Organizing, storing & cataloging videos & photographs

Our team has been very fortunate to have some very talented photographer/videographers. However, now that we’ve made it through our “Rookie + 1” year, we are starting to see the challenge of cataloging videos and photographs for team use in the years to come.

For programming and CAD, we have a team hard drive set up with Subversion for programming and CAD files but for photographs and marketing documents, we are relying on a mixture of:

  • DropBox (limited size and impacts many peoples’ personal computers!)
  • Web albums (tied to individual team members’ accounts)
  • Wiki (again, limited in size and it’s easier to link to other outside storage places instead of uploading files to the wiki)

Our videos are primarily with one student but then they become inaccessible to other students and as time goes on, it will be difficult to find video clips for bigger projects as we keep adding to the collection.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you!
Linda

Adobe Lightroom and SmugMug

We use DropBox most often. But we have experianced it getting really full (having the 2GB limit and all). We usually upload the photos from it to our website and then dump everything in the dropbox (of course there is a back up on the original’s computer though).

But if there is a massive ammount of photos/videos that need to be uploaded somewhere or needs to be transported we will use CDs or DVDs. I’ll even head over with my laptop to get the media from people in some cases.

I’m interested in hearing about different server setups, if anyone is running any themselves. Ideally, I’d like to run a server that can run FTP, HTTP, SVN, private-cloud, etc. Not sure how I’d get to it through the school network though.

We actually contacted Dropbox at the beginning of the school year and they sponsor our team with a 25GB account. You might want to look into contacting them. (I can give you more details via PM.)

Why create your own system when there are applications available that have been designed for this specific purpose?

A Pro Flickr account costs $25/year and gives you unlimited photo and video uploads. You can organize in collections/sets and tag with key words. Content can be either public and private. Picassa and YouTube are other alternatives.