Working With Digital Photograph Archives

Moving photos from DVD disks to NAS

Viewing photo information in Adobe Lightroom

Early photos were archived to CDs or DVDs. Some of these disks have been copied to NAS for archiving.

All photos archived to CDs/DVDs have been added to the photo archive Lightroom catalog. If the photos are marked as missing in that catalog, it means that they have not yet been copied over to NAS storage.

For photos that have not yet been copied to NAS,

• Copy all directories on the DVD to backup/photos XX` under the "photography" directory on the NAS. Where XX in the directory name is the number of the DVD archive.
• Open the photo archive catalog in Adobe Lightroom. Photos that are only on DVD will be marked as "missing" in the catalog.
• Mount a photo archive DVD.
• Find the corresponding collection for that DVD in the Lightroom catalog.
  All the photos in the photo archive gallery have been manually added to collections that correspond to the CD/DVD that they were archived on. Right click on a missing photo and select Go To Collection to see which DVD to find the photo on.
• Right click on the top-level files and folders from that DVD and choose Find missing file or Find missing folder.

Copying photos to NAS

• Open Powershell
• Copy the files using robocopy (assuming that the photo category folders are at the root level of the DVD):

c:\> robocopy e:\ N:\photos\archive /s /xo /xx /xf *.xmp

• robocopy parameters:
  • /s - Include subdirectories
  • /xo - Exclude if the file exists in the destination and is the same age or newer
  • /xx - Ignore files in the destination that don't exist in the source
  • /xf - Exclude files matching the pattern

Add the /l option to the robocopy command to do a test run.

• Eject the DVD. Now the photos in the Lightroom collection corresponding to the DVD will be missing.
  • Click the exclamation mark at the top right of the photo thumbnail in the Lightroom gallery to locate the missing photo.
  • Find the photo file on the NAS drive.