Digital Photo storage

[Roy Henstock]

What are the best photo storage solutions that allow me to move images from them to Affinity 1 for editing?

[smadell]

Hi, @Roy Henstock. I noticed your question was unanswered after several weeks and I thought I might chime in. Your question is broad and open-ended and, of course, the obvious answer is "the one that works for you." I think the only answer that anyone can suggest is to tell you what they do, and perhaps why they do it.

It boils down to "workflow." I think you have to answer a couple of questions first. (1) When all is said and done, what versions of the photo do you intend to keep (long term)? Will you keep raw files, Affinity files (.afphoto extension), JPG or TIFF files, etc.? (2) Affinity Photo does not include a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) but you might want to use a third party solution to keep track of your photos. (3) Do you have an SSD (either as an internal or external drive) and do you have a higher capacity hard drive? All of these answers might impact the solution you come up with. Also, you are not so much "moving" images to Affinity Photo; rather you are readomg them from wherever you have copied them and doing your edits in RAM. Saving/exporting can be directed to any desired location.

For me (and this is a personal choice, not necessarily one that will suit everyone) I copy my raw files from my camera disk to my computer's internal SSD drive. I put them into a folder named "RAW files" (or something similar) and open them one-by-one into Affinity Photo for editing. Once they are edited, I save the .afphoto files into another folder called "AFFINITY files" and I export a .jpg version of the file to a third folder called "JPG files". All three of these folders are enclosed in a parent folder named for the date, the event, or some other category. Once all the editing is done, I've got 3 folders; each contains a raw, .afphoto, or jpg version of each edited file.

I eventually copy that parent folder onto a high capacity hard drive, where they are stored long-term. I use a separate piece of software (Photo Supreme) as my Digital Asset Manager, and I import them from the storage hard drive (and keyword, geotag, etc) from there.

Will that work for you? It might. Only you can decide. Really, any place you want to store those images will work, since you can open them into Affinity Photo from just about anywhere. (As a caveat, I can't speak to whether storing them on a cloud-based drive, or on a network server, is a good solution. These are things I have never tried, and simply don't know.)