Card cloner software for Windows

Question

As part of my workflow I would like to clone the SD card first thing before I do anything.

Does anyone know of a good external USB drive cloner for Windows 7? Mac has this functionality natively (boohoo for Microsoft for not having this yet).

The idea is to clone it as read only, mount the cloned file as an external drive and then read it. (delete it after 90 days, but that's a different story) I would then copy the files and do anything from that cloned, mounted, drive.

That way I can then erase the SD card right after cloning to reuse it right away, but know I have all the info for a while in case I need it. A little extra paranoya, I know, but a healthy one. I've had it where I lost files on a move (don't know how, but it happened).

Asked by Joao

Answer

It sounds like MacOS is just creating a disk image file (.dmg I would guess) for the USB drive, which can then be mounted. I'm curious if you can actually clone an SD card, or just USB drives...SD/CF cards are usually treated differently than USB drives, and the MacOS clone feature is usually intended as a means of backing up literal external USB drives.

Windows 7 actually does have direct support for mountable drive images in .vhd (Virtual Hard Disk) format. You could create a VHD via the Windows 7 Disk Management tool, mount it, and copy the files from the memory card to your VHD (which, being a file, can be mounted, unmounted, copied for backup, etc.), and delete the VHD when you no longer need it. This would not be a 100% exact clone (although I suspect neither is the MacOS clone...its probably a new disk image with the contents of the external drive.) You could also use a backup tool like Acronis True Image to create USB drive clones, however it does not seem to support cloning SD/CF cards (at least, the version I have, 2011, does not.)

To create a VHD and copy the memory card contents to it, which would pretty much be as good as a MacOS DMG, do the following:

• Right-click Computer, choose "Manage"
• Expand the "Storage" node
• Right-click "Disk Management"
• Select "Create VHD"
• Fill out the form
  • Size XYGb (i.e. 16Gb)
  • Fixed Size
• Watch the status bar for progress
  • May take a few minutes...
  • Virtual disk will appear as an unallocated drive when done
• Right-click "Disk" (should appear bright greenish-blue, unlike normal drives which are silver)
  • Select "Initialize"
    • Use MBR format for greatest compatibility
• Right-click "Unallocated Volume" (should have a black "Unallocated" strip color)
  • "New Simple Volume..."
    • Next...
    • Next...
    • Pick a drive letter or mount to folder
    • Next...
    • NTFS or FAT32 (NTFS offers more features)
    • Add a Volume Label
    • Perform a quick format (Checked)
    • Next...
    • Finish
• The drive should automatically mount, ready for use

Once you have a VHD, you can just drag-and-drop copy everything from a CF card to the VHD. In windows, cameras themselves show up as devices in Computer. You can open up the camera, and directly access the memory cards inside them, and just copy the DCIM and any other folders across to the VHD. If you have a card reader in your computer, the cards will usually show up as removable drives once you pop a memory card in. You can again just copy the DCIM and any other folders across to the VHD. Cameras usually have pretty fast interfaces, and copy pretty quick. Some memory card readers for computers, particularly cheap ones, are often limited to USB 1.1 speeds, so you might only get a few mb/s out of them. USB 2.0 ones will usually get you about 20mb/s. If you have the option, even for non UDMA-7 memory cards, picking up a $20 USB 3.0 PCI-e card and USB 3.0 CF/SD card reader will get you about 40-50mb/s (and significantly more, up to 150mb/s, on todays native UDMA-7/USB3 compatible CF cards.)

Answered by jrista

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How to remove duplicate masters in Aperture?

Question

There are many photos in my Aperture library that have two masters, each one jpeg and one raw. I'd like to delete one of both, but I didn't even found a way of splitting them.

Asked by Max Ried

Answer

Why don't you use a smart folder? Set file type to RAW, and then you can delete the files. Its however not ideal.

Answered by Rogier

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What's the easiest way to deliver RAW images online to a client?

Question

RAW images are very large in file size so sending them as email attachments doesn't work with gmail/yahoo because they have file size limits. This gets even more difficult when sending 50+ images at a time. What's the easiest way to deliver RAW images to a client so they can download them?

Answer

I have created privately shared folders in Dropbox, which works very well. If your customer also has a Dropbox account, the folder shows on his account view as well.

You can also use a temporary file share service like Dropsend, which I use frequently when an image is larger than the Gmail limit.

Both of these services have free as well as paid options. If you pay in either, you can store/send larger files.

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What photography workflow software can be kept on a central server?

Question

At my company we do a lot of photo shoots for our products, at the moment we just organize the photo per photo shoot but with this system its hard to recover a photo of a product, you have to go over all the shoots to find the right one. So now we are looking for a better system, the most logical seems to organize per product, but what to do with pictures with multiple products and some times you just need a photo of a kid with any product, etc.

So we would like to be able to put all our photo's in a database so that we can tag them with some terms we could be looking for and keep them all in the same place.

I already looked at software like Lightroom and ACDSee and they would be great if just one person would manage the pictures but we need something that can be kept on a central server and can be accessed by everyone.

It would be a plus if you can do some basic editing in the program but this not necessary.

Anyone any experience with a program that can do this?

We have people who work and mac and others with Windows so it should be usable by both.

Answer

I work at Daminion Software. Our Daminion Server is a TRUE multi-user photo management solution for small teams (and even for home users)

Thanks to support for XMP you can easily exchange the information between Daminion and Lightroom, including hierarchical keywords.

You can restrict access to your content by user roles and protect assets by version control. Daminion Server focused on cataloguing (no built-in fancy image editors and publishing tools) with excellent bridge to external photo editors like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign.

BTW you didn't mentioned your platform. Daminion is for Windows only.

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How can I manage my raw+jpeg files?

Question

I shoot in raw+jpeg mode. Mainly because I like to do post processing, but my wife doesn't wan't to be bothered with that. She likes to be able to take the photo and upload it to facebook without any other steps.

After a session out with the family, I can easily come home with 300+ photos. Most are good, but some are not even worth keeping. They may be blurry, over exposed, etc...

Right now I go through the files and delete any jpeg/raw combo that I don't want. Is there any (preferably free) software that will help manage them? It would be nice if it would link the two together so when I rename/delete/move one it does it with the other as well.

ps.
If you have any tips on how you manage your files, I am all ears.

Answer

If you are looking for a free option Picasa is probably your best bet. You can match it up with Gimp to do some more advanced editing. The preferred solution by many is Adobe Lightroom, which you can find on sale for around $130USD right now I believe.

Depending on the camera that you bought, you likely received a disc of software with it that may even include some pretty good digital asset management software of its own.

Resources

This question that has many answers might help you, although it does cover paid as well as free options: What software is focused on reviewing and organizing images?

A great group of articles can be found at this link: http://www.neocamera.com/article.php?id=dam-software It explains in more detail about how using digital asset management software can benefit the photographer, as well as going into detail about the paid options available.

A blog post at this very site may help you out as well, it specifically outlines the options available in Adobe Lightroom, but the same basic feature set exists in any digital asset management software such as Picasa or Apple Aperture. Here is the blog post: http://photo.blogoverflow.com/2011/10/lightroom-fundamentals/

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What does the DSC filename prefix come from?

Question

Without having a real problem with this, why did Nikon (maybe others too?) chose this filename prefix?

Answer

CIPA has long established DSC as meaning Digital Still Camera. This prefix is not mandated by the DCF (Digital Camera Filesystem) standard but was adopted uniformly by Nikon and Fuji which named their files starting with DSC_, DSCN, or DSCF. Other manufactures went with PICT, PIC or P which presumable all stand for Picture. Although plenty of cameras also save videos with the same convention.

You will notice that DCF requires files in AdobeRBG color-space to start with an underscore, in which case DSC is often all that is left and you get _DSCxxxx.yyy uniformly for Nikon and Fuji.

As ahockley pointed-out, Sony coincidentally uses the DSC prefix for fixed-lens camera names as well.

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How do I prevent a Nikon D3100 from resetting the file image numbering each time?

Question

I have a Nikon D3100. When I unload the pictures from the camera to the computer, the numbering of the file names goes back to zero.

Sometimes, when they are still about the same event, I would prefer if it kept going where it left off. Is there a way to tweak those settings?

Thanks

Answer

Go to the Setup Menu (The one with the wrench icon) and set File Number Sequence to ON.

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Can I import pictures into Lightroom and retain my existing folder structure?

Question

I already have 30k pictures ordered in the following format: YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD. I would like to continue this format instead of going through and renaming all my folders (besides, I like this layout). Is there any way to add to the items in the date format drop down to include my own format?

Answer

Short answer: Yes you absolutely can add your own date format to the drop down list. Within your Lightroom program folder, go to the "Resources" folder and create a folder called "en." Then, create a file called "TranslatedStrings.txt."

In that file, write the following line (including the quotes): "$$$/AgImportDialog/ShootArrangement_1/Template=%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d"

If you're having trouble saving the file because of permissions, try creating the file on your desktop and then copying it into the "Resources\en" folder.

Longer answer: TranslatedStrings.txt is essentially a method to localize Lightroom for different languages, for example by rewriting the menu in another language. However, it also allows you to "hack" parts of Lightroom and personalize it. Adding some custom values to this to the date format dropdown menu is one option. You can also use it to customize the shortcut keys for various tools/actions in Lightroom.

The line "$$$/AgImportDialog/ShootArrangement_1/Template" specifies the value that we're replacing. You can use any number from 1 to 13 at the end of "ShootArrangement" and that will alter the position of the template in the dropdown menu.

The string at the end "%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d" defines the actual date format. There are a number of different values you can use, and you can find a full list here. For example %b will give you the three letter abbreviation for a month.

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Where does Lightroom keep the original raw file?

Question

Yesterday I realized that for the last import I did with Lightroom I don't have the original RAW files from the camera's SD. In the memory card I have only the RAW file and when I import them in Lightroom it converts in JPEG and save them to the library.

There are any particularly options for keeping the original RAW during the import?

update Sorry....I'm a fool! Someone changes my settings and I didn't realize that I was shooting in jpeg. I double checked and yes, it's only JPG!:( sorry for the wasting of time

Answer

Lightroom always keeps the RAW file. It does not convert on import, it converts on Export. Your files will be in your designated LR import folder. Note that there can be more than one of these if you like.

So to find out where your last photos went, you can simply open Lightroom and click "Import". One of the gotcha's of Lightroom is that it imports wherever you last told it to. So simply click on 'Import' and see where it is going to put the files. This will be the place it put them last time. In LR3, this is the top right hand of the UI, where is says "to".

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Suggestions for shared cross-platform photo management?

Question

I have a Mac, my wife has a Win7 machine. Currently I take all of our photos and put them into iPhoto. There's about 35K images in there now. The problem is that they are all accessible only from my Mac and she has to wait for me to put the images on there, etc.

I'm willing to switch away from iPhoto. I know there are some tools that are cross platform (Lightroom, Picasa), but are there any that support a shared library? I can share a volume out via NFS or CIFS that we could both mount, but I want to avoid problems of (potentially) both of us hitting the image database at the same time.

Answer

The issue you are going to face is similar to any database-based solution: the issue is ownership over a file and if two systems are trying to change a file at the same time. This can often corrupt a database for systems that are not designed with this concurrency in mind, and most systems are not designed with this in mind. As mentioned above, there are some higher end solutions that are designed with this in mind, but they are expensive and typically designed with an agency in mind.

Assuming you do not wish to purchase an agency solution, Lightroom would do fine, if you did not wish to share the database and each others edits. In this case, you would simply share an external drive with the photos themselves, but each keep your own catalog of edits local to your system. I am not sure if Aperture works this way or not, others can perhaps chime in.

The only alternative to get something close to this function with Lightroom, is for you to share the hard drive of photos as above, but then, use the export/import catalog function of Lightroom to "share' the catalog between machines. So, have your wife export a catalog of images she has edited, and then you import them into your catalog...and so on. Not especially simple, but it will work, as long as you can put up with it.

Of course, if you can get by without sharing edits, then simply put all your images on a network accessible drive, point each copy of Lightroom at this shared drive and edit away. One note: when your wife adds images, they will not automatically be added to your catalog, but you can easily solve this by right clicking on the shared drive link in the Library view, and select 'Synchronize Folder" which will add any new images to your local catalog.

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