow managed to grab ten cards, five of which were full" is inexcusable.
He organizes it by keeping track, putting things in consistent places, eg. full cards in need of download to the computer go in one place, cards that have been downloaded to the computer can be put in another place.
Simple habits can fix most problems of organization.
He needs so many cards because sometimes he doesn't have time to process photos between shoots, and there isn't always time to stop by the store to buy more, either.
And yes, he archives all data to hard disks and what not. Keeping it on flimsy cards that can easily get deleted by a camera's "clear card" function is a horrifying way to loose your customer's data.
While not always avoidable, try to keep critical data off cards. We've all seen photos of cell phones with address books in toilets or the fabled $2,000 latte. Do you really want to be the next /. headline "I lost my SD card in the wash and there was data on it I didn't have replicated - can you suggest any good recovery techniques, or am I basically screwed?"
Re:Altoids tin (Score:4, Interesting)
I use a 35mm film canister for the SD cards I use for photography.
Re:Labels (Score:4, Interesting)
One of his largest client bases are public schools which pay to have pictures taken of all the kids for the student ID cards.
For some of the larger schools, you're looking at 2,000 kids, and you want a minimum of four to six good photos of each kid. 2,000 times 4 is 8,000 photos.
Granted, he brings computers and other equipment on those shoots and sets them up on-site (with cool card-printing machines and stuff) but the point is that if he's far away from his studio, he can't go running back to get more cards, and stores don't reliably have cards in stock. The best way is to have many of them on hand. If you're away from studio, you may shoot many different events before going back to process the images, filter out the bad shots, touch up the color (he's a color freak - subtle things that I can't even begin to pick up bug the snot out of him) and do other things.
If he's out of state (not uncommon) the dangers of being caught unprepared where your professional reputation is on the line are catastrophic. And how does he manage all these little cards?
Simple habits that scale from managing a house of 10 flash cards to photo studios with hundreds.
So grab your family, their memory cards, and a sharpie, and establish a system and good habits of keeping track of your things. Nothing is cheaper, and nothing is more effective.
Re:Labels (Score:2, Interesting)
...and it's flash, so you can't rely on it like a hard drive!
SD card wallets (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one.
Be the first on your block. Start a trend.
If the label is blank it's empty (Score:4, Interesting)
Back when a 20MB hard drive was still a big capacity and everyone had zillions of floppy disks to manage I had a teacher give me a piece of advice I still live by:
If the disk contents aren't important enough to justify the tiny effort of labeling the disk then treat the disk as if it is blank.
Saves a lot of hand wringing about whether the files on the disk are important. If it wasn't important enough to take the very simple measure of writing a brief description of the contents of then you probably didn't need the contents anyway. If by some chance you did need the contents your organizational skills/system suck and you deserve the consequences.
The problem should never be organizing SD cards however. The problem should be organizing and backing up the photos once you have downloaded the contents to your PC. Even if a photographer has 30+ SD (or equivalent) cards with him for a shoot, the contents should not remain on those cards for long after the shoot is done.
Re:Treat Them as Garbage! (Score:2, Interesting)
Im sorry, I cant see using DVDs as reliable long term backup.
I have yet to buy a pack of DVDs that last longer than a couple months, even at slower burning speeds.
The dvds from the last 100 pack I bought only last a week or two at the most, but I guess thats what you get for buying the cheapest ones you see.
I doubt blank blue ray media will be any more reliable.
And lets face it, burning 58GB of data will take far too long to do, especially if you have to burn at 2x or 4x speed to retain reliability like in the case of blank DVDs
Label them electronically? (there is space inside) (Score:2, Interesting)
SD / SDHC limits (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Labels (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the fact that the purpose of an ID card is to identify someone. Altering their appearance in the photo kind of defeats that purpose.
I use Photoshop mostly to make levels adjustments and such to improve the quality of the photo, not change the way a person looks. If the subject of an otherwise good shot has a booger in his nose, or some other "temporary" feature that would embarrass them, I'll touch it up, but other than that I leave it alone. I like to say that I use Photoshop to fix my mistakes, not God's.
Re:Fire safe won't do much (Score:2, Interesting)
I always thought people should install fire safes outside.
Seriously. It's a safe. As long as it is actually secured to the ground via some means, no one should be able to get in. At least not without explosives, and if they're willing to do that, duh, they'd be willing to break some windows to get in, or take a chainsaw to the front door.
Install it on, or under, your backporch. And you don't have to worry about 'how long' the fire will last. It might get somewhat hot, but obviously not as much as inside the house, and in a fire, the porch obviously goes out fairly quickly when firefighters show up.
And, as you pointed out, you can actually get to it after the fire.