Organizing your photos - software used, best methods and categories

[Jeff]

You make a very clear and excellent point -- the whole point of maintaining a photography data base is so that you can retrieve images. The first order of business is developing a system that works for you.


But here's a question. Suppose your sister calls one day and is going to throw a graduation party for your nephew. She'd like you to bring a slideshow of pictures you've taken of him over the years doing different things, like family gatherings, fishing trips, travel, etc. How would you go about creating that slideshow?

 

[dlevitt]

Glen Barrington wrote:

I moved away from Lightroom about a month ago for ACDSee Pro 6. One of the things I found was that Lr made it too easy to simply not care about the physical organization of my photos, I tended to dump everything into one folder and let Lr sort it out.

[snippage of rest of the response]

I would cast a vote in favor of managed libraries, such as the default setting on iPhoto and is more typical in Aperture installations.

The trouble is with any OS more recent than CP/M 1.1 you really do not have a mapping available as to where a file is in the 'physical organization' of the storage media. [Some device drivers may have some additional knowledge, but that is not shared with the rest of the system]

Since you need to take the software's word for what bits/sectors/clusters are part of which photo anyway, why not use a specialized tool to manage photos instead of managing files?

Metadata is the issue for organization, and coercing files in to paths in the file system is just using one flavor of metadata where everything is just part of the file name.

 

[Osvaldo Cristo]

Jeff wrote:

But here's a question. Suppose your sister calls one day and is going to throw a graduation party for your nephew. She'd like you to bring a slideshow of pictures you've taken of him over the years doing different things, like family gatherings, fishing trips, travel, etc. How would you go about creating that slideshow?

Good question. Actually I had to do similar task a couple of times since I started my data base.

Despite I have a considerable data base size, it is organized in only in 700 named folders. Just browsing by the folder´s name it was easy to select only the probable folders where I would find the subject I was looking for. I just open those specific folders and at thumbnail display mode I quickly selected and copied the interesting ones.

All the selection process took less than a couple of hours. Not so bad if you consider the simplicity of my present structure.

Of course if I would to make such kind of task more frequently I would look for a different scheme to organize my data. Again: the organization of the data depends from your application or retrieve methods/needs.

Best regards,

 

[Lee Jay]

Jeff wrote:

ljfinger wrote:

Folders by date is nuts. It's nothing but redundant metadata in the most important and compatible metadata field - path/filename.

That's what I said, and is part of the DAM Book approach. Folders are only convenient 'buckets' for holding files, and their names should be irrelevant.

No, I said the opposite.

Dates are redundant. The most important and compatible metadata field of all is the path/filename. Wasting it on irrelevant and redundant metadata is foolish, and the DAM book is dead wrong on this topic and has led many astray in my opinion.

 

[Lee Jay]

Glen Barrington wrote:

I've discovered that, especially, my older photos, have mysteriously had their metadata stripped from them and I' have had to recreate, as best I can that "taken date".

Using a tool like Lightroom, that doesn't touch your original data, prevents this sort of thing from happening. Further, backups, executed wisely, would detect this sort of change.

 

[AnthonyL]

Jeff wrote:

You make a very clear and excellent point -- the whole point of maintaining a photography data base is so that you can retrieve images. The first order of business is developing a system that works for you.

But here's a question. Suppose your sister calls one day and is going to throw a graduation party for your nephew. She'd like you to bring a slideshow of pictures you've taken of him over the years doing different things, like family gatherings, fishing trips, travel, etc. How would you go about creating that slideshow?

Just jumping in here but I use Picasa on Windows and keep the Face Recognition up to date. My images are scattered over the computer - a result mainly of copy the last computer contents to the new computer for the past few generations and never really getting around to consolidating everything.

A couple of other things I do since I started shooting RAW:

1) Generally batch rename photos maintaining the original file name

2) Move processed images into subject specific folders

3) Archive RAW by shooting date (auto created on import)

4) Use the free Locate program to regular index my drives. I can pretty well immediately find any RAW just by putting in the image number

I'm only on about 9,000 images but I can find all photos of any friend or relative within seconds.

 

[Jeff]

ljfinger wrote:

Jeff wrote:

ljfinger wrote:

Folders by date is nuts. It's nothing but redundant metadata in the most important and compatible metadata field - path/filename.

That's what I said, and is part of the DAM Book approach. Folders are only convenient 'buckets' for holding files, and their names should be irrelevant.

No, I said the opposite.

Dates are redundant. The most important and compatible metadata field of all is the path/filename. Wasting it on irrelevant and redundant metadata is foolish, and the DAM book is dead wrong on this topic and has led many astray in my opinion.

 

[Lee Jay]

Jeff wrote:

OK, I now get your meaning and think I understand your point.

But I have to respectfully disagree. The most useful thing for a filename, imho, is that it be unique serial number for the image. The most useful thing about folders is storage containers for managing location on disk, backups, and the like. For some folders are a useful way of organizing materials related to discreet assignments, which makes sense. For me chronological organization of folders by year, season, perhaps major event makes sense. But the to embed more detailed meaning to the folder names, imho, is using the wrong tool for the job.

Use metadata for metadata.

Path names ARE metadata! That's what the DAM book seems to miss and what it's loyal readership seems to totally fall for.

Use filenames as serial numbers, folders as storage object. Separating these functions is a basic principle of the DAM book, with which I agree.

And which, in my opinion, is dead wrong.

Path names are by far the most compatible form of metadata - everything can read them, even across OSs and devices. Only Lightroom can read LR collections, and they aren't stored with the files. Lose LR or lose your catalog, and you've lost your collections.

Keywords are a little better than collections as they can at least be stored in the files (but are not, by default, using LR), but only some applications can read them, and there are often conflicts between applications when it comes to hierarchical keywords and synonyms. The problem with keywords for me is, I had more than 60,000 images before I got LR 1 (the first application I used that supported keywords) and not one of them had keywords. I never got time to go back and add them, and I've never had time to properly keyword my new images meaning I now have 200,000 unkeyworded images. Fortunately, using the path names and the embedded metadata means I can find what I want usually in seconds.

 

[morepix]

Method #1: When I first bought Lightroom, I had great hopes for its organizing facilities, with it's collections and tags. However, I've found it less of a panacea than I hoped. The trouble is, as soon as you finish cataloging all of your multi thousand images with collections and keywords, a classification idea will occur to you tomorrow that applies not only to the photo(s) that suggested the idea, but all those you've taken in the past. So you realize that you really need to revisit all 30,000 of your images to classify those that also fit in that new category. At that point, it becomes Bah! Humbug!

Method #2: So my principal organization remains by date, supplemented by memory of what I took when. That method has the drawback that it deteriorates with time, at an ever-increasing deterioration rate as the years go by.

Method #3: The most streamlined and reliable method is to delete everything that's more than a year old. I haven't done that ... yet.

 

[Leonard Migliore]

Mike_PEAT wrote:

Leonard Migliore wrote:

photogizmo wrote:

What tools are you using to organise your photos? ie. lightroom, bridge, etc.

I put every shooting event into a dated folder with a descriptive name.

That's all I need to do. If I need to find a day's images, I use Windows' or Mac's Find command to search for a particular keyword. Processed images from that day's shoot are in a subdirectory from that day.

Anything more than that is going overboard (for me).

Also I certainly would NEVER use a program like Lightroom to manage my files...I've heard too many horror stories of lost images due to Lightroom.

I've never heard of this and don't see how it could happen. As I noted, my RAW files are all in folders that are named things like "Point Lobos 061813". No matter what Lightroom does (and I haven't experienced any strange behavior from Lightroom anyway), I'm still gonna have the same RAW files in that folder.

 

[Jeff]

ljfinger wrote:

Jeff wrote:

OK, I now get your meaning and think I understand your point.

But I have to respectfully disagree. The most useful thing for a filename, imho, is that it be unique serial number for the image. The most useful thing about folders is storage containers for managing location on disk, backups, and the like. For some folders are a useful way of organizing materials related to discreet assignments, which makes sense. For me chronological organization of folders by year, season, perhaps major event makes sense. But the to embed more detailed meaning to the folder names, imho, is using the wrong tool for the job.

Use metadata for metadata.

Path names ARE metadata! That's what the DAM book seems to miss and what it's loyal readership seems to totally fall for.

Use filenames as serial numbers, folders as storage object. Separating these functions is a basic principle of the DAM book, with which I agree.

And which, in my opinion, is dead wrong.

Path names are by far the most compatible form of metadata - everything can read them, even across OSs and devices. Only Lightroom can read LR collections, and they aren't stored with the files. Lose LR or lose your catalog, and you've lost your collections.

Keywords are a little better than collections as they can at least be stored in the files (but are not, by default, using LR), but only some applications can read them, and there are often conflicts between applications when it comes to hierarchical keywords and synonyms. The problem with keywords for me is, I had more than 60,000 images before I got LR 1 (the first application I used that supported keywords) and not one of them had keywords. I never got time to go back and add them, and I've never had time to properly keyword my new images meaning I now have 200,000 unkeyworded images. Fortunately, using the path names and the embedded metadata means I can find what I want usually in seconds.

 

[DenWil]

I create a folder and name it.

 

[Lee Jay]

Jeff wrote:

To each his own. You seem to be arguing that since you never bothered to use keywords, that they must be a bad idea.

No, keywords are fine, and have their use for those that have time to use them (I estimate that it would take me approximately 1,000 man-hours to properly keyword my images at this point - without some automated help, I'm not even going to start). My argument is that intentionally ignoring the most important and universally-accessible piece of metadata (the path name) is crazy and self-destructive.

 

[JudyN]

Jeff wrote:

But here's a question. Suppose your sister calls one day and is going to throw a graduation party for your nephew. She'd like you to bring a slideshow of pictures you've taken of him over the years doing different things, like family gatherings, fishing trips, travel, etc. How would you go about creating that slideshow?

I've done just that with Lightroom. My husband scanned in hundreds of slides of he and his ex wife and kids on long summer vacations in American National Parks. I attempted to get what I could out of them (the slides were faded and discolored -- if you have slides, scan them!) and loaded them into Lightroom. I put in keyword tags for the people in each one and identified the locations as best I could with the help of my husband who was there... I also use a metadata tag to identify trips or events so I can find all of a particular category.

I made a number of booklets from these pictures. The first were the summer vacations, one at a time. Then I decided why not select out each person and make a booklet for them. Since I had keyworded them by their names, it was trivial to find all of the pictures with each of the kids in them.

When I do something like this I use collections to save all of my potential candidates and then work from the collection to make the final cut and ordering.

 

[Create Dont Imitate]

Bravo...!

Because I will never purchase anything from Adobe ever again as long as I live... I too have gone back to creating files and folders... and naming them... and organizing them myself. Once I started the basic process it became more intuitive and faster because it is all tailored to me and my jobs as I know them.

I refuse to be held hostage to anyone elses software and I am finding that it all works better to simply do it myself. There is absolutely nothing difficult about it.

 

[klopus]

[No message]

 

[technic]

JudyN wrote:

Jeff wrote:

But here's a question. Suppose your sister calls one day and is going to throw a graduation party for your nephew. She'd like you to bring a slideshow of pictures you've taken of him over the years doing different things, like family gatherings, fishing trips, travel, etc. How would you go about creating that slideshow?

I've done just that with Lightroom. My husband scanned in hundreds of slides of he and his ex wife and kids on long summer vacations in American National Parks. I attempted to get what I could out of them (the slides were faded and discolored -- if you have slides, scan them!) and loaded them into Lightroom. I put in keyword tags for the people in each one and identified the locations as best I could with the help of my husband who was there... I also use a metadata tag to identify trips or events so I can find all of a particular category.

I made a number of booklets from these pictures. The first were the summer vacations, one at a time. Then I decided why not select out each person and make a booklet for them. Since I had keyworded them by their names, it was trivial to find all of the pictures with each of the kids in them.

When I do something like this I use collections to save all of my potential candidates and then work from the collection to make the final cut and ordering.

I'm also busy making books from a large collection of images I took over the last 35 years.

Part of these are a few thousand scanned and restored slides + negatives, where I only know the date if I took notes at the time. Another part of them are images from the early digital era before 2000 when I used many different cameras due to my work. In those early days there were sometimes problems with the metadata e.g. wrong data settings in camera (a sure way to confuse programs that organise by metadata ...). Fortunately most of the early digital stuff was stored in folders that were organised by date, so I could still find approximate dates for most of them.

My images are currently organised in folders by type (scans of slide, negative, print; and digital images), date (year / season) and subject (e.g. family pictures) that contain images of 1 year at most, or lately 1 season. I have experience with cataloguing software or even image file types going out of date and requiring conversion or starting over again; as others have mentioned such a folder structure is almost foolproof whatever happens.

Making a book is lots of work for me now, also because my book software (Blurb) requires resized copies of images for best quality. After printing a book I often discover other images that I could have used ... I have considered Lightroom for organising like you do, but I don't like the idea of having to import and keyword maybe 50.000 images. It would be different if I had started after 2000 or so, with all images having reliable metadata ...

 

[jonathanj]

To the people with large collections of scanned slides / negatives, how did you go about sorting and selecting them? The year before last (and it really did take a year) I scanned my pre-digital negatives and my parents' slides and negatives. Now I have 10,000 TIF files on an external drive, folder per film, and I've yet to work out how to approach them. Some I have notes on, some I can recognise places and/or dates, some are blurred photos of complete strangers....

For post-digital camear photos I use Lightroom, but with no metadata on the scans I'm not sure whether it will be a help or a hindrance - even things like viewing pictures in non-random order is going to be difficult...

 

[evoprox]

I'm using AcDSee Pro6, it gives you lots of options (catalogues, tags, folders, ...) but doesn't dictate anything. I've been using folders ever since I bought my first digital snapper, the structure is mainly chronological, with exceptions - special folders for sessions, jobs, themes.

Cheers, Ken

 

[edhannon]

jonathanj wrote:

To the people with large collections of scanned slides / negatives, how did you go about sorting and selecting them? The year before last (and it really did take a year) I scanned my pre-digital negatives and my parents' slides and negatives. Now I have 10,000 TIF files on an external drive, folder per film, and I've yet to work out how to approach them. Some I have notes on, some I can recognise places and/or dates, some are blurred photos of complete strangers....

For post-digital camear photos I use Lightroom, but with no metadata on the scans I'm not sure whether it will be a help or a hindrance - even things like viewing pictures in non-random order is going to be difficult...

I scan the negatives and slides, put them in folders organized by approximate year and month, import them into LR, and then do the same triage I did for my pre-LR digital images.

Triage sorts then into three categories:

1. Junk (OOF, really bad exposure, etc.) - delete.

2. Clearly keepers with known subjects - add keywords, especially names of individuals and places.

3. Need further review to determine what it is - flag.

It will take awhile to do 10,000 images - even at 10 seconds per image that is around 30 hours.

However, any sort of review/triage will take at least that long. So you might as well tag the knowns with keywords while you triage.