How do your Orgainze??

[LGeorge]

Ok, so i've been searching thread after thread & web page after web page looking for a way to make sense of all my digital images.

Right now, I have 32gb worth total. I know, I know, alot of you have that from one month or somthing wild, but anyway, it's roughly 14,500 images. I'm not shooting pro, just have been keeping my digital shots in Microsoft's "My Pictures" folder, backed up on a 100gb Maxtor ext. hard drive.

I have tried Corel Photo Album 6, but I'm kinda in the same boat. I feel my problem is that if i go out to shoot, when I get back, i have a few hundred images ranging from people, macro, buildings, bridges, landscapes...basically the whole gammut of shots.

So I've been racking my brains wondering what everyone else does who shoots like this. Do you take your 300 images, send 100 this way, 50 that way, 50 this way & 100 that way? Or do you keep them all in the same folder & date it, like "Downtown 01-20-07"

I know it sounds rediculous, but my 15gb jumped to 32gb really fast and I want to make sense & keep track of my "keepers/printable" vs "view only on computer" type shots.

ANY help would be great!!!

 

[Mark53]

I don't know what others do, but after fiddling around with naming subdirectories for a while, I decided to simply store my images on my PC drive using the folder names directly from the camera, under My Pictures. So, I have Img0001, 0002, etc. I decided that this was the most "pure" way to retain them. I keep a Word document with a brief description of each directory and note special images I want to find quickly. Typically, I upload my images from the camera at the end of a single "event", I don't keep adding more and more images until the card is full. This way, each image directory reflects a specific use.

I back it all up to a Maxtor 500GB external HD twice a week.

 

[Sunnyjim]

Hi LGeorge,

I use the "Outline" method in My Pictures. I have about 15k photos I can instantly find any photo I want. So far, I haven't used any organizing software because I figure some day it's eventually not going to work anyway for what ever reason.

Example: In "My Pictures" name a master folder "Automobiles". Then everytime you go to a car show, make a new folder and name it after the care show you went to, like "Edmonds Car Show 2007" and put it in your "Automobiles" folder. You can do the same thing for Vacations, Gardens, Family, what ever.

I have 1 internal hard drive and 2 external hard drives. Under My Pictures everything is backed up the same on each hard drive. I think if I used CD's or DVD's I would loose track of everything.

Good luck..............

 

[Diddlbiker]

I shoot in RAW mode and use rawshooter to sort out the pictures. The keepers are (automatically) renumbered and stored in a MM_DD folder.
Basically my folder structure looks like this:
+THUMB
+RAW
+PRINT
+WEB
+2004
+2005
+2006
+2007
+01_07
+01_12 (etc)

The folders RAW, PRINT and WEB are identical in structure - a folder for the year, subfolders for they day in the folders the pictures by number (R_xxxxx for raw, P_xxxxx for Print, etc)

The raws are just that - raw. They're basically my negatives
The prints are full-sized but cropped, levelled, etc. They're pretty big.
The webs are downsized to 1600x1200 (still decent size!) to save space

Every month I backup the latest month in all three folders and from time to time I remove some raw/print folders from my HD to save space - they're backed up anyway.

The thumbs folder is one massive folder with all pictures in thumbnail size in a T_yyyy_mm_dd_xxxxx format. Tip: save your thumbnails as GIF's, they're a lot smaller than JPEG's at that size (and at 100x75 pixels the 256 colors don't matter that much).

Finding pictures back is easy: I have a set of HTML pages that show all the thumbnails (slow) or either by year (faster) or month (light speed). From there clicking on a thumbnail will display the "web"-sized picture along with EXIF data.

If it sounds like a lot of work: it is not - I wrote a bunch of Python scripts that take care of all the work. After converting RAW to JPG (print size) I run two scripts: the first script copies the images to the Web/Thumbnail folders, and the second script creates and updates the HTML files used for viewing. The whole process takes less than a minute and is fully automatic.

If that is too much work, use the faststone viewer (freeware, fast and lots of useful features) and organize your pictures by date and number. I found it easier to find pictures by date than by description - besides that, even for a medium shooter like me (about 2500 pics/yr) - renaming all picture folders is way too much work!
--
Cheers,
Bart

 

[LGeorge]

Thanks guys, definatly some good advice. I've got all my folders "somewhat" in order, exp. of workflow: My pictures, Places folder, (city), 12-10-2006. Once I'm there is basically an open file with all my JPGS or JPGS+RAW files.

I'm just coming up with stupid ideas while im away from my computer where im like, now if i need that pic, where do i find it? And 100% of the time I know exactly where it is. I just dont see how guys who have shot digital since day one and who shoot pro, exp. Moose, how he keeps up with his literally 100,000 + images!! Thats just crazy!!

I'm going to try the word document method and keep up with them that way.

Oh, and one other "problem". My laptop (my primary machine, has a 60gb internal HD. I dont have room to keep all 32gb due to other stuff being on the drive, so my main source of storage is my Maxtor 100gb. I also have a Sony Vaio 250gb desktop, but its a crash-test dummy & I'm a little scared to keep my images on that machine.

Thanks for you advie, and please, if you have anymore suggestions, I'm all ears!!

 

[mironv]

--Last poster just give me a headech from just reading it.Picasa to a rescue.

Whatever name you have now on MS folders it will transfer after picasa scan HD and puts them in hronological order.Than you can have eazy access to see names of folders change names if you like and add comments to a individual picture and if you add same comment to describe gruping of a pictures than you can search for it and all with same comment will line up for you. Picasa have best interface of any picture related softwear if sombody can figure it out how to keep that and put all Adobe CS tricks into it it will last forever.
Mironv
http://mironv.smugmug.com/

 

[Mark_H]

I organize by shot date. I have a folder for each date (sometimes several days may end up in one folder if I haven't shot much). I retain the original file name. For now I just try to remember when approximately I took a photo and then look through those. I back up my photos to DVDs, one copy offsite and delete the originals from the PC. DVDs are date labeled. I also resize everything to a small 400x360? jpg and leave those on my PC. Then I can scroll through them and see the photo I want. I've sorted these by folders for each DVD.

Ideally I am going to go through those "archive" photos, as I call them, and edit the properties in Windows. If you right click on a thumbnail, or file you can open the "properties" window. Then fill in the fields:

Title, Subject, Author, category, keywords, comments. I have not figured out how to create my subject headings and what keywords to use, but you can do something like:

Subject: 2007 Detroit Auto Show
Category cars, automobiles
Keywords: four-door sedan, Ford Taurus

etc. Think of your master category. Maybe every photo of New York City gets New York City in it. Then Empire State Building, architecture, and so on.

Once done, you can search windows for photo files that have "Ford" in it and you will find all your Ford photos from any and all folders and auto shows. There's probably some software program that allows you to do this more easily, but it's the doing of it, in effect cataloging your photos, that's the hard work. And you need to be consistent or you won't find that shot you're looking for, because you forgot to label it New York City. And you need to think ahead, should "city" be a keyword for every photo you take in a city? How about "urban" will that end up being the key term you search for one day?

It also appears possible to add this sort of cataloging in Nikon Viewer and to create drop down lists of keywords that you can more quickly append to a photo. Whatever software you use this would appear to be the simplest method for organizing your photos. Folders by date, folders batched into larger folders by DVD or harddrive the originals are stored on with a small version of the file with the original file name/number in these folders, so you can see if the photo is what you want. Exporting this data to a spreadsheet and print out would be good too.

Now I've got about 20,000 photos to catalog. Gotta go. Oh, it's a great help to delete the junk before doing this work. I probably have fewer than 14,000 photos to label.

Is there a batch label method? Could that be made into an action in Photoshop? Hmmm. Maybe.

Mark

 

[sean000]

As for folder structure... I keep it fairly flat (not many subdirectories), because I don't really use folders for organization. I name a folder based on a memory card by the date and subject: 012607_Janes_Birthday, for example. I keep the different versions in the same folder.

IMatch helps me do the real organizing. It's the most customizable image management system I've used (and I've used a number of them including Photoshop's Bridge and Picasa). There is a learning curve, but once you figure out the categories/keywords you will use it takes only minutes to tag a new folder full of images.

Now I have tens of thousands of photos and I can find just about any photo in seconds. I can also find any combination of categories/keywords and ranks... using AND, NOT, OR, brackets, etc. If I want to find all of the photos of both my nieces together, or just one niece with her grandmother, I can find those photos. I can also find only the best of a type of photo since I use a ranking system.

Imatch can also catalog offline media like DVDs and external drives. It stores information in an open XML format and categories can be exported to IPTC tags on the images themselves. Quite fast and scalable as well.

My only complaint is that it is Windows-only. More info at http://www.photools.com (and no, I don't work for them...I just like the software a lot).

Sean

 

[Paulo Goulart]

Also around 15.000 photos:

1. One folder per year;

2. One sub-folder per month;

3. One sub-sub-folder per "subject" - e.g. "Visit to Rome", "Christmas at home", "Flowers", "Beach", "Kids"...;

4. Every file inside was renamed (when transfered from the card) with date plus label, e.g. "2007-01-01_1_Kids".

5. Just NEFs now, kept in main drive, processed and saved as JPEGs in a backup external drive.

--
Paulo Goulart

 

[Paulo Goulart]

iMatch appears to be very similar to Capture NX (or the opposite)?

In Capture NX you can also edit the "properties" info and, mainly, apply labels in batch and in a very easy way, just by selecting the files and clicking in the key numbers "1", "2"...
--
Paulo Goulart

 

[Greg Gebhardt]

always dumped them and went back to the simple Windows system and put in folders named for the occasion.

--
Greg Gebhardt in
Jacksonville, Florida
D Two Xs
D Two Hundred
G Seven

 

[Vic_V]

Use the simplest approach based on Windows folder system and do not trust any properties or metadata to keep your records. Any "archival" program may and probably will be obsolete in a few years time. I was stunned when I discovered that the metadata in Adobe Bridge showed three different dates for my images taken one day. Don't remember now exactly, but it was something like: date file created, date modified and something else. ALL THREE DATES were wrong!!! The correct date was the day before, and the "date file created" was the date when I downloaded pictures from CF to computer. Only Nikon View showed the date correctly. There may be no Nikon View in the future or may be a bug in their new software, how do you know what date/property is right and what wrong? Also, if you travel, how do you know if the time incorporated was local or not? This may also affect the date. (I use GMT and don't bother changing that.)

I have about 15 K images (also 25K on film). For digital images I use the date and word or two of discription in the name of the folder, e.g. "2005 January 24 New York". (This puts December before January, but I can live with that. I tried numbers instead of names of months but this became confusing, e.g. 2006-10-11, this is October 11 in US and November 10 in Europe.)

Inside "2005 January 24 New York" I create the subfolders named "originals", "work in progress" (for PS files) and "processed JPEGs". I also add a word document in each directory with a brief description of this particular shoot.

The small word files can be copied and pasted into a separate unified Word catalogue (I did this for my film archive as well). Using Word search you can easily find any words in this master catalogue and see what and where is stored.

If you really paranoid about compatibility in the future, you may want to keep yet another PDF copy of the Word file, and also a plain text file (Word> Save AS> .txt). I haven't done that.

 

[MikaelJ]

I have tried IMatch and think it's a killer app, but my only complaint is the viewer, it's soooo slow. Much slower than Irfanview.

Mabye someone knows a way to configure IMatch to be faster??

MikaelJ
--
Nikon D200, 70-200/2.8VR, 17-55/2.8, 50/1.4, Loewe Mini Trekker AW
http://www.reklambladet.se/photos

 

[Peter_Schulz]

I think setting up specific folders is the way to go. At least it is for me.

Specifically, I set up a folder for each shoot and name it with the date in sortable order and a description e.g. place or event. Then I rename the files in the folder with the date. I keep my original RAW files and finished JPEGs in these folders.

If I also wanted to keep my pictures by category, I'd set up a hierarchy of folders and keep JPEG copies in these folders.

Why folders? Because they are forever. Stated another way I don't trust databases to last over time e.g. in ACDsee, when there are program problems they recommend deleting the folder that has the database. Also, using a specific applications database locks you into that application forever.

I guess writing to the IPTC would also be another primitive way to go. But for me it's folders.

--

Gallery - http://www.peterpeterpeter.com

 

[cloudbuster]

I tried many ways but this is the system that I have developed. I shoot RAW or JPEG depending on situation, rarely both and if I do the JPEG is for speed view only, I'll dump and make Jpegs from raw if needed. Trying to work with two sets of files and keep them in sync was a headache, although there are various bits of software that will do this.

I import into a folder which will be titled Date-Discriptor. So 070126-Snow would be for today. I then rename the images in Bridge / also delete a few here too! So the images will be 070126-Snow-01.NEF etc. Various versions then become 070126-Snow-Master.TIFF and so on. One card may have a couple of shoots in which case the files will be seperated into seperate folders if neccessary.

This all takes place in a master file 2007. There are some sub files, for example my "client" work will go into a subfile.

I takes a little time, but if you ever need a file quickly then you'll be thankful for setting something up that is robust and referenced.

Most, but not all images then get a preview and basic metadata support using Aperture, (I keep in location) which is a Remote hard drive. I'm also stating to send key print files to an online storage facility and make CD's backups. I uses colour codes to indicate backup / Aperture status.
--
Its always Sunny above the clouds!

 

[cloudbuster]

Error, 070126-Snow-01-Master.TIFF, the sequence number was missed in original text, sorry for any confusion.

--
Its always Sunny above the clouds!

 

[Alejandro Daz del Ro Fery]

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=21814294
--
Best of luck, wish, light...

 

[Mitrajoon]

I agree. I get creation dates like 2016 and 1936. No logic or rationale to what's going on or what date might appear. Simple folder system by year, event/place and date.

--
Mitra
http://jmlphotography.smugmug.com/

 

[sean000]

iMatch appears to be very similar to Capture NX (or the opposite)?
In Capture NX you can also edit the "properties" info and, mainly,
apply labels in batch and in a very easy way, just by selecting the
files and clicking in the key numbers "1", "2"...
--
Paulo Goulart

Sure... many programs allow you to edit the metadata in batches, but this is not Capture's strength. It's a rather blunt instrument compared to applications designed for the job.

 

[Evan Effa]

If you want to read a definitive analysis of this topic get "The DAM book " by Krogh. Well worth the read.

-evan

--
D200

I do know how to spell. I'm just a lousy Tipyst!

http://www.pbase.com/eheffa