I bought an external hard drive to store digital photo’s because they are scattered over 4 hard drives, various zip disks, CD’s and DVD’s. When I started looking at what I’ve got I realized I have thousands of pictures to gather for storage.
If you’ve done this already, how do you file them so that you can find them again? I thought about category and then year but I don’t want to get into too many levels of folders. I’m thinking maybe 3-4 levels maximum.
Apart from the more obvious categories you can add tags to the images to make them easily searchable, like the “labels” in Gmail. The tags are independent of any folders the images might be sorted into.
I don’t envy you going through that lot to add tags to each image though, not so bad with newly added ones of course.
Thread discussing Photo Archiving here.
As noted, I use YY\MM<Event or Trip title><sub-location if needed> and rename photos to YYMMDD@HH-MM-SS_<SEQ>. I then tag the photos using EXIF/IPTC tags in a standard manner.
It is slow work tagging historic stuff, but I hope it will make for a far more useful archive in the end.
Si
I just let iPhoto do it for me now. But before then, I put them in folders labeled with the date and event in “YYYYMMDD Event” format such that they would end up sorted by date, but still give me a clue as to what they were pictures of. If you want to be able to find individual photos by tags, you can do that at the finder level, but it’s generally much easier to use some sort of photo organizing program like iPhoto to do it.
I picked a system at the get go and have taken the time at each download (daily) to do it right and so my gazillion are all nice and organized.
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… Everybody does not do this? … ::: Shakes head and wanders away. ::::
If you’re able to live with just subfolders/subdirectories (with descriptive names), then just stick with that. I tell people it’s not a good idea to invest hours of typing in metadata (tagging) into proprietary photo album software because the database (tag metadata) is closed. You’re locked into whatever vendor software you box yourself into.
I have thousands of digital photos starting from 1997 Kodak digital cameras. I just organize by subfolders and I always find what I’m looking for. I can’t think of any photo-album software back in 1997 I could’ve invested metatagging effort that’s still available today. Any metadata in 1997 would’ve have been a waste of time.
If you’re a commercial stock image library, then of course, you need to tag all your photos to sell. They have sophisticated content-management systems to keep track of their million images portfolio. However, many home users don’t need elaborate metadata tags to find the kids’ birthday pics from last year.
Worry about organising them later; get them backed up to start with.
Well… I put a little thought into this when I got my first digital camera some years ago (10?).
I put them into directories named "YYYY-MM-DD_<description>.
I also set my cameras to sequentially number my photos and not reset, so even if they all get chucked into the same folder somehow, sorting by name is also sorting them by the order that they were shot.
It’s worked pretty well so far; the only thing that sometimes trips me up is inadequate descriptions.
This is what I do. I’ve heard good things about Adobe Lightroom, if you’re willing to shell out the bucks for it. It seems to work better than Bridge in terms of organizing, but not quite as fancy as Photoshop for editing.
I have hundreds of gigabytes of photos, so my problem is probably bigger than most folks’ and my solutions may be overkill for you.
I download my photos from the memory cards using PhotoMechanic. At the time of importing, PhotoMechanic renames the files to include the date the photo was taken (e.g. 20081031-IMG_1234.jpg) to reduce the occurrence of duplicate names (not strictly required by my system, but duplicate names make things a little more confusing). I also add a bunch of IPTC data at that time, including location and keywords.
Then I have a set of custom scripts that archive the files in several locations, one of which is a large NAS device. It files them in directories by date (e.g. 2008/10/31/20081031-IMG_0313.jpg). The NAS is the online copy of the photos – everything else is just for backup. I index the NAS photo directories with iView MediaPro (acquired by Microsoft since I last upgraded – I can’t vouch for the new version). This allows me to very quickly find photos. I can visually scan them sorted by date, or I can search by keywords, location, etc. Even with the huge number of images I have, I can almost always find what I am looking for (the only exception is when I have screwed up and not entered the data when I downloaded the photos – my own fault, and I don’t think any other system would alleviate that problem).
The IPTC data is in the image, and it’s a standard format, so this system doesn’t tie me into any of the tools I’m using (though I’m very happy with them). For the volume of photos I have, I don’t find that just organizing via folder/file name is sufficient. If I want to find all of the photos of Cousin Joe, I’d be lost – even if I could remember every event at which he’s been present (highly unlikely), I’d still have to manually look through all of the photos to pick him out. With this system, I just search for “cousin joe” and a few seconds later I have all of the photos in a browser.
Again, probably overkill for most people, but it works well for me and has for years.
The easiest sort for me is folders by date and place or event. I also keep scanned pictures separate.
I also create a “raw” folder as the last directory to not allow writes or deletions so you don’t accidentally overwrite the orginal when editing. Then have other folders like “good” and “cleaned” where cleaned are fixed red eyes, cropped, etc, and “good” are the final versions of pictures that are cleaned and I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show to other people (because I take about 10 pictures of the same exact thing in different settings --it would be painful to have people look at the 9 bad for 1 good). It takes up a lot of space @8mb a picture, but space is cheap.
Agreed. I have a Mac, but I only use iPhoto very occasionally for image editing. I don’t use its organization tools at all.
My system is admittedly half-assed. I dump everything into one folder, named “Kodak Easyshare whatever.” When I get a new camera, make a new folder.
Then, I select the batch I just downloaded to the computer and pick which ones I like and put them into a dated folder (“20080420 Red Sox @ Yankees”). I upload those pictures to Flickr, run them through Picnik (image editor), and re-save into Flickr.
Flickr’s good at cataloging metadata, and I’ve usually been good at tagging. So if I’me looking for something, I’ll search my Flickr. Usually the stuff published there is good enough for whatever I might want, but if not, I can go to the corresponding file on my local computer for the original.
Basically, I use a simple two-level folder system for organization and I outsource the data crunching to Flickr. This might suck if Flickr even goes under, but between my dated folders and dated originals, I should be mostly okay. I’ve been using more-or-less the same system since I was scanning in 4x6s in high school.
I use Picasa 3 and keep all my photos on a 200Gb networked hard drive. I also archive the photos to 40Gb of Google web space for which I pay about $75 per year. In addition, Mrs Floppy does the same thing and we have them linked.
Picasa rocks!
This is not necessarily true. In many cases there is no external database, the tags are stored in the image file itself. Many software programs can write EXIF and IPTC tags that are interoperable between applications.
It is far from being standardized across the board, so any two programs might handle the info differently or overwrite the tag information created by the other when saving files as, or other file operations, but if you define a workflow that uses compatible programs, you aren’t really “locked into” anything.
:rolleyes:
But what’s the system you picked?
Embedding in IPTC EXIF is only half the battle because non-standardization makes the invested effort into tagging a no go. And “defining a workflow of compatible programs” is beyond the research enthusiasm of the typical casual photographer.
Suppose you use ProgramX on Windows platform to catalog and tag 10,000 photos. You decide to switch to Apple Mac, but ProgramX does not exist on Mac. Well, all that metadata might as well not exist on the Mac. Or ProgramX works in Windows Vista, but is not upgraded to be compatible with the new Windows 7. Again, tagging effort is wasted.
The Return-On-Investment for tagging is different for everyone but in IMHO, it is overkill for most weekend photographers. I currently have about 30,000 photos organized by subfolders. What’s the crossover point where the volume of photos exceeds my brain’s capacity to manage subfolders? Maybe 100,000 photos? 500,000? I don’t know. I do know it’s not 30,000 photos.
I have a friend who is not computer savvy. Even she finds it more straightforward to organize photos via subfolder names instead of tagging them.
For the folks here (who are not commercial photographers) that have the discipline to tag their photos, I’d be curious to know how many images they’ve accumulated. That might give us interesting datapoints for the scalability of subfolders.
ETA: The hybrid metadata tag via the web (e.g. Flickr) mentioned by Troy McClure SF is an interesting approach. I’m not familiar with it but the metadata does seem to have built-in longevity because it’s not tied to any particular desktop software.
Sorry, I meant a method I guess. I have 5 different Digi cameras.
I have 6000 + slides from the old days, I gots lots of old prints.
I do not do prints anymore. I do not do professional or for $$$$.
Take pictures of two previous categories and one new categorie for example with any camera. Copy to zzdump folder. ** I Never connect camera to computer**, always copy with a reader from the storage media, seems fast to me and I can’t screw up the camera or media. If it can be done, I will do it so…
Zip through them in ‘full screen mode’ dumping all bad, fuzzy, oops pictures.
Pictures in group ‘a’ will be ‘saved as’ in the number sequence of that group or date ( sdmb01.jog ) etc., then all originals go there to if I think I want to save them.
Same for other pictures and for new groups, just make the folder with descriptive & date label and repeat.
Same with scans, copies I am making of all the slides, etc. Hard drives are cheap. Old 5400, 40 gig or less are usually free.
I keep three total copies of everything on three separate hard drives. + my recent working pictures on my ‘c’ drive.
I have a pretty set routine and so it goes very fast, especially if I batch them as I do for generic family shots that will never be looked at again after the first round of sending them to family and friends for casual computer viewing. I do not always save all the originals as I get bigger and better cameras because I have little that is really all that great or will be wanted by history or family after I’m gone.
Works for me and I can use all different apps, and use lots of different places to up load them for free depending on what I want to do with them. Picasa, Flickr, etc. I wish I could afford a static IP and run my own server, did for a while, as that is the easiest way to dish up to friends and foes any pictures I want seen.
I was in the aerial mapping business and could pretty much walk back into the archives and lay my hands on the correct roll of flim that contained the job I was looking for of any job I flew. I just can do that, don’t know why. Maybe the effort to get the shots, (pilot) I processed the film, (B/W) I edited the film, I made the prints and plotting plates, the enlargements etc for many years until we go so big that we had dedicated people for those jobs…
Anywho, when dealing with large masses of info, I always start with a method and stick to it even if adding tech that makes it go faster.
I only have to please me and make it work for me now … 
In my photos folder, I put all pictures from a year in a folder, such as:
1981
1998
2009
In each year’s folder, I separate into months:
2008\01
2008\02 (etc.)
In each month, I have them by date and event:
2008\12\20081224-ChristmasParty
I re-list the YYYYMM on the DD folder name because if I copy the entire folder somewhere else (say to a flash memory card or DVD to take somewhere) I’d like to capture that information without having to record it or remember it.
Mine are separated by event, then into subfolders under that. My roadtrip out west last year all went under Denver 2008, then photos for each day were put into a separate folder under that at the end of the day. Family and friends stuff is put into years, with sub-folders for month/day under that. This last is a recent development, with my purchase of my newest DSLR and using the software to download to my computer from it. I am taking more pictures now, and keeping them organized like this is making it easier to find things.