Image Storage

For some time I have been using iView media and remote file storage on a remote hard drive. After converting to a fully raw work flow I have been looking at LR and also aperture. Are you guys keeping the raw files in the catalogue of LR and aperture or do you just use it for conversions.

Im confused as to the best method. When I develop a raw file and then finish in PS I just seem to end up with loads of large files all mixed with the raws.

Any advice!!

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I keep my raw files in one folder (after breaking
it down by Location->Date. Then I have a folder for tifs and whatever else.

For example...

Florida
---4/12/07
----Raw
----Tif
---4/13/07
----Raw
---Tif

This way I know that if I want to go back and look at a raw file
while looking at a tif file that came out of 4/13/07, I know exactly
what folder its in.

Doug

I keep a reference to my files is Lightroom, and the actual files in two separate hard drives, duplicating.

At the moment, I keep all my RAW files in LR with a Purple color label (the only one that doesn't have a number hot key).

I also back them up to a second HD on import.

When I process a file I stack it with the original (new version on top of the stack).

I Have auto backup of my main image folder and the disk with the RAW backups as well as Time Machine set to backup everything to a 4TB concatenated array.

I've been starting the conversion to LightRoom and keep files stored on multiple hard drives and servers.

Steve,
I'm using Lightroom for everything that I used to use iView / Expression Media for. However, I'm still using Expression Media for my older files (that have already been cataloged with it). So all my digital files from 2003-2007 are in Expression Media, and everything 2008-forward will be in Lightroom. The advantage of a program like Lightroom (and I assume Aperture works the same way, but I have very little experience with it outside of fiddling at an Apple Store ;)) is that you can accomplish your RAW conversions and your Digital-Asset-Management all in one program. With iView, I was editing in Bridge (via Camera RAW) and then converting to DNG before importing into iView for DAM-associated tasks.

I store all of my images on an external hard drive. Then I use Lightroom to import the images. I use the option where Lightroom creates copies of the original images, and have those copies stored on another external hard drive. I never discard images from the first external drive as I am worried I might regret it later. I only discard images from the drive that holds the copies. I don't store the copies on the hard disk of my laptop, because I would probably run out of space much too soon.

I have 4 external drives with identical copies. I use one more internal to dump everything and edit from there. After I'm done choosing the keepers I put a copy in ever external drive. I don't convert anything to TIFF until I'm ready to print.

I have two RAID 1 configurations set up in my machine and a couple of externals as well. I use SYNCTOY to manage copying each file to all drives.