My work flow is just about like Cotty's. I have the "contact sheets", negatives and "original" CD's filed, by date, in binders. A second set of CD's is used as an additional backup. Another copy is on a USB attached external hard drive for convenience.
Originally I kept track of this stuff by having a very structured set of directories and file naming conventions. A while back I layered the Ulead PhotoImpact Album program on top of this. That worked fine but assigning keywords was cumbersome. Recently Adobe released a similarly named program, Photoshop Album, that has a great timeline feature and tagging system and I switched to that. I ran into a bit of a bug and have been working with Adobe to figure it out. Neither Adobe nor Ulead's programs do file management very well so I continued to look.
I ran across IMatch from Photools. So far I'm impressed, and this may be the product I end up using in the long term. It does file management, indexing and categorizing very well, and it seems to do a good job of handling off line files. It's intelligently designed, has a scripting language and comes with a full set of program documentation as well as reference manual. The author encourages his user community to extend the product. At $50 per user, it seems like a bargain. Time will tell. As a test I indexed about 3000 on-line images in about 20 minutes. After about an hour of study with the manual I built a set of categories. I tag each image with location, photographer (I keep my family's photos filed with mine), date taken, subject, event type, and the names of any recognizable people in the photo. I can categorize about 200 images/hour.
If this program works out, I'll go back to scanning several decades worth of slides and the family photo albums that go back to the thirties and forties.
Now given all that as background, and motivation not to save giant tiffs, I'll return to the primary topic.
If you save your original in the highest quality jpeg, you're probably not going to see the loss. Any minor artifact will probably get swamped by whatever manipulation takes place in the printer driver or video driver anyway. I'm not advocating saving and re-saving in jpeg, just saying that if you understand how jpeg works and use it within those limits, it's a fine way to save space without any significant loss.
I'm sure the math contradicts my statement, but given the monitors and printers available today, I've not been able to see any difference between the highest quality jpegs and the monster size tiffs.
I've mentioned several products and have no connection with any of them other than that of customer:
Ulead PhotoImpact and PhotoImpact Album are described at http://www.ulead.com Adobe Photoshop Album is described at http://www.adobe.com Imatch is described at http://www.photools.com
And, last but not least, I've added several flower photos, most taken as grab shots with my Optio S to my gallery at http://georges.smugmug.com Now that little digital cameras all focus so close and make it so easy, we're bound to be boring each other to death with bad close ups us flowers such as these.
See you later, gs
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