Preserving photographs through photo archiving is a critical aspect of ensuring they remain safe and accessible for years to come.
Organizing digital photos for archiving entails creating a systematic folder structure and implementing metadata to label and sort photos further enhances the organization process, enabling efficient retrieval of specific images.
Metadata provides valuable information about digital images, including details about the camera settings, date, and location of the photographs. Leveraging metadata for photo archiving enhances the ability to categorize and search for specific images within the archive.
ImgArchive has done a lot of the work for you already. ImgArchive employs a date-oriented folder system and contains metadata for each image in the archive.
ImgArchive can use most common archiving media such as hard and optical drives etc. Tape can be used but not recommended.
How ImgArchive handles Archiving
ImgArchive manages two repositories of images. The Master repository contain all the original images and the Derivative repository that contains the edited images that are derived from the original images. These are the sources of images to be archived. both repositories are in data order.
The Archiving process is split into three steps:
The selection of images for archiving
The creation of a Archive media plan.
The execution of the Archive media plan thus, creating archival media.
The selection of images for archiving
The archive process can take all or a selection of images from ether of these repositories. A selection can be based on some criteria. This criteria may be a from/to date and or other criteria such as the star value of the image or a tag value for example. The product of this selection will be a list of images to be included in the archive. This list is captured in a file called the Archive Image Set (AIS) the resulting file will have “.ais” as its extension. This file can be further edited to remove any unwanted images from the archive image set that will be archived.
Note: The full set of criteria used is detailed below:
The creation of a Archive media plan
The Archive media plan is a plan by which the archive image set is allocated a media volumes. For example, if a archiving session consists of a year of images. The size of the images plus metadata may be say 549 Gigabytes. One Blu-ray disks may store 50 Gigabytes. 549 Gigabytes divided by 50 Gigabytes will be 10.98 so 11 Blu-ray disks will be needed to store the complete Archive Image Set. Archive media plan file is created detailing the contents of each of the Volumes that complete the archive image set. This plan will then be followed in the next stage which will create the Volume set.
The execution of the Archive media plan
Following on from the last step. In this step archival media will be created. This will consist of a Volume set. This will comprise of one or a number of media volumes. Each of the media volumes will be created in order by using a file storage area for staging the contents of each volume in turn. For example: if a set of 50 Gigabyte Blu-ray disks are to be used then at least 50 Gigabytes of storage mush be made available as part of the staging area. If for example 11 Blu-ray disks are to be used then contents of each of these disks will be generated in the staging area then hulk copied to each of the media Volumes in the set. As each of the Volumes are created the staging area will be cleared of the last Volume ready for the next to be created. This will be repeated until all the volumes in the volume Set are created.
To monitor that the archival media plan is followed an Archive Journal is created. This is used to verify that the images and metadata are copied to the archival media correctly without error. Once all the data in the the archive media plan is written to each of the archival media. The data will then be copied back from the archival media and compared to the original in the staging area. If any do not compare then the that data will be flagged as an error in the coping and delt with, only once all the data is copied correctly will the archive session be complete.
Media Volumes
This is the media used in the archive process, For example a set of Blu-ray disks. Each disk will be a Volume. This relates to the physical media being used Blu-ray disks, DVDs, Hard Disks, Tape etc. Each unit of physical media is a Volume.
Volume set
A Volume set consists of one or more media volumes containing the archived images in the set, plus all the accompanying metadata. For example, if a archiving session consists of a year of images then more than one Blu-ray disks may be need to be used. say 12 Blu-ray disks are used, this will be a 12 disk volume set.
This set of volumes will be numbered with a sequence number, in this case 1 to 12. Each volume in the set will contain a Volume Set Index (VSI) of all the images in the set to enable redundancy. Each volume in the set can then be used to read where a specified images is in the set. In addition this Volume Set Index will be stored within ImgArchive for quick access. The VSI will also contain the date and description of the Volume Set.
Archive Journal
The contents of the volume set is defined by a Archive Journal. This is a simple list in date order of the images to be archived. This also acts as a check file to validate that the volume set was generated correctly.
The Archive Journal can contain any image in the archive selected by any number of criteria. The simplest would be by date. For example all the image in 2023. However you may only wish to archive the best images