I estimate I have between 70,000 and 100,000 images spread around various hard drives and CDs and DVDs from as far back as 1997!

Until Adobe brought out Lightroom, I had not settled on a digital asset management (DAM) solution to keep tabs on all these images.

I have now committed to a project, which will take several weeks, if not months, to create a new Lightroom database of all my images, and tagging them as I go along. I have reached almost 3,000 images since the end of last week!

To do this I have invested in a new 1TB hard drive (internal) and will be backing the archive up using an external drive as well.

I'm MOVING everything from its current location into the new Lightroom database on the new 1TB drive, which will free up space on the other drives.

As I import images, I will - at the very least - tag sets of imported images with basic relevance, and more important images will have more specific tags attached.

It's already paying back as I find it so much easier to find images that have been tagged properly.

Lightroom rejects duplicates - and I have loads of duplicated folders - so this will also reduce wasted storage space and problems when searching.

I just hope my 1TB drive will be enough... I've already used 15GB...