Sixty blocks of San Francisco

“Not another aerial shot of San Francisco”, I hear you say. Well yes, I’m afraid so.  But to be honest, when you get to fly around a city like that in a helicopter for 30 minutes (with a decent camera), you’re going to end up with a lot of photos that you’ll want to put on a photoblog should you have one.  So I think posting four such shots in nine months is showing some restraint.

I had some fun identifying where this shot was taken courtesy of Google Maps and I can tell you now that it shows about a 60 block area between 3rd and 13th Avenue (right to left), and Cabrillo Street and Lake Street (front to back).  The most dominant building in the frame – the orange and yellow L-shaped one – is the Kaiser Permanente Medical Centre on Geary Boulevard between 5th and 6th Avenue.

Looking at Google Maps, and in particular the satellite and street views which use photographic images, it’s hard to fathom how much data they must have to store (and back up) to keep that whole system functioning.

I struggle to keep my modest library of images organized sensibly and backed up in a fool proof way.  In fact lately I’m finding the data getting more difficult to manage – particularly in the area of backups – which is why I’m hoping to get a RAID1 storage system before the end of the year that will keep a redundant copy of all my images without me having to manually manage it.  That’s the plan at least.

It’s particularly important to have a fool-proof system in place when you are taking photographs for others – weddings, portraits or commercially – and so in those instances my workflow starts with transferring data to two separate drives. If it’s a particularly important set of images, a DVD backup is probably worth considering also, though of course if you get very paranoid you can question the longevity of the DVD format. If you’re that paranoid you’ll probably also want to keep a copy of your data off-site – somewhere different to your primary storage.  I’m sure a few amateur Irish photographers lost some images during the recent floods for instance.

The whole area of data management is a necessary evil when you take any reasonable amount of digitial images that you want to keep, but one that you ignore at your peril.  This time last year I had a hard disk failure that meant I lost my entire Aperture Library. I didn’t lose any images, but I lost all the adjustments I had made to images for the previous 12 months or so.  A painful experience, although looking on the bright side I’ve been able to take the opportunity to revisit many shots and reprocess them – this being one of those that I would have processed before the disk failed.  Whatever the up side, it’s not something I want to happen again.