Organizing photos

[Lanshark]

Thanks for the help. I'm embarrassed to say I've got about 5 years of pictures to get printed and organized. I've organized a couple of photobooks on imagestation but they're about $100 apiece with about 400 pictures in each one. I've got three partially done but am having a hard time pulling the trigger on that much money.

 

[go cowboys]

I am really getting fired up about my new D80 but I have never used a computer program to store, edit and print the pics. Can anyone suggest a cheap (read as free) software program that I should use? I have heard that picasa is good and free but I would love more help.

Thanks

 

[Groucho]

It depends on what you want to do. You don't need anything to "store" the photos, they just sit on your computer like any other file.

For editing, it depends how much you want to do... for free, I think your only choice for "serious" editing is Gimp.

I use Irfanview (free, I have it linked in my signature) for nearly all my photo stuff. It can do "basic" editing (colors, filters, cropping, resizing, add text, but not stuff like change background, clone out things you don't want, etc), it has good printing capabilities, and it can do a good job of adding comments, keywords, etc, and letting you search on them later. It's not the most user-friendly program in the world but it's not too tricky, and it's incredibly powerful for a small, free download.

 

[gruZ]

I like Gimp as well - free and Photoshop-like

For organization, I like Picasa. It's a free Google program, that allows basic photo editing, uploading, e-mailing, etc. I use it mostly as a way to quickly find a picture I'm looking for.

I keep the pictures on my hard drive (and back-up drive) in a month / year filing system. In other words, in MY PICTURES, I have a 2006 folder, and then a 0106 folder - meaning all pictures taken from January of 06 are in this subdirectory. Picasa will keep your file structure, let you view thumbnails, and add keywords etc.

Whatever system works for you will be find - but make sure you have some sort of system - keeping all your pictures in one large folder will create huge headaches down the road.

 

[LinkDIS]

I stopped using Picasa after discovered that it created many small info files on each of the folder it scans. There are several very good alternatives on the market. I checked and tried about 8-9 digital photo management tools. And after comparing PicaJet and Adobe PhotoShop Album decided that the first one is the suite to all of my requirements although I send several suggestions to its development team regarding built Flickr Uploader. Highly recommended.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

It's not particularly cheap (until you consider the value of the time it saves you), but I recommend that you look at Adobe Lightroom. It's keywording and collections capabilities make it very good for organizing photos. It's a really good photo processor. It has good printing capabilities.

It is not, however, a photo editor. It's best if used in conjunction with an editor. The thing that I love about it is that it allows me to process a set of pictures much faster than I could with Photoshop alone. If you only take 100 pictures a year, it's a waste. If you take 1,000 shots a month, it's pretty easy to justify the expense.

 

[go cowboys]

I stopped using Picasa after discovered that it created many small info files on each of the folder it scans.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Does it take a greater amount of hard drive space?

 

[AndrewWG]

Ok, here is a question about organization. Is there a program that will create a database of sorts so that I could type in Disney and have it search all of my photos for Disney related photos? I realize that I would have to tell it keywords for each photo or group of photos so that it would know what to look for. I would like something that could pull up, for example, all Disney photos and could also pull a subset of the same photos up if I typed in Mickey or Donald etc.

Am I making sense? I don't want to have to search every darned folder manually to find pictures of the castle or something, I want a program to do it for me.

Andy

 

[Master Mason]

Adobe bridge will do that, I am almost certain that Lightroom will as well.

But I think that Infranview will aslo do it for free, I am sure that there are many others as well.

I go by the file and naming system for mine.

if I shoot a baseball game I will call all the pics Kenny Baseball Game 4-30-07 -- ## for example, pretty easy to find that way.

 

[Master Mason]

also, if you have a kid in school, you qualify for the edu discount at campus tech http://www.campustech.com Light room for $94

This is where I got CS2 as well, for about half price. My son uses it for his digital photo class, so I actually wasn't even cheating at all in this case.

 

[AndrewWG]

also, if you have a kid in school, you qualify for the edu discount at campus tech http://www.campustech.com Light room for $94

This is where I got CS2 as well, for about half price. My son uses it for his digital photo class, so I actually wasn't even cheating at all in this case.

Thats good to know. How about if she is in 2nd grade? I don't figure she will use high tech software for quite awhile. So far she is only up to Spongebob and Webkins. We have awhile to wait!

I will look into Lightroom though. I don't want to have to re-name everything from the past but I am doing a similar naming thing as of a few months ago. Seems to work pretty well. With many many GB's of photos, I just want a program to do the search for me.

Thanks!

Andy

 

[Master Mason]

Thats good to know. How about if she is in 2nd grade? I don't figure she will use high tech software for quite awhile. So far she is only up to Spongebob and Webkins. We have awhile to wait!

I will look into Lightroom though. I don't want to have to re-name everything from the past but I am doing a similar naming thing as of a few months ago. Seems to work pretty well. With many many GB's of photos, I just want a program to do the search for me.

Thanks!

Andy

True, but have you taken a picture for her class?? Or of her in a school funtion? All they ask is their be a student.

 

[AndrewWG]

True, but have you taken a picture for her class?? Or of her in a school funtion? All they ask is their be a student.

Many, many pics of school functions and stuff. Hmmm.....

Thanks again!

Andy

 

[Groucho]

Ok, here is a question about organization. Is there a program that will create a database of sorts so that I could type in Disney and have it search all of my photos for Disney related photos? I realize that I would have to tell it keywords for each photo or group of photos so that it would know what to look for. I would like something that could pull up, for example, all Disney photos and could also pull a subset of the same photos up if I typed in Mickey or Donald etc.

Am I making sense? I don't want to have to search every darned folder manually to find pictures of the castle or something, I want a program to do it for me.

Andy

The best way to do this is with actually putting the information into the picture itself, not creating a separate database that's tied to just one program.

There's IPTC data that has ready-made fields for all sorts of, or the comment field in the EXIF data. I believe that most organizers will use one or both of these. Irfanview generally sticks stuff in IPTC, and you can edit many files at once with the Thumbnails part (similar to Adobe Bridge). This data is automatically grabbed when I upload my photos to my gallery, so you can search by any of the keywords.

Irfanview has a nice search functionality that can search all these fields, I think like to choose "view as thumbnails" which gives you thumbnail views of all the results, and you can view them full-size just as if they were the only files in the directory.

My gripe is that you can't (unless I just haven't figured out how) just add keywords with Irfanview Thumbnails, rather than edit and/or replace what's already there. What I'd really love is to be able to highlight all my trip photos, add an appropriate keyword, then mix and match other keywords. Adding them works fine in Irfanview, it just gets tricky if I want to, say, tag all "epcot" photos, all "mgm" photos, then tag photos with my son in them - the last tag will set all the tags the same, not add it to the rest.

I think you can do that with PixVue, but I haven't had any luck using that. I don't think Adobe Bridge can do it either, but I'm not positive - I tried it and ended up going back to Irfanview Thumbnails fairly quickly.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Lightroom also embeds keyword information in the photos. One of it's nice features is that you can create keyword hierarchies. You start with a general keyword and can then create keywords beneath it with more detail. For example, if I tag a photo with the keyword "Festival of the Lion King", it will also be tagged with "Animal Kingdom", "Walt Disney World", "Florida", "United States". If I add my nephew as a keyword, it'll inlcude "William Barbieri", "Michael Barbieri's Family", "Mark's Relatives", "Relatives".

That makes it really easy to add a large set of keywords quickly. Now I can pull up picture sets like "all pictures with my Brother's family taken in Florida."

The one big limitation that I haven't figured out how to overcome is "shared" keywords. For example, if a kid in the neighborhood is on my son's soccer team and in his first grade class, I'd like to see the same kid's name show up under "Bullfrogs (soccer team)", "Neighbors", "Friends", "Mrs. Patrick's First Grade Class." I could do that with iMatch, but not Lightroom.

If you want a program that is a pure play image organizer, I don't think you can beat iMatch (unless you drop tens of thousands on some serious stock photo management software). It's an incredible keywording program with more features than you can dream of. I used it for a while, but dropped it in favor of Lightroom. Lightroom is far inferior as an organizer, but it's good enough and it does many other things I need.

 

[mabas9395]

The two best things I've done for my photography to help me out AFTER I have taken the picture is get a monitor calibrator and Adobe Lightroom!

 

[go cowboys]

Just watched the lightroom video on the website and am totally impressed. I do not even think that I know enough to be as imoressed as I should be. It sounds like this is the most user friendly software and the student discount makes it not so bad to buy either. Thanks for that idea.

I also looked at irfanview, but not sure that it is as easy as lightroom. especially when you want to add a tag. Thanks for that comment as I have never thought of that aspect.

thanks to all who have replied.

 

[KrazyPete]

I use Lightroom too but I got it before the price went up. I highly recommend it anyway. Here's a link to some videos that do a great job of giving you a brief overview of the major features:

NAPP: Lightroom Videos

I've used Picasa and I didn't hate it. You may find that it does everything you need it to do. I'm not sure sure it will recognize your NEF files if you decide to shoot RAW. There may not be a free option that can do that.

Have you tried the "Picture Project" cd that came with your camera? I don't know how well it does at organizing the pictures but a well thought out directory structure may be all you really need for that.

 

[photo_chick]

The two best things I've done for my photography to help me out AFTER I have taken the picture is get a monitor calibrator and Adobe Lightroom!

Same here. I love my Spyder amd I love Lightroom.

 

[ChgoLaniteVal]

I need help with photos & clips. I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. I am willing to buy a better program (as long as it's not too expensive) because there is no easy way to recatalog stuff I had prior to owning that program (and now). I also want to know how, if possible, to get all of my movie clips in order-without breaks (like the old-fashioned videos) & get them to DVD.​

Thanks!!