PLEA FOR HELP: PHOTO STORAGE

Here's a question for all of you altered art & photography fans out there.


How do YOU store all those digital photos?




Copyright-free photo from Tack-O-Rama

As you will know if you read my computer rants on the blog, I have had a few crashes and had to install a new hard drive. Luckily, I had done sporadic backups and so have around 20-30 CDs full of pix - many of them duplicates. And an external hard drive, which I did a backup onto - and the next backup started to copy the identical information again!

So I need to do 2 things:

1. Configure/organise/instruct the external hard drive just to backup the new stuff or changed stuff (not recopy all the old stuff already on there, especially my huge music section).
2. Totally revamp/reorganise all those photographs, so I can get rid of all these CDs and actually find what I need.

My problem is this: my old web is written in MS Front Page - I loved it; it has an autothumbnail capability. Unfortunately MS no longer support it, so neither does my web server - so I have to completely rewrite the entire website. I bought Serif's new package - which doesn't do autothumbnails (waaaah!) so I am now saving my pictures in 3 sizes (original 300dpi, 72dp for the web and also thumbnails) and even more versions of the same pic if cropping for closeups or alter for digital scrapbook/journal/altered book pages.

It's all become a nightmare, totally out of control, and I want to organise it all once and for all, before the situation snowballs even further.

So if anyone has a solution, I would LOVE to hear it!

HELP!