I just switched from a PC

[Rapman1959]

Hi fellow mac users,
I decide to convert my house to the mac as my kids have to use macbook pros in college. Anyways for my photography I bout a Mac pro with 8 gigs of ram and used my moniters from my PC. Exchanging to CS3 for the mac was very easy. The one program I wanted to use also only comes for PC. It's Archiev Creater. Does anyone know if there is a program that lets you burn to DVD and calculates the number of photos to optimise space like this program does?

Thanks Adolfo

 

[ChrisA]

Does anyone know if there is a program that lets you burn to DVD and calculates the number of photos to optimise space like this program does?

How does on "optimize space" the photos take up whatever room they take up. On a mac you can drage files to a Burn Folder and watch the total size and keep draging until you notice you have just one DVD oer CD full then click the burn button. "Toast" has a little "fuel gauge" graphic that tells you about the same thing but it has another nice feature where you can make a multi-disc archive. It will ask you to swap discs, as many as are required.

But really, optical disks are not great archives. It's better to just use hard drives and keep a few hard drives in rotation. Cist per GB is very low now.

 

[Rapman1959]

Chris, thanks for responding
Not all photos are the same size. The program will look at all the photos you are archieving and maximize the DVD storage. It's great having a fuel gauge but lets say you have only x amount on your dvd left you need to hunt thru your phots to get one the correct size. As to DVD not being a good storage I'm not sure I agree. Gold dvd's have a 200 year life. You can look at the web page for a better idea of what I mean. http://www.rawworkflow.com/products/archive_creator/index.html

Adolfo

 

[Jeromy]

with the price of a dvd, I am not sure its worth my time to make sure every single scrap of data is filled on each disk. Also I would rather not break up file order to achive this.

my 2 pennies.

 

[GBRandy]

In additional, the archival quality of todays DVD's makes it a poor selection for data storage. The media is so thin on these disks now that they actually "decay" and can fail just sitting on your desk. All in the name of cost reductions

Based on what is out there and the costs, installing a second hard drive and just duplicating the data to it is really the only long term solution... RAID would be better.

 

[Alan.Tran]

If you use iPhoto and select burn, it'll show you with a little pie graph how much space is taken up on that dvd/cd. But for long-term storage, I'd probably recommend just getting an external HDD and using time machine.