Organizing photos

[Master Mason]

Groucho had a good idea.

how do you organize your pictures.

I rename mine by the event and date if the event covers muliple days. And then keep similar events together in a seperate folder.

For example. I have a folder for each kids football game, each game folder is then put into the Master Football Folder.

So one games would be Kenny Football game 10-22-06 All pictures in that folder would have the same name, plus a number extention.

I do not rename my Raw files, but save those in a folder with the date taken. That way if/when I need them I can go to that date to find.

I have everything backed up to an external HD, and burned on CD's (really need to get a DVD burner, but I just spent this months camera money on a 430 flash). And pictures are also uploaded to smugmug account.

So how do you do it?

 

[jann1033]

i have them by where i took them ( you can also map them on elements 5)then also by who/what/ events if they are if they were taken locally. (dates never really mean much to me.) tags for all that stuff and in my photoorganizer on the pc which someday will move to external hard drive storage ..

then i have them on dvd, right now by the date but i'm going to go through and add a list to what/where/ who they are ( same as in the pc) for each dvd since like i said august 10, 2006 means nothing to my brain.

with elements 5 you are supposed to be able to burn a dvd you can keep writing to so i may start burning them with my lightscribe inscribed with ie "flowers "and according to tags ie i have tons of sunsets, tons of flowers, each would be a dvd i could keep adding to

 

[Master Mason]

The problem with the adding to, is it can only be read by the computer your using to add from. it would be worthless to put an open cd or DVD in a set top dvd player. It wouldn't be able to read it. At least that is how I understand it.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I have a folder for each year. Within each year I have a folder with the number and month name (01 - January, 02 - February, etc.). The number is their for sorting purposes. Within each month I either dump the photos directly or break them up into groups based on activity (WDW Trip, Erik's Birthday Party, etc.). Whether I use the subfolders depends on how many shots I have for the month. If I'm only keeping a few dozen, I don't bother. If I've got hundreds, I do bother.

I used to use some really cool software called iMatch. With it, I would categorize each photo by date, by location, by activity, and by subjects. The subjects categorization included people as well as notable objects. Each category was actually a hierarchy. Tagging the photos was a bit of a nuisance, but since most pictures in a shoot were the same date, location, and activity, that part was quick.

The cool thing about it was the ability to quickly retrieve odd sets of photos. I could quickly grab all pictures of my sons at beaches with sand castles or all pictures of a visiting family or all pictures with my sons and their grandmother or any weird adhoc group like that.

Because everything is a hierarchy and elements can appear in multiple hierarchies, it is even better. When I tag a picture with my niece, the photo shows up in groups with her, her family, relatives on my side of the family, relatives, or people (each being a superset of the other). I have a friend that I canoe with who is also a neighbor. When I tag a picture with him, the photo shows up both in my neighbors group and in my canoeing friends group.

The software is designed more for people with stock photos, but I found it great for personal photo organization. I also meant to create a feed into my screensaver so that when people were coming to visit, I could quickly customize the screen saver to show groups of photos that they would find interesting.

I finally quit using the software because I didn't have time to keep it up-to-date. I occasionally consider going back to it, but for my limited usage, it would be hard to justify the time tagging.

I like my current organization structure because it is simple. I am also planning on using Adobe Lightroom and it's searching facilities to do basic searches. My thought is that the future of searching will rely more and more and embedded tags rather than folder structures. For now, the folder structures combined with thumbnail previews get the job done.

 

[Mellie0119]

I also have my photos stored by year, then month. Special Events get their own folder in the month folders. Simple to remember and use and makes it easy when backing up photos- I know exactly what month is the last one updated and can go from there.

 

[LMarge]

Mine are on CD's and I need to get an external HD for storing just photos - any suggestions for size, etc? On the pc they are in PSE4 sorted into "collections". Within each collection is a sub-folder for events. "Holidays" would be one collection. Within it there would be Christmas 06, Christmas 05, Easter 06, Halloween, etc. This is a pretty simple set up, but it works for me- because I scrapbook. My scrapbook style tends to be by events, birthdays, holidays, vacations, etc. I have random shots of the kids in a file just for that - Fav's of Steven, Fav's of Colleen, etc. Then when I'm ready I can scrap just that one picture, since it doesn't fall into an event. I hope that makes sense!!! I have a feeling as I get further into this digital thing, that certain holidays will become their own "collection". Just haven't gotten that far, yet!!!

 

[_chill_]

I keep my originals arranged by folder (i.e. 2006/WDW/May/Day 1, Day 2, etc.) I go through and clean out the obvious unusable images, and once I have 3-4G, I burn them immediately to a DVD for safe keeping (they're cheap storage, and I've had more than one HD crash and spent months recovering files) Then as I have time, I process the images (cropping, contrast, etc.) as needed. Those images are burned to DVDs for myself and family to play in their respective DVD players. I also have a folder I update on occassion called 'screen saver' that not only feeds my computer (and my work computer) for the screen saver, but I also copy the files to a memory chip and send it to my parents (I bought them a digital picture frame. When I send them a new chip, they send me the old one for new updates)

 

[extreme8]

For the most part I just drop them in a folder named for the event where they were taken, but I also index them using ACDSee Pro.
I add keywords to each image so finding them later is much less of a hassle.
For example if I search for "kids, epcot, characters" it will show the pictures that have been tagged with those keywords - all of the pictures taken in epcot that include my kids and the characters.
I can narrow the search - "kids, epcot, mickey" - or make it more broad - "kids, characters, florida" - which would include all of WDW & Universal.
It will also let you burn your images to DVD and track which disk they're stored on. If I try and view one that isn't on the hard drive it will prompt me to insert the correct disk.
It takes some time upfront but it really simplifies things when you're searching for a particular image.

Very soon I'll be putting together a network attached RAID-5 storage array so I don't need to worry as much about disk space or data loss.

 

[0bli0]

i have them all arranged in Apple Aperture in 2 separate libraries. one of which is dedicated to the sports i shoot (rugby, cricket, baseball, etc.). and the other library is fully of the rest of the photos that i shoot - family, places, etc. they are keyworded and i can search across all images for things like exif data, dates, keywords, etc.

 

[Groucho]

Unfortunately, I'm horrible at organizing my photos. Generally, they go in folders organized by year. With my old Fuji PnS, it would reset the numbering every time you cleared the card, so I created folders named for the date I emptied the card onto the PC. The only organization is for photos that end up on one of my web sites.

I know that this is a terrible waste of good pictures that get hidden. What I'm like is to get everything organized and keep only the worthwhile pictures online, with the original (with original naming, etc) backed up onto a pair of DVDs.

I have some requirements, though:
I absolutely REFUSE to use a program that locks me in to using that program. For example, some programs may let you "tag" your photos or put them into little "albums" but that information is lost if you use any other program. That's not acceptable.
I want to be able to use my favorite-by-far photo viewer, Irfanview, to view everything.
I want it all to be quick and easy. No big, huge, bloated program.
I'd much prefer for it to be free, too!

The solution for tagging seems to be to use IPTC tagging, which doesn't modify the original JPG but can be searched. Irfanview lets you modify several at a time, but what I'd really like is the ability to add tags without destroying the existing ones. For example, for WDW photos, I want to select all of them and add the tags "Disney World". I can then add "Epcot" to the appropriate ones, maybe add my kid's name for one that he's in, etc.

There is a free Explorer add-on that has this functionality - but I fear that I cannot remember the name of it to save my life. (And I'm typing this from a parking lot with a sleeping kid in the backseat and waiting for my wife to finish her conference, so I can't check my home PC!) I played with it briefly but not enough to decide if I liked it or not. It also let you search by tag and put the pictures into a virtual "album" but you cannot flip through them with anything but its own slideshow. You can view with a normal viewer but navigating to other pictures keeps you in the original location.

Supposedly Adobe Bridge is good at tagging the photos, too, but I haven't played with that yet, either.

Maybe we need an industry-standard "album"file for photo viewing, like .m3u for MP3s.

The hardest part though, without a doubt, is actually tagging all the photos.

 

[handicap18]

I use Window's Explorer. I don't rename any of my photo's unless they have been edited and then its usually with a letter at the end of the original file name. Each year goes into its own file listed numeritically. I don't renumber the files after each media card change or reformat. When I first went digital i would seperate them into different folders by month and everything, but I found it way to difficult and took way to much time to find different pictures.

This method probably takes the same amount of time as using different folders, but this works for me. This was also the same way I would seperate my pictures when I got them back after being developed. I would put them in the photo album in the order they were taken.

I've tried using different software for organizing photos but I never liked any of them. I found it to much trouble.

I'll stick with my one folder per year in numeritical order.

 

[Groucho]

I'm back home now, so I can report that the program I was referring to is PixVue. It exists primarily for image management and is not a standalone program, but integrated into Windows Explorer. (Which is one of the problems for me, as I use a third-party file manager which doesn't seem to play perfectly well with PixVue... but I haven't given up hope yet.) It sounds good and users seem very happy. Oh, and it's free - I'll generally exhaust every possible free avenue before paying, especially for something like this - often, free products actually work better than pay products as they're written for what actual users want them to do, rather than what looks good on a feature list or whatnot.

Anyway, PixVue actually uses "XMP" (which is apparently the next generation of IPTC?) to store the metadata used to organize the pictures.

 

[boBQuincy]

DW and I have been organizing our images by year, month, and if necessary, day. For trips where we take a lot of photos, we set up a folder for the trip and subfolders for the days of the trip. We have *really* been taking a lot of photos and can come home with 6GB (each) to download.

We use BreezeBrowser for searching and this has worked ok but now there are just too many folders to search through for say, a certain image of Cinderella's Castle or yosemite Falls. We have outgrown our system and need a better way.

I am starting to use "keywords" for the images, in Adobe Bridge. It is fairly quick to select a group of images and tag them with a keyword like "castle" or "monorail". This allows Bridge to find all the tagged images by folder(s) or by the entire drive.
It is quick and also allows opening a selected image directly into Photoshop, which is what we use.

It's certainly not an inexpensive method but if you already have Photoshop and Bridge then everything you need is already there.

 

[Groucho]

I believe that Adobe Bridge uses the same IPTC tagging system as most other JPG taggers, so it should be interoperable with Irfanview and Pixvue and digiKam and most others.

 

[Groucho]

One other idea that might be worth considering (for the more tech-savvy) is using a web-based system to organize all your photos. Not something accessible from the internet (well, maybe if you wanted, but not necessarily), but a computer in your house running a basic web server setup - probably Apache and php and MySQL.

I'm thinking specifically of Gallery 2, but others might be comparable. There are some advantages - a central storing-house for all the photos, easily accessible from any computer in the house, thumbnails and different screen sizes are automatically created, easily searchable, organizing the photos is a breeze as is adding comments, etc.

Adding photos is easy as Gallery 2 has several different options, from just sucking up all the photos in a directory on the server to using a standalone program to easily transfer them. Getting them back out is not too tricky as you can use the shopping cart functionality - add the photos (or entire albums) you want to the "cart" then do a zip download, and it'll put all the pictures you wanted (the original, unresized versions) into a zip file for you.

The downsides are that the tags don't go into the original JPG (unlike IPTC taggers like Irfanview, Bridge, etc), it can potentially be more hassle getting the pictures out, and for slideshow-type viewing, it'll never touch Irfanview. (Though it does have a few slideshow options.)

Oh, and then there's the whole matter of having a system set up with Apache/php/MySQL. (They'll run on nearly any OS, but FreeBSD is my favorite for that kind of work.)

I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. But it seems like potentially a good setup.

You could also do it with a web host, if you get enough storage space, and just hide the albums that you don't want the public to see, or make them accessible only to certain users.

 

[fitzperry]

Nevermind. Problem solved.

 

[Lanshark]

I have several hundred digital images that I want to have prints made of. I'm trying to decide weather I should have them printed and organize them into albums myself or if I should have photobooks made. Has anyone else wrestled with this type of thing? I have only used Imagestation but don't know if that's the best place to have photobooks made. If I get the prints made I don't even know the best type of photo album to use to organize. It would probably take months to organize all of these photos.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Steve's Girl]

I have used both snapfish and shutterfly. I always have good intentions of organizing them into albums myself, but just don't seem to get around to it. I will usually have a book printed that summarizes the year and then may also print some smaller ones for special occasions (ie, Christmas, family event, etc.)

 

[Pea-n-Me]

I do both, and yes, it's a struggle.

I always do an album of our trips right away. I've done various types of albums from standard ones to photobooks to scrapbooks. I've also ordered photo albums on DVD which are nice. I ordered one in the fall directly from Disney and that came out great, I love the music and there were Disney pictures in there as well. The photobook from Shutterfly was really nice. It took me a long time to make and organize (I think about 12 hrs), but it was well worth the effort - I added extra pages and had some technical difficulties with the website, so that's part of what took so long. I often shoot 1200-1500 pictures per trip so it takes a long time to go through them all and make the albums.

During the year, I also shoot a lot of everyday pictures. I try to regularly order prints online and throw them in a regular album. It's less important that it's perfect than getting them in there. I also have a small HP printer at home for one or two pictures here and there which is really convenient. For regular albums, I buy the ones they sell at WalMart which are maroon leather bound and have slots for 3 photos on each page with room to write notes which comes in handy. My kids love looking through them. I still have a lot of pictures I have to put into albums but at least if I can keep up with the present ones, I'm happy. HTH. Good luck.

 

[JarettK]

I get photobooks made when mypublisher.com has really really good sales. (Like 50% off or more)

Other than that, Ill just have 4x6s made or print them myself, and keep them on hand until I want to make a specific scrapbook or album out of it.