Organizing A Photo Archive

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

 

I've been working on organizing a digital archive I acquired. The collection consisted of nearly 7,000 photos and was about 150gb in size. Originally it was near a terabyte and was all TIFF files. First thing I did was convert to JPEG. Too much godlike qualities are put into TIFF as opposed to JPEG.

Here...

31 Generation JPEG Degradation Test D.D. Teoli Jr. A.C. : D.D. Teoli Jr. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Same thing with 8 bit vs 16 bit.

JPEG vs TIFF / 8 bit vs 16 bit Tests D.D. Teoli Jr. A.C. : D.D. Teoli Jr. A.C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

I've done tons of testing in this area. If I do any photography I still shoot in RAW for important things. But generally speaking, I'm all JPEG now.

I looked through the collection a few times and just started to make folders for breaking it down. As I filed photos, I made more folders or combined folders as they seemed fit. And so forth and so on.

As shown in the photo, eventually I had enough folders for the material to be sorted. As I sorted the material I made Blu-ray disc backups. This is time consuming work and don't need any f'ups. Cheap Blu-ray discs for temporary backup are only .40 cents each. Just let me stress for .40 cents they are not archival grade Blu-ray. But they don't need to be, being for temporary back up while the work is in progress.

There is no magic bullet to getting it done, you just chip away at it every day.

One piece of advice...

If you decide to use lots of the photos in multiple categories and you plan on extensive post processing. Do the post work first and the sorting second. If you keep the same file name, then you can replace them easily with a search. But if the names are changed it can be a lot of work that could have been avoided.

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Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography

Edited December 25, 2025 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.