Photo Cataloging/#'ing and naming system you like, find hellpful etc.

[mom007]

Hi, I've always taken a lot of pictures in my life but now that I have a DSLR I'm really taking a TON of pictures.

Can anybody point me to a good way to either catalog them, some numbering system (seems like they end up renumbered in camera after you delete others or your sharing webite renumbers them etc.) or HOW to break down things into more manageable terms? I use the ViewNX (Nikon) to download from camera to computer,,Picasa was a pain so I'm trying out SmugMug to see how I like that. I'm wanting to be able to easily upload, email pictures, post on a forum for help or a contest. Simple, simple is my goal. That's why I'm 86'ing Picasa and photobucket. Everytime you turn around, it's changed or harder to work with.

Another thing Is there any special stickers that can be put on a SD photo memory card that will still allow you to put the card back into the camera? For example. Each I'm looking for a picture on a memory card I have to put each card into the camera to see what's on the card. The plastic container can get switched around when you're in a hurry so that is hit or miss. It would be nice to just easily look at the front of the card to see a vacation name etc. I've used fine permanent markers but some cards labels are black, so that won't work.
Thx, Nicole

 

[Doug Pardee]

You have a choice to make. You could:

• make the effort to learn about Digital Asset Management and to implement a good DAM system, or
• try to get by with simpler techniques until you have collected so many photos that you can't deal with them any more, and then make the effort to learn about and implement a DAM system and spend who knows how long going back over thousands of your old photos and cataloguing them into your DAM system.

You can tell what I think.

I suggest that you read Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers" (2nd edition is out now). He gives a really good and easy to understand overview of the various systems that people use, and explains the strengths and weaknesses of each system.

Trying to catalog photos by folder name and file name is a process that is doomed to failure if you collect a lot of photos. You'll almost certainly need to be able to "file" your photos in multiple ways—a snap of Joe and Susan at the beach might be filed under Joe, Susan, beach, and the date—and the file name really should be permanent once you've assigned it during or right after downloading.

If you're determined to go the folder/filename way, the technique that most people seem to find usable is to have folders by year, each containing folders by date. The date folders will typically have a name like 08-31-At-the-beach, so that they'll sort into date order and still give you a clue what the particular "shoot" was. You may end up with multiple folders for the same date if you do multiple shoots, and if you do that a lot you might choose to use subfolders instead.

 

[ShelliDawn]

Another thing Is there any special stickers that can be put on a SD photo memory card that will still allow you to put the card back into the camera? For example. Each I'm looking for a picture on a memory card I have to put each card into the camera to see what's on the card. The plastic container can get switched around when you're in a hurry so that is hit or miss. It would be nice to just easily look at the front of the card to see a vacation name etc. I've used fine permanent markers but some cards labels are black, so that won't work.

I'm not sure I understand. Do you not delete your pictures from the SD card once you've downloaded them to the computer? If not, why not? Are you using the SD cards as backup?

My camera has CF cards which are bigger and I label them with my name, phone number and country on them in hopes that if they're lost and someone finds them they can contact me.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellidawn/

 

[Darrakk]

I find it isn't too hard to just leave everything named as it was in the camera, and just put the files in folders named for the dates the pictures were taken. If there is a special occasion like a wedding or birthday party of something, the folder gets named accordingly.

 

[mom007]

Doug, Thanks, I will check out this DAM system. I take a lot and have thousands of photos. As I'm learning manual mode for my DSLR I'm taking more than I keep as a learning tool but am making myself pare it down after I look and see what I did wrong etc.

I'll have to go thru my new camera and my old P&S but better to start now. Thanks for the info here. , Nicole

 

[mom007]

ShelliDawn, Yea, I'm reluctant to dump them off the SD card for good. I don't trust my computer and invariably a few years down the road we end up getting a new one. I really need to learn how to get them all off the computer onto a flash or zip drive or better yet, to burn them onto a DVD. I'm finding computer stuff frustration can work me up into a big lather to put it mildly, that I've just avoided it. Thx, Nicole

 

[Hugowolf]

ShelliDawn, Yea, I'm reluctant to dump them off the SD card for good. I don't trust my computer and invariably a few years down the road we end up getting a new one. I really need to learn how to get them all off the computer onto a flash or zip drive or better yet, to burn them onto a DVD. I'm finding computer stuff frustration can work me up into a big lather to put it mildly, that I've just avoided it. Thx, Nicole

Keeping images on SD cards really isn’t a good system, and I think it is the main of the cause of your ‘filing system’ problems. You really need to get them off the cards and onto some backup strorage.

• Floppy Discs: they are gone, and would have been too small anyhow
• Zip Discs: you may not have noticed this, but Zip drives have disappeared too.
• Flash Dives: your SD card is a flash drive, they are just too small for backup purposes
• CD ROMs: at 700 MB (0.7 GB) are way too small
• DVD: Standard one-sided DVDs are only 4.7 GB, my smallest camera CF card is 4GB. DVD are too small for backup too, but are a possibility if you want to use several.
• Portable hard drives: portable USB hard disc drives are now incredibly inexpensive per GB.

You need to get all you shots off SD cards and downloaded to your main hard drive. Then backup the images from your main HD to another HD or several DVDs. One terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) portable USB hard drives are available from Walmart, Target, and office supply stores for very little more than $100.

Think of your SD cards are temporary storage. You should be downloading after every shoot, and backing up the downloaded images frequently. Also, it isn’t good practice to delete individual images from SD cards, then reuse them. Apart from the numbering problems, it is preferable to download and reformat the card to avoid fragmentation problems.

Once you have all your shots on a HD, then you have numerous possibilities for cataloging and indexing all your images. I use Adobe Lightroom, but there are other cheaper or free alternatives. Although Lightroom has some image manipulation tools, it main purpose is for cataloging and searching. For every image (or batches of images), you can add key words, location data, star ratings, color coding, captions, titles, etc, etc.

Once cataloged, you can easily find that shot of Aunt Mable taken in Paris in Aug of 2003. Or all the images of Uncle Joe taken anywhere at any time or date. Or all the images with water in them but not taken at the beach. Or all the images taken with a Nikon whatever at f/8 at a focal length of 200 mm.

The camera, lens, focal length, aperture, and date/time is already there for each photo, you do not have to catalog that, it will automatically be cataloged for later searches. You have to add the keywords you may later want to search for. I recently cataloged 25,000 images. I would strongly suggest that you start cataloging as soon as possible so that you avoid such a task.

Brian A.

 

[ShelliDawn]

ShelliDawn, Yea, I'm reluctant to dump them off the SD card for good. I don't trust my computer and invariably a few years down the road we end up getting a new one. I really need to learn how to get them all off the computer onto a flash or zip drive or better yet, to burn them onto a DVD. I'm finding computer stuff frustration can work me up into a big lather to put it mildly, that I've just avoided it. Thx, Nicole

Using SD cards as backup storage is a very expensive way to go. For example a SanDisk Ultra II 16GB SD HC Card is priced at $110.00 (CAD) where I'm located. That's $6.88 a GB. On the other hand, the Vantec NexStar 3 external hard drive with a 750GB capacity is $135.00 (CAD). That's 18 cents a GB!!

Also, asl you have already discovered, it's not a great way to track/find your photos.

My advice while you're learning about DAM is do NOT buy any SD cards to use as backup. It's a waste of money. In the short term, have somebody show you how to burn DVDs until you know enough to set up a good DAM system which will (hopefully) include backing up to hard drives.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellidawn/

 

[mom007]

Good info Brian. What brands of external H.drive should I be looking at? Any features I should know about to make sure and get or to avoid? Are they all created equally? Any size that would be too small for the future? Currently I'd say I've taken maybe 6-7K pictures since I got my D90 (Feb '09) and am learning the whole manual photography thing. The photo triangle thing has started to really click in my head so that # of bad photos should go down but I'm just a big picture taker. Question: How many times on a 4 Gb card can you dump the contents of the card to your hard drive, reformat (effectively-delete) and shoot again? At what point should you stop, throw out and start with a fresh SDHC? Just thinking here... Thx, Nicole

 

[Hugowolf]

Question: How many times on a 4 Gb card can you dump the contents of the card to your hard drive, reformat (effectively-delete) and shoot again? At what point should you stop, throw out and start with a fresh SDHC?

NAND based flash memory used to be rated at 100,000 erase cycles for consumer grade flash. If you were to download and reformat at the end of each days shoot, then your card would last a couple of hundred years (on average). If instead you are dong this on an image by image basis, it may actually fail well before the camera fails.

Copying bulk data from the flash drive (ie downloading), then reformatting has the same effect as copying one image then deleting it. Putting it simply, each time you delete a file and then rewrite, whole blocks of data have to be erased and rewritten. Downloading and reformatting is more efficient than single image deletion, because both have similar overheads as far as wear and tear is concerned, but for single image deletion, the wear and tear occurs for each image rather than many images.

What brands of external H.drive should I be looking at? Any features I should know about to make sure and get or to avoid? Are they all created equally?

I can’t recommend any particular brand of HD. Manufacture X could easily have one model made in the US, another made in China, and another subcontracted to a company in India that in turn subcontracts that to a Taiwanese company; and the third party Taiwanese company could end up with the lowest average failure rate.

Have a look at a mega site, such as Amazon, and look at the user reviews/ratings for the models you are interested in.

Any size that would be too small for the future?

In the future they will have larger capacities and will be cheaper per unit capacity. Look for the size (capacity really) that is currently the cheapest per megabyte. There will always be a capacity that has optimal cost. Just like SD cards, you pay a premium for 1 GB cards and for 16 GB cards, 4 or 8 GB cards have the most bytes for the money at the moment.

Brian A.

 

[doady]

For the file names, I just keep the names given by the Olympus camera, since Olympus actually gives file names:

PMDDSSSS.jpg

M = month (1-C)
D = day (1-30)
X = shutter count

Folder names are the dates the photos were downloaded. Like "2009-08-21". Adobe PSE Organiser and Windows Photo Gallery do this automatically.

When I burn to DVD for back, I have specifiy my own custom name for DVD. I using the earliest photo date and the latest photo date, to make everything all photos easy to find later. For example my last DVD was titled "090704-090811" for example.

With dates for files, folders, and DVDs, it is easier to pinpoint the location of a specific file, I think.

 

[mom007]

Brian, So I'm reading the reviews on amazon for the most popular ones and I'm hearing terms like failure rate, tipped over and never worked again, all data lost, etc.

So then I think, okay what about the non portable ext hard drives. Looked at those and saw that I had to watch out for how hot they got, early signs of impending failure etc. I'm going to get one only for the use of getting my pictures off my computer and camera as a back up device. Would I be able to turn off/on a non portable one just for backing up the photos like once a week or do I have to leave it on all the time.

On the portable ones it sounds like the minute you plug it into the USB drive, that starts it up. Then I came across stuff like, it should have more than just the USB it can plug into like SATA or 2 others.

What is the most likely 2nd plug in way I should choose for any computer upgrade we do the future? Then there is something else like version 1 or version 2 (not saying it right but that was earlier today),,anything better in one than another?

And to think I was all set to just go down to Office Depot and buy a 500 Gb they had on sale. Do you think I'd be okay with Western Digital? Should I buy an extended warranty even though that wouldn't get back any data lost on a failed ext H drive? thx, Nicole

 

[GregBrave]

Hi,

I am having the same problems you do with backing up my photos. I was burning my photos on DVDs but now I am thinking about buying an external hard drive. I am thinking about portable HD. In any case you can plug the HD only to back up the data on it and then to turn it off. If it has a USB connection you can do it when your computer is already turned on. If it is an internal hard drive then you will have to turn off your computer before connecting it (and also disconnecting).

And one more advice from my experience - going over all the photos from the day's shoot and deleting those that you don't like greatly reduces the storage space
And be more critical of yourself - it will reduce the storage space even more.
--
Warm Regards,
Greg Brave
http://www.photopathway.com
http://www.isranature.com

 

[mom007]

I'm going portable. I only want it to store my photos so I don't want it running all the time. Just down load them, then "turn" it off.

A Little concerned over some failure rates I've read on Amazon while researching and then you just lose it all. That is the part that bugs me...if they are so sensitive that any slight thing can just make it stop and recovering data is super expensive, then it seems like a big risk to put all your faith and pictures for years and years into something that can be problematic.

ANYBODY, what do you think about that conundrum??? I'm thinking for major vacations that I'd still buy new SDHC cards and never fully delete them. Then nothing can happen to those right?

 

[mike703]

I'm going portable. I only want it to store my photos so I don't want it running all the time. Just down load them, then "turn" it off.

A Little concerned over some failure rates I've read on Amazon while researching and then you just lose it all. That is the part that bugs me...if they are so sensitive that any slight thing can just make it stop and recovering data is super expensive, then it seems like a big risk to put all your faith and pictures for years and years into something that can be problematic.

ANYBODY, what do you think about that conundrum??? I'm thinking for major vacations that I'd still buy new SDHC cards and never fully delete them. Then nothing can happen to those right?

On long vacations I take a small laptop with a DVD writer in it. I copy pix onto the laptop at the end of every day and do basic editing / sorting (but not much because the screen isn't very good) and, before I reformat a memory card, make a DVD copy. So I have two copies of everything (camera plus laptop, or laptop plus DVD). I would be nervous about relying SDHC cards along with making copies on to a laptop.

best wishes
Mike
--
Mike

 

[graphikal]

A Little concerned over some failure rates I've read on Amazon while researching and then you just lose it all.

Don't be. Just make sure you have multiple copies of your data. Of course, all storage systems can fail, and some have worse failure rates than others; pick one of the better ones and go with it (actually, go with TWO for redundant copies if you are very concerned).

The advice given earlier in this thread is a good one. If you have a desktop system, making sure it has a good amount of internal storage (i.e. add a drive if necessary), then adding an external drive, is a good way to keep redundant copies.

When I bought mine, I did some reading and picked this one (actually found a deal on this one for $75 elsewhere, so hunt around):

You can also buy more expensive home file servers with redundant storage, but the easiest way is to just buy two drives and copy each file twice.

That is the part that bugs me...if they are so sensitive that any slight thing can just make it stop and recovering data is super expensive, then it seems like a big risk to put all your faith and pictures for years and years into something that can be problematic.

DVD storage has historically been problematic. Hard drives are one of the less risky methods of storage out there, and they are cheap so you can store redundantly, which is the best protection no matter what storage type you choose.

ANYBODY, what do you think about that conundrum??? I'm thinking for major vacations that I'd still buy new SDHC cards and never fully delete them.

That's not wise, since SDHC can fail just like anything else and you'll just be paying through the nose for a relatively small amount of storage.

 

[zaaka]

Reading through the very useful replies answered most of the questions I had on image storage. Now I know I can reformat my SD cards and refill them.

I currently back up photos (they number in the hundreds, not thousands) on my desktop computer running PS Elements, on a portable HD stored off site, and on DVDs. My obviously newbie question is: Does the image lose a little something in quality each time that I back up to an external device? I only work in .jpeg presently. Should I save them in .tiff or .psd?

Thanks.

 

[Hofendis]

Brian's answer to this is excellent.

It's important to realize that ALL electronic storage media have shelf lives. While photo prints won't live forever either, tape, DVDs, Harddrives, flashdrives, etc all have shelf lives from 5 - 15 years (we don't have enough track record yet to even know for sure whether the estimates are correct). After that, the media itself begins to degrade and/or the software used to access it becomes outdated. So you 1/ want to have duplicate copies of your photos and 2/ figure that you'll be eventually moving them to updated storage systems over the years.

But for now, you can get large (500 MB to 2 Tb) mirrored external harddrives to use as backups. If you use your computer harddrive as your primary storage and one of these "RAID 1" mirrored external drives (kept offsite somewhere safe), you have triple redundancy.

 

[sifutommy]

No. You're fine to copy jpgs around at will as many times as you want. The lossy part of the format only comes into play if you edit the photos and therefore recompress them upon saving.