How do you process and store your Drone photos, videos, logs etc?

[Aerialskape]

Download from drone to external drive. Folders are named as date shot.
Log is AIr Data to collect the information, then transferred to spreadsheet, which includes place flights took place.
When editing video it gets transferred to smaller hard drive that I can switch between MacBook and iMac as working files. Once editing / rendering is done and I’m happy they are deleted from smaller drive.

 

[Gagey52]

I don't intend to hijack this thread. Would you please share what electronic logbook you use?

Hi mate I’m using the Australian version of Dronelogbook.
Regards

 

[vindibona1]

If I have any advice it would be to be judicious in what you save.

I'm referencing my previous reply because I forgot to mention something else that is just as important. Write down (on paper if you can) which files are in which drives and folders. Paper is a very quick look-up as you're not digging for the electronic file that tells you where the other files are. I probably have more than 10 drives in my bin from several years past. I archived the stuff for a reason, but can't even tell you what's on any of those drives.

I didn't take the advice that I just gave above and had no idea at the time that at some point I'd want to know, even if it was just to throw the drives in the trash.

 

[Dbez1]

…If I have any advice it would be to be judicious in what you save.

Amen!

 

[eva2000]

Write down (on paper if you can) which files are in which drives and folders.

Thanks for that! Guess it's same for USB thumbdrives once you have many of them, you don't know which is which!

 

[PepperBird]

I'm new to DJI drones and only bought my Mini 2 5 days ago. But after my first 3 flights recording in 1080p 30fps, I have realised that I will be racking up a lot of time and disk storage space over time with photos, videos and DJI flight logs etc. If you also add a phone screenshot video recording of the DJI Fly app, that's even more disk storage space to consume!

There's also disk space on the mobile phone device too from Fly app! How do folks handle that?

I am wondering how fellow DJI drone users are handling this? What's your workflow for dealing with photos, videos, DJI flight logs etc? How much disk space does your DJI drone usage consume?

Any tips and pointers are much appreciated

I remove the SD Card and move all the image/video files to a NAS drive.

 

[ThatBeardedDroneGuy]

I'm referencing my previous reply because I forgot to mention something else that is just as important. Write down (on paper if you can) which files are in which drives and folders. Paper is a very quick look-up as you're not digging for the electronic file that tells you where the other files are. I probably have more than 10 drives in my bin from several years past. I archived the stuff for a reason, but can't even tell you what's on any of those drives.

I didn't take the advice that I just gave above and had no idea at the time that at some point I'd want to know, even if it was just to throw the drives in the trash.

I'm not a huge fan of paper. When I was doing photography in volume, I kept a spreadsheet of jobs. At the time, I was archiving to DVD and that helped me track which jobs were on which DVD. Same could be used for physical drives if necessary.

Of course, many ways to skin the cat.

 

[mavicpi314]

Up to 1 terabyte of random footage! I usually try to group them by location or subject matter, but it's not an idea solution. As I start to run out of space, I run most through handbrake to reduce the bitrate to a point I don't find noticeable, and that usually cuts the space around half.

As far as the space on the phone, I believe I have it set up to delete the oldest video in the cache first.

 

[maggior]

I have a 4tb drive set up on a linux file server and another one connected to my windows desktop as backup.

I don't film entire flights like I used to. It makes choosing clips easier and reduces required storage space.

 

[mavicpi314]

I have a 4tb drive set up on a linux file server and another one connected to my windows desktop as backup.

I don't film entire flights like I used to. It makes choosing clips easier and reduces required storage space.

I tried that for a time, but I like to keep it rolling in case something unexpected comes up. I've started to edit after to trim out the excess which there is a lot of, but only when I'm not lazy, so it doesn't happen very often.

 

[Brojon]

80% probably end up in the bin

YES!!!
#1 hard lesson to learn is you need to be ruthless in culling video and images.
I learned that the hard way when I got into digital photography waaaaay back.
To compound the issue storage is cheap - almost too cheap.
By the time you realize you have a problem locating a particular image it's too late.
Prepare to do a LOT of wading through stuff to get rid of junk you never should have let through to begin with.

 

[Brojon]

Download from drone to external drive. Folders are named as date shot.
Log is AIr Data to collect the information, then transferred to spreadsheet, which includes place flights took place.
When editing video it gets transferred to smaller hard drive that I can switch between MacBook and iMac as working files. Once editing / rendering is done and I’m happy they are deleted from smaller drive.

If you use something like Lightroom you can use it to organize by date and use keywords for place.
In fact Lightroom can use embedded GPS data on images to make map location possible.
For that reason I always take at least one image in addition to video.
Edited video and images get exported to an output folder which is a separate catalog.
I do like the Spreadsheet idea tho...

 

[Eagle Eye 62]

YES!!!
#1 hard lesson to learn is you need to be ruthless in culling video and images.
I learned that the hard way when I got into digital photography waaaaay back.
To compound the issue storage is cheap - almost too cheap.
By the time you realize you have a problem locating a particular image it's too late.
Prepare to do a LOT of wading through stuff to get rid of junk you never should have let through to begin with.

I

I'm new to DJI drones and only bought my Mini 2 5 days ago. But after my first 3 flights recording in 1080p 30fps, I have realised that I will be racking up a lot of time and disk storage space over time with photos, videos and DJI flight logs etc. If you also add a phone screenshot video recording of the DJI Fly app, that's even more disk storage space to consume!

There's also disk space on the mobile phone device too from Fly app! How do folks handle that?

I am wondering how fellow DJI drone users are handling this? What's your workflow for dealing with photos, videos, DJI flight logs etc? How much disk space does your DJI drone usage consume?

Any tips and pointers are much appreciated

I use external drives exclusively. They are cheap and getting larger all the time. I simply create a new folder for each flight session (I call them missions) they are date stamped and then I back them up on a second external drive just in case. It has worked pretty well for me so far.

 

[akdrone]

I have a 6TB external dedicated to drone stuff which currently takes up about 2.5TB. I have a folder for DJI info including my invoices and FAA stuff, a folder for sounds I have used in various videos, one for FlightRecords, and one for all my flights. The flight folder holds a folder for each days flights and breaks further down with folders for the high res images, one for the screen shot videos and one for videos and such done by goggles fro the FPV shots. If I shoot broll with my iPhone or Insta360 camera I include that their own folders so I have all the assets for a project in one folder. I name the folders by date, starting with year and then a brief description of the flight, ie "2022 March 8 Phil Frozen Forest II". If I shoot entirely different footage in a day (ie filming at a park and then a mountain) I will create separate folders for each subject. I keep everything. If I outgrow this 6TB drive, I'll just get a bigger drive. The editing is done in Lightroom for the photos and the final selections of photos along with any videos are brought into Final Cut Pro for video editing. This video, Alaska Railroad for instance, took up ~300mb but the folder it came from was 192GB .

 

[EricF]

I have a 128GB SanDisk Extreme micro SD card in My Mini 2. After a flight (or a day of flying), I copy everything onto a dated folder on an SSD drive. The folders use a naming convention of YYYY-MM-DD (so 2022-07-02 for today) for easier sorting, and I don't change any file names (the date & time is in the file properties; ditto for the location). Since I generally shoot both JPG and DNG, I create a DNG subfolder for the raw files so I have the top quality if I want to do something with a particular shot — but the JPGs are quicker & easier to review. Then I reformat the SD card.

If I want to keep specific images (or video clips), I write a Tag and details in the Comment attributes of the JPG image's EXIF data (various SW) so I can get to it (or the associated DNG) later.

When I've taken a photosphere (3D 360°), I move the JPG & DNG files that make it up into a subfolder for the date, and save the stitched version(s) within it.

For images & videos I want to use for other purposes or share (as taken or retouched), I copy them to cloud storage (Google Photos [Drive], or Microsoft OneDrive).

If a flight has a particularly worthy image, I download the CSV file from my AirData account (and save it into the same folder). This lets me open it Excel to parse out the lat/long/alt, and gimbal & bearing details for particular photos so I can include them in a Litchi mission to repeat them. For ones I want to repeat regularly, I upload the image to AirData so I can see it in context. (I'm collecting sets of the "same" image over time to make time lapses.)

Except for a couple of 2TB WD drives on my destop system, I've stopped using spinning disks for storage now: micro SD cards are cheap now (C$25 for 128GB); ditto for the internal SSDs (C$90 for 512GB & C$116 for 1TB) — and adapters (like a Sabrent USB 3 drive enclosure) let me use them on my laptop, desktop, or Pixel phone.

 

[SupermaNZ]

Hi

I use a 5TB Western Digital Passport external drive - they're cheap-as-chips now (less than US$150 or so). If you install the DJI Assistant 2(Consumer Drones) software from the DJI site, the software detects your external drives (including your drone), and creates directories on your desktop ready for easy file transfer. You can access this software (which also services the DJI Mini 2) here.

You can then delete your MicroSD files. Your low-res files on your iPhone/other device DJI Fly Album will still be in place on your phone, ready for processing of the low-res images for social media posts.

On your Mac/PC - DaVinci Resolve has top-of-class colour management/grading, so RAW/DNG files can be processed, but it also has a remarkably efficient DAM (Digital Asset Management) element built in. As the basic version is FREE to download - I've nabbed that. Version 18 is now available as a Beta. This is the version that I am using. You can see an example of how the DAM element works here. If you want to be really smart, you can learn how to use 'Smart Bin Filters' - these make image management a dream. A useful training video on this can be found here. DaVinci Resolve media management can easily organise your files in a date-related manner. Go to 1:40 on this training video to get an overview of Smart Bin management. You can create as many Smart Bins and sub-bins as you like.

DaVinci Resolve colour grading works a treat. It has (at least some) DJI drone camera LUTs built-in, but just experimenting with the myriad of LUT options means that you can speedily find an approximately-correct colour grading, and then fine-tune it from there.

I've learned not to upload any full resolution files to my iPhone, as the space consumed is enormous (and then iCloud duplicates this space requirement on every other Apple device that you have linked to iCloud). Easier (for me at least) to place on an external drive and then access this with Davinci Resolve. Note - you may need a powered hub (or direct connection of your WD Passport to your PC/laptop) in order for the drive to work.

On the DJI App Album, I process the DJI Album files (which are low res) using (FREE) nifty 3rd-party software to generate 3D/Little World-style images like this. A combination of mobile app Google Street View, and Theta+, allows easy generation of these.

Hope this helps.

 

[eva2000]

Thanks folks for continually sharing your workflow and how you manage your disk storage for your drone photos/video/data

I use a 5TB Western Digital Passport external drive - they're cheap-as-chips now (less than US$150 or so). If you install the DJI Assistant 2(Consumer Drones) software from the DJI site, the software detects your external drives (including your drone), and creates directories on your desktop ready for easy file transfer. You can access this software (which also services the DJI Mini 2) here.

Didn't know about this! Thanks for the heads up too!

On your Mac/PC - DaVinci Resolve has top-of-class colour management/grading, so RAW/DNG files can be processed, but it also has a remarkably efficient DAM (Digital Asset Management) element built in. As the basic version is FREE to download - I've nabbed that. Colour grading works a treat. It has (at least some) DJI drone camera LUTs built-in, but just experimenting with the myriad of LUT options means that you can speedily find an approximately-correct colour grading, and then fine-tune it from there.

Didn't know that either! Must try

I've learned not to upload any full resolution files to my iPhone, as the space consumed is enormous (and then iCloud duplicates this space requirement on every other Apple device that you have linked to iCloud). Easier (for me at least) to place on an external drive and then access this with Davinci Resolve. Note - you may need a powered hub (or direct connection of your WD Passport to your PC/laptop) in order for the drive to work.

On the DJI App Album, I process the DJI Album files (which are low res) using (FREE) nifty 3rd-party software to generate 3D/Little World-style images like this. A combination of mobile app Google Street View, and Theta+, allows easy generation of these.

That facebook link gives me the following message

This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.

But I assume you're reference to the sphere/360 images from the drone?

 

[thomasthomas]

I asked a similar question a while back but didn't really land on a great solution. I come from a photography background where a DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution was critical. I eventually moved to Lightroom and it's great since you can tag photos. you don't need to import them into certain folders, or have an insane folder structure to keep subjects together. It doesn't matter if they're even on different physical volumes. As long as you have keywords, you can search and find your images.

I have yet to find a similar solution for video. There are plenty of expensive options but they seem more suited to enterprise solutions rather than meeting the needs of an individual. Optimally, it would also provide the ability to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff so you don't waste space with useless clips. I looked at ACDSee (which I also used in the photo world) but it also fails miserably on the video front.

Digikam? It handles video as well photo, and has every option tagging, organising, searching a filtering etc

 

[ThatBeardedDroneGuy]

Man, forgot all about that. I used it years ago but I was thinking it was only on Linux. I'll download it today. Thanks!

 

[SupermaNZ]

Thanks folks for continually sharing your workflow and how you manage your disk storage for your drone photos/video/data

Didn't know about this! Thanks for the heads up too!


Didn't know that either! Must try


That facebook link gives me the following message

But I assume you're reference to the sphere/360 images from the drone?

My apologies - I had the Facebook link set to 'Friends'. It will be working now here.