CD-DVD Burning over multiple folders

[JohnW]

 I love the fact that PM tells me how many DVDs will be needed when I burn to DVD, but I really need it to see and maintain the FOLDER hierarchy, and read over multiple folders. Thanks!

[Kirk Baker]

I love the fact that PM tells me how many DVDs will be needed when I burn to DVD, but I really need it to see and maintain the FOLDER hierarchy, and read over multiple folders. Thanks!

You can preserve up to two folders deep with the popup menu in the disc burning dialog.

You can open multiple folders into the same contact sheet and burn them all onto the same set of discs.

I can explain how to do this if you tell me what OS you are running and which version of Photo Mechanic you are running.

-Kirk

[JohnW]

I use PM 4.4.3.3 and mac OSX Tiger ver. 10.4.8

I have about 30,000 images in my International Folder. Under that are folders by country. China, for example, has six folders because I shot in six different locations. That's how my images are stored. What I want to do is to back up my images on archival DVDs (I already have backups on two other HDs) but want the DVDs for longer term storage. But I need to keep that folder structure to keep everything ordered properly. I was hoping to do this in PM since I saw an otherwise great "burn to CD/DVD" function that would tell me exactly how many DVDs I need for each country set of images. (In this case, I can start with the country folder being the top of the hierarchy).

[Kirk Baker]

I use PM 4.4.3.3 and mac OSX Tiger ver. 10.4.8

I have about 30,000 images in my International Folder. Under that are folders by country. China, for example, has six folders because I shot in six different locations. That's how my images are stored. What I want to do is to back up my images on archival DVDs (I already have backups on two other HDs) but want the DVDs for longer term storage. But I need to keep that folder structure to keep everything ordered properly. I was hoping to do this in PM since I saw an otherwise great "burn to CD/DVD" function that would tell me exactly how many DVDs I need for each country set of images. (In this case, I can start with the country folder being the top of the hierarchy).

Could you post a bit of your folder hierarchy?  Like:

China/
    Hunan/
    Sichuan/
    Guizhou/
    Taiwan/
    Zhejiang/

Thanks,

-Kirk
   

[JohnW]

Yes, its just like that. (Different. cities though).

[Kirk Baker]

Yes, its just like that. (Different. cities though).

OK, then you would open each of those folders representing each city into a single Contact Sheet window.  To do this, expand the China folder in the Navigator.  Then double-click on the first city.  Then for each of the remaining cities, control-click (or right-click if you have a two button mouse) on the city and choose 'Open in current Contact Sheet'.

Now all of your cities will be in a single Contact Sheet.  Select the photos you want to burn (Command-A will select all.)  Then open the Burn Photos to Disc dialog (Command-B).  On the Parent folder hierarchy popup menu change it to say 'Two levels: (e.g. FolderA/FolderB/DSC_1234.jpg)'.  Set your other options and start burning the series of discs.

When complete you will have a folder named 'China' on each disc, and inside it will be the city folder names that made it onto that disc.  Inside each city folder will be the actual images.

That's it.

HTH,

-Kirk

[JohnW]

Thanks Kirk, I'll give that a try. I use PM professionally so I appreciate your prompt response to my question. Time is. . .
-John

[BillyDix]

This question should go into a FAQ list.

[FairfieldPhoto]

Just an idea for the future to consider. 

I recently purchased a product called "Archived Creator".  It is an image archiver only.  One of the features it has (and one that had me invest the USD $59.95) was that it created a mini-website of generated thumbnails and placed this website on each of the disks being burned.  Say you burned a LARGE event's worth of photos spanning 3 DVDs.  The mini-website is placed on each of the 3 DVDs so when you inserted ANY of the disks, you get a quick website showing the images on the entire backup and telling you which of the 3 DVDs discs the image is located.

This feature has been very valuable for me to grab a CD/DVD from an event and use the website of images to quickly scan through what I am looking for rather than putting the DVD worth of images into PM and scroll through all the full res images.  Perhaps a thumbnail website added to PM's backup/burn feature would be valuable to others.

Just a thought...

-Mike

[Kirk Baker]

Mike,

Just an idea for the future to consider. 

I recently purchased a product called "Archived Creator".  It is an image archiver only.  One of the features it has (and one that had me invest the USD $59.95) was that it created a mini-website of generated thumbnails and placed this website on each of the disks being burned.  Say you burned a LARGE event's worth of photos spanning 3 DVDs.  The mini-website is placed on each of the 3 DVDs so when you inserted ANY of the disks, you get a quick website showing the images on the entire backup and telling you which of the 3 DVDs discs the image is located.

This feature has been very valuable for me to grab a CD/DVD from an event and use the website of images to quickly scan through what I am looking for rather than putting the DVD worth of images into PM and scroll through all the full res images.  Perhaps a thumbnail website added to PM's backup/burn feature would be valuable to others.

That's a neat idea and it would be fairly easy to add to Photo Mechanic.  All of the ingredients are there.  It's just a matter of having the time to implement it...

-Kirk

[mbrakes]

The above mini-website idea sounds nice. Would just like to add that most of the time when I burn cd's, it is because clients request it for archival purposes. What would be very nice is also to have a choice of burning two versions - jpg and tiff original - as the tiffs are really heavy to load on most client's machines, but often I get a rquest for TIFFS nevertheless. So having a choice between JPGs for sketches/browsing or TIFFS for final layout seems like the best compromise. I really like PM's ability to generate jpg versions for FTP upload on the fly, a similar way of having PM generate JPG versions and save to separate JPG/TIFF folders would be a great time-saver. (Theres a choice for RAW/JPG handling, but I never deliver untreated files so this is of little use to me)