Organising photos and videos

[rocknrollstar]

Hi,

 

I'm carrying out a little spring cleanning on our file system. We have a single teacher account, which works well, although ends up having a large folder containing lots of folders. We take a lot of photos and videos.

 

I am wondering how others organise photos and videos, so they are accessible and searchable, but also don't take up a ridiculous amount of space. Have thought that a good option is to have a seperate mapped drive for photos and videos, and staff copy their photos onto that drive only. Could then use picasa to be able to search etc.

 

Other ideas welcome!

[dhicks]

I am wondering how others organise photos and videos, so they are accessible and searchable, but also don't take up a ridiculous amount of space. Have thought that a good option is to have a seperate mapped drive for photos and videos, and staff copy their photos onto that drive only. Could then use picasa to be able to search etc.

 

I've found that one issue is having multiple copies of photos on your photos storage server, hence my preference for some kind of deduplication. I've tried block-level deduplicating file systems (i.e. ZFS and whatever I could rummage around and find in Linux) on commodity hardware but with poor results - either currupted data, slow I/O or just no actual deduplication. I figure file-level deduplication is rather more worth while, i.e. a script that looks at photos, does a chekcsum to see if there's any duplicates, and if so makes a hard link instead of keeping another copy of the same file. That way, users can plaster identical copies of the same picture in as many folders as they like ("year 2", "christmas party", "whole school", etc) with no worry about taking up extra file space.

 

The problem comes when people want to start editing (or deleting) photos - cropping, rotating, resizing, etc - you can't change the original photo because you'd change all the other hard-linked copies. Picassa handles this by storing changes in a separate data file alongside each folder of photos that it indexes. However, as far as I can make out, its approach assumes exclusive file access - it doesn't know about shared file systems. I could be wrong by now, of course, and the newest version might have got this sorted by now.

 

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David Hicks

[rocknrollstar]

That's interesting, I was thinking about Picasa, but hadn't thought about exclusive file access. Will look into it. Thanks for your help David.