Rome

My big 2025 photography project was to move all my pictures out of my hardware dependent local storage, and migrate them to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I knew I would not convert my Lightroom 6 catalogs (theoretically possible, but too cumbersome), but the folders on the Network Attached Storage device (NAS) where the originals were stored had always been carefully organized. I thought I would not lose much by not converting the catalogs. I subscribed to Adobe’s Lightroom Creative Cloud (first through the Apple Store, later directly on the Adobe Store), and uploaded all the original images, folder by folder, to Lightroom. The process was described in detail is a series of blog entries dedicated to Lightroom.

Which means I’m now trusting Adobe for preserving 28 years of scanned negatives and digital images in their cloud. What can possibly go wrong?

A recent post by Jim Grey (about “the lost photos era”) and interactions I’ve had with cloud service providers in a professional context brought back to my attention that storing my images in a cloud was a good first step but not enough.

*Rome – Fontana de Nettuno – Piazza Navona. Nikon D80 – Jan 2010*

The “shared responsibility model”

All cloud service providers (CSPs) operate under a shared responsibility model. It’s the CSP’s job to ensure that their technical platform remains available and secure, and that the data entrusted to them can be recovered in case of a disaster in their data centers. As the client, it’s your responsibility to “govern your content”: manage the uploads, the regular cleanups, and configure how the data is accessed and shared.

The grey area is of course backup – CSPs generally commit to recovering your data at Day Minus One if something really bad happens to their infrastructure, but they won’t be obligated to do anything if you deleted a folder by mistake, or if you wanted to recover a group of files as they were at a specific point in time. CSPs generally consider that backups and restores are the responsibility of the client.

Although Adobe is a reliable company, I know I have to protect my images from a catastrophic error on their part, and from a major mistake (fat finger?) on mine.

A reminder – the differences between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic

Adobe Lightroom Classic is the current iteration of Adobe’s original image edit and management software, launched in 2007 as Lightroom 1.0.

It’s a “fat client” application designed to work on Windows or MacOS workstations (desktop or laptop), which stores your images locally (on the hard drive of your workstation or on some form of higher capacity local storage, DAS or NAS). Lightroom maintains at least one local catalog of your images, which contains all the ratings, flags, titles, captions you have entered, as well as a log of all the edits and setting changes (crops, exposure, color balance, sharpening,…) performed on the images.

The system is totally self contained – but as everything (catalog, images and edits) is kept locally, it’s your responsibility to manage the storage, the backup and the disaster recovery of your images.

Under the same Lightroom brand, Adobe is selling a totally different range of cloud based products simply named Lightroom or Lightroom CC, whose lightweight clients run on a smartphone (iOS or Android), a tablet (iPadOS or Android) and on a desktop or laptop (Windows or MacOS). All those products share the same on-line library (hosted on Adobe’s Creative Cloud).

Contrarily to Lightroom Classic, the Creative Cloud versions of Lightroom (smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac) don’t keep any image or catalog on your device – just a cache to reduce the response time. The whole system works very well: I can upload images from my camera through a smartphone while traveling, perform light edits on a tablet at the hotel the same day, and spend more time perfecting the images on a laptop when I’m back home – it’s seamless. As long as I keep paying for the subscription, of course. And bar a catastrophic event in Creative Cloud.

Backup workflows don’t live forever

Even if the image formats themselves (jPEG and DNG) have been remarkably stable over the last 20 years, the hardware, the software and the cloud services offerings have not stopped evolving – and what used to work reliably ten years ago does not work any more. Which means that every now and then, we need to take a hard look at our workflow and re-engineer it.

When I put it in place in 2018, my image preservation workflow made sense – I was using Adobe Lightroom 6 running on a Mac to edit my photos and manage my libraries. Lightroom 6 was keeping the catalog on the local hard drive of my Macbook and was pointing to a volume on the Netgear NAS to store the images themselves. I was also running a backup application named Arq on the Macbook, and using it to keep a backup of the NAS in Amazon’s long term storage, AWS Glacier.

Along the years, this finely tuned workflow crumbled.

First, the OS of my old MacBook stopped being supported, and I saw its capabilities decline progressively as it could not access the services that Apple (and others) kept on making more secure with more refined security protocols and longer encryption keys.

To make the matter worse, Netgear decided to get out of the network storage business – my RN214 NAS still works, but is not supported and (of course) its OS and its built-in backup apps are not updated anymore.

Last but not least, AWS has now sunset Glacier as I was using it – it’s not a stand alone product anymore, just a storage class in the S3 product portfolio, using different APIs.

My storage and backup strategy was crumbling and I had to act. That’s why I migrated the libraries themselves to Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year, and why I’m now implementing a new backup and restore workflow now.

My new workflow – saving the “digital negatives“

As often nowadays, I called ChatGPT for help. The workflow it recommended, and that I implemented, is still based on Adobe Creative Cloud being my primary image store, the “source of truth”. Lightroom (the PC/Mac edition of Lightroom) on my MacBook will act as a sort of gateway to the NAS, and the NAS volume will store my local replica of the originals stored in Creative Cloud.

It’s important to remember that for Lightroom, a local storage volume is nothing more than the place where it stores a local cache. What is being replicated to the local volume is the source image – the original JPEG or raw files exactly as they were originally uploaded from the camera – before any transformation, optimization or edit was performed. The images are grouped on the SAN by date (one folder per year, one subfolder per day) and the album structure you defined in Lightroom is not respected. Again, it’s a cache that we use as a way to backup our source images, not a backup of the final images after Lightroom has processed them.

The local cache on the SAN shows the original files grouped by date of capture – the Lightroom Album structure and the edits are not preserved, only the original image itself (compare with the structure of April 2016 in Lightroom, as shown below).

*Lightroom CC – the folder/album structure (here, April 2016)*. *In Lightroom the images are grouped in user defined folders and albums*.

How to setup Adobe Lightroom

Once the Mac is logged in the Network Attached Storage volume, simply click on the “Adobe Lightroom” option at the top left of the screen, select “Cache”, and under Performance, check the “Store a copy of all originals option”, and point to the folder of the NAS where the original images will be dropped.

The sync process is managed automatically by Lightroom. Every time you add new pictures to Lightroom, it will start replicating them to the SAN.

If you’re working with Lightroom away from your home network, no problem. Adobe will consider that the cache is not available, and will download the images from the cloud.

*In Lightroom CC – check the “Store a copy of all originals” option and point to the NAS as a the local storage*

Creating an off-site backup of the Network Attached Storage volume

The primary storage location of my images is Adobe Creative Cloud. I keep a replica of the originals on a network attached storage device (NAS) at home. It’s a pretty solid data protection system, but it’s only keeping one replica of Creative Cloud’s originals – and a replica is not a backup (because it only keeps the most recent version of a file). It is not very complicated or expensive to make it even more robust, and create an off site backup of the original images.

*Duplicati – the backup job (it took it 12 hours to backup 110 Gbytes of pictures – not bad at all).*

That’s what I used to do with Amazon Glacier – and having an off site backup of my photo library was a saving grace when my first Netgear NAS device gave up the ghost. Restoring the images from Glacier took a week, but it’s better than losing everything.

*The target Google Drive after the backup – the data is grouped in blocks of 50 Mbytes*.

This time, I tried different options (Arq, Backblaze) which for various reasons (performance, cost, no support of network attached devices) did not work for me. My current setup is based on an open source software named Duplicati, which is pushing the Lightroom replica on the NAS to a Google Drive. It works, backups are reasonably fast (around 2.5 Mbytes/sec), and it’s flexible enough: I can recover a specific image in a few minutes if I need to.

Validating that the setup works

Backup and restore workflows are fragile, and they can fail for all sorts of reasons (expired passwords or keys, OS or software upgrade, hardware or network related issues, human error). And it’s not because the backup is successful that the restore will be.

*Restoring the data – selecting the document to restore is easy and the restore takes no more than a few minutes.*

I had to validate that, with the Mac and Lightroom CC up and running, and the NAS volume mounted, that:

any new image added to the Lightroom CC library was replicated to the SAN, in its original state,
the backup software would catch the new image and back it up to the Google drive,
and that I could restore any image or any group of images as needed.

The tests were successful.

Saving the final images

You may also want to preserve a copy of the final state of your images, after Lightroom has applied all of its edits.

The challenge of course is that in Lightroom, the images don’t really have a final state. Adobe keeps your original photo and a sort of log of the transformations you performed, and dynamically creates a file containing the image you want after you have requested an export. You pick the quality, the dimensions, and the file format (small JPEG, large JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DNG, …) with or without sharpening – depending on what you intend to do with the image (email attachment, social media, photo gallery, photo album, print, …). And the image you need is created on the fly.

*Lightroom – so many ways to export a photo*

I understand that a professional photographer delivering images to many clients may want to keep a trace of what was delivered, and have an archival system specifically tuned to preserve them. (And pros may prefer working Adobe Lightroom Classic, anyway).

I’m not in this situation and I’ve never really given much thought about it. I simply export the images I need to the same shared folder in Apple’s iCloud, that all my Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) can access.

Final words

In the days of film, it was not easy (or cheap) for amateur photographers to create duplicates of their color slides or their negatives, and store them in a second location as a backup. Photographers were at the mercy of fire, floods and burglaries, and could lose the images of a lifetime in a few minutes.

Digital images can be easily duplicated, and the duplicates stored in totally different locations, on totally different media. The setup described here is very easy to implement: a NAS is not even needed (the local SSD of a PC or a Mac would work as well), and many of our subscriptions (Microsoft Office Family for instance) already include 1 TB of storage and could be used as backup target.

More about Lightroom and fifty five camera reviews:

All the images of this series were shot in Rome, in April 2009 and in January 2010, with a Nikon D80. They were saved as originals on multiple generations of storage, recovered from a catastrophic NAS failure, and imported in Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year. I just adjusted a few sliders before exporting them to WordPress.

[The Web standards are constantly evolving, and backwards compatibility does not seem to sit very high in the list of priorities. One day, you find out that your good old laptop can’t render Adobe.com or Apple.com pages anymore, or that modern browsers are making a mess of your old blog entries. Because it had become unreadable I moved the content of this old blog post to my current “Isola” theme in WordPress and I’m republishing it. I did not alter the text – just added comments between brackets when necessary.]

When your good friends learn that you still shoot film, and write about it, they understand they have a unique opportunity to get rid of all the – let’s be polite – worthless photo equipment they don’t use anymore and you end up with Kodak Brownies or Instamatics by the bucketload. And if your brother in law is really facetious, he brings you a brand new Holga from one of his trips in China, and since it’s a Christmas present and everybody in the family is intrigued, you buy film and start using it.

That particular camera comes in a big orange box with the rest of the “Starter Kit”. Reading the user manual, you get confirmation that the camera is “extremely low tech, and will eventually wear out”. Major design flaws are presented as unique features – the dreaded manual mentions “leaks of light, unvoluntary multiple exposures, loose connection between the film and the take up spool” among the desirable characteristics of the product. Looking for some comfort, you check a little square format book at the bottom of the box. It’s a nice paperback of 192 pages, showing 300 images taken with Holga cameras. Not something Leica or Nikon would be proud of, but interesting pictures nonetheless.

The camera’s design is very basic. It accepts 120 format roll film, has a plastic wide angle lens (60mm, F:8 or F:11) with 4 possible focus settings, and a shutter which offers a unique and unspecified speed. The camera comes with 2 user interchangeable back plates, one will give you 6×6 cm negatives with some vignetting, the other one 6×4.5cm negatives, probably with less vignetting (I don’t know, I only shot with the 6×6 plate). The “CFN” Holgas also come with an electronic flash, equipped with a turret of 4 filters (Red, Blue, Yellow and transparent) for special effects.

Shooting with Holga

The Holga 120 CFN needs 120 film – of course – and since Holgas are supposed to be enjoyed for their shortcomings, color film should be preferred (the plastic lens is prone to chromatic aberrations which would not be visible with black and white film).

Finding color film in 120 rolls proved very difficult. If 35mm film is still easy to find (even in supermarkets or in the little stores attached to many hotels), the same can not be said for 120 roll film. Only stores dedicated to professional photographers still have a few references. I bought a few rolls of Kodak’s Portra 400 NC film. Loading the camera is a difficult task, but in all honesty I’m not used to roll film and I would also have suffered with a more high end camera. [this blog entry was originally written in 2010 – 35mm film is not that easy to find anymore]

Holga 120 CNF - a view from the shutter (120 film adapter removed) — *Holga 120 CNF – a view from the shutter (120 film adapter removed) – According to the brochure, you should not expect to transmit it to your grand children.*

In the street, the camera attracts lost of attention. People notice the bright red color (Holgas are also available in black, kaki and in a unique blue and yellow combination), and are intrigued by the cheap aspect of the camera. It looks like a toy, and people are surprised to see an adult using it.

Rome - View of the Curia from the Campidoglio - Holga 120 CFN — *Rome – View of the Curia from the Campidoglio – Holga 120 CFN*

The camera has very few controls and is easy to use, with a decent viewfinder and relatively smooth commands, and provides a user experience very similar the “boxes” that Kodak used to sell before the launch of the Instamatic cameras.

The result?

Having the rolls processed proved as difficult as buying the film in the first place. Costco and the proximity drugstores don’t process anything larger than 35mm film, and the rolls had be sent to a professional lab (some of them charge up to $20.00 per roll). When you receive the pictures, you discover the “Holga paradox”: you’re not attracted to the almost “normal” images, but by the most severely flawed. The pictures with the fewer technical faults are just bad (with vignetting and all sorts of aberrations), while some of the images plagued with the worst of the problems (involuntary multiple exposures, light leaks) have a surrealist quality that the most creative of the photographers would struggle to get from a digital picture processed in Photoshop.

*Rome-Coliseum-Holga 120 CFN – This is one of the pictures with the fewest defects.*

Holga, what for?

“Normal” photographers are supposed to spend thousands of dollars in the equipment which will help them produce pictures as perfect as possible from a technical point of view – in focus, sharp, with the right exposure, no vignetting, no distortion, and no chromatic aberration.

Straight from the Holga - at least the bright red camera attracts smiles — *Straight from the Holga – at least the bright red camera attracts smiles*

Deviations from the norm of the technically perfect picture are supposed to be voluntary, in order to convey an emotion or a message. They’re not supposed to have been brought randomly by a poorly designed camera.

Holgas don’t follow the rule. They’re not “normal”, and they’re not what “normal” photographers would be looking for. Their results are totally unpredictable. When nothing went really wrong, the results are dull. It’s only when they are massively flawed that the pictures start being surprising and interesting.

Using a Holga reminded me of the “Exquisite Corpse” creativity method used by the Surrealist movement at the beginning of the XXth century. With a Holga you will rely on chance to create something new and different. Using the bright red Holga, I started believing that chance could be an artist on its own right. And you end up loving that little camera for that very reason.

More about Holgas

A few decades ago, photographers in Austria discovered the “Lomos” (copies of Cosina point and shoot cameras made in the USSR), and liked the – flawed – pictures made by those very imperfect little cameras so much that they launched the “lomography” movement. They started distributing the “Lomos” in Austria and Germany, and progressively added other cameras from Eastern Europe and China to their catalog. Lomos and Holgas are now widely distributed, and can also be purchased directly from the Lomography web site, where a red Holga 120 CFN can be found for $75. That’s a lot of money for such a low tech object. Bargain hunters can also find Holgas on eBay, for far less.

[The production of the Holga ceased in November 2015, but Freestyle Photo still have a few of them available – only in black, unfortunatelly. Lomography are proposing a camera, the Diana F, that seems to follow the same recipe as the original Holga, and is available in multiple colors.]