We’ve been trying to organize our thousands of home pictures and videos.
Any insights you can offer?
We started by putting the date and location in the file name, but that is becoming a mess of BronxZoo2010_01.jpg, BronxZoo2010_02.jpg. Any software perhaps that we can use to organize this mess?
Here’s my approach…
Three layers of directories:
Year
–>Month
---->Event
In other words, my christmas pictures went into a folder called “Christmas” within a folder called “2010-12” which is in a folder called “2010”
I don’t name any of the photos. That’s just too much trouble.
I make sure that the bottom-level folder has a descriptive enough title for the event.
You can use tagging and rating as well in order to get a handle on what photos you have.
I use iPhoto for all of this, since I am a Mac guy. If you are on a PC, give Picasa a try—it’s free and works quite nicely.
So for your example…
2010/2010-08/Bronx Zoo/PHOTO_01.JPG
2010/2010-08/Bronx Zoo/PHOTO_02.JPG
2010/2010-08/Bronx Zoo/PHOTO_03.JPG
…
(assuming the Bronx Zoo trip was in August).
As far as software goes, you might want to try two kinds of software: programs that help creating folder hierarchies, such as The Big Mean Folder Machine (Mac), and programs that allow you to do batch file renaming, such as A Better File Renamer (Mac).
And there should be plenty of stuff out there specifically designed for your problem.
Renaming individual files is probably not the best route; that is far too much trouble.
This, except under each event folder there’s a Moon folder and a hubby folder to keep track of who took which shot.
I’m working on the same problem. I’m thinking of a dual 2 layer system consisting of a date based filing system and a project based system.
so it would be:
Photos by project
Photos by date
This way I can break down a months worth of photos into the groups they belong in. By physically numbering the months they should appear in chronological order.
In addition to a chronological filing I would also keep photos broken down into projects if the projects are related but span years.
Note to above, if it’s easier to hunt for files by the name of the month then label and number them as such:
01 Jan
02 Feb
03 Mar
And photo’s grouped into projects can be copies of stuff that was originally filed by date if they have to be picked out of date based groups.
Ive tried time based, but find its not much use when I want to search for particular subjects, eg all my dolphin shots or whatever, as your database gets bigger over time.
Picasa is free and pretty good in that it has thumbnails and you can now add ‘tags’ eg ‘dolphin’ ‘melbourne’ etc, so you can later on do a search for all melbourne shots, or all dolphin or all dolphin melbourne shots between 2006-2007 etc. It even has ‘quick tags’ so you just need to click a few buttons for common tags -you dont have to do everything after all, just the things you may want to find in the future, one photo per folder makes the folder pretty easy to find.
But it means you have to put the work in to add the tags as you add new pictures.
Otara
My company shoots about 150,000 images per year. Our system goes:
2010
07 July (“07” is so windows keeps the folders in order)
21 July (The Date)
River (vs. a bike trail)
PM
Canyon Voyages (The name of the river company)
Each of these folders will contain between 10-200 shots
Adobe Photoshop Elements.
I sort them by event.
Nick and Sarah Wedding
John 25th Birthday
2007 Chirstmas
I also have folders that are broken down by pets.
Scout
Bella
Scooby
Shaggy
The rest are just thrown into a misc folder.
Part of why this works is because I tend to only have my camera out for events. I don’t keep one on me all the time. If I was the type of person (like my sisters or my ex-wife) who easily snaps 100+ pictures a week, I’m not sure what I would do.
Also, don’t forget, you can always all the files in a given folder by date by clicking on that heading. So even if you keep them all in one folder, you can still have them in chronological order.
I also use Year/Month/Event folders, but I use batch rename (either RenRot or DigiKam) to rename all photos into YYYYMMDD@HH-MM-SS_xx format. This means that I can combine photos from both our cameras into a chronological sequence.
Then I tag the photos (location, subject, people, caption, photographer) and store in the metadata. That way, the tag data stays with the photos. Then I can use DigiKam to filter by tag or date or person, and it can be used for my online gallery, too.
Si
Aperture.
One folder for each year.
Within a folder, the images are named by year, month, and image number.
So 2011-01-09.jpg is a picture taken in January 2011, and it’s the ninth one for that month. I lead single-digit numbers with a zero so that when sorting by file name, the files all end up listed in the correct order. In months with more than 100 images, the image number has two leading zeros, e.g. 2011-01-009.jpg.
I just have them in folders by year (“2011”), by month (“2011-01”), then by date (“2011-01-20”). If I’ve taken a lot of photos on one day, I might have subdirectories with a leading number to keep them in order, then a meaningful name (e.g., “01 Springfield OH”).
I also put my better pictures on Flickr, organised into sets and collections, with lots of tags, and mostly geotagged. (At http://www.flickr.com/photos/75905404@N00/) That means that I can search for them on Flickr, where I find the date and image number, then find that picture or others on the same subject on my own hard drives.
Chronological folder structure, but very inconsequential as it depends on how often I empty the camera. I.e. I have folders named “03-2010”, “late spring 2010”, “09-10 2010”, etc. I access the images via Picasa which can sort the pictures quite accurately in chronological order. As for subject / place I just sort of browse through the thumbnails in Picasa. It is not perfect, but it works reasonably well considering the absolute minimum of time that is actually put into organizing my pictures.
By year and month. Every three months, I select the ten best photo’s and put them in a folder " print jan-feb-march 09". Then I print them and paste them in an paper album, along with keepsakes, notes, printed chat conversations, to-do lists, entry ticket stubs, maps, and written descriptions etc.
The folders print-month I burn on an cd-rom, along with some selected movies, and put that in a plastic holder in the album, too.
The rest of the pictures can crash or be erased with the computer for all I care. I don’t think I will ever look at them again.
I mostly use thematic folders, like this:
-Animals
– MyCat
– SecondCat
-Friends
–Friend1
–Friend2
-Some general place
–Some more specific location
—Spring 2010
—Summer 2007
-BigEvent
–2006
Folders labeled by last date taken and major category.
Example:
20110119 Snowstorm
Sort Shots for iPad
This one.
I’m much more likely to be looking for a picture from our trip to Iceland, or a photo of our friends Steve and Becky. I rarely want to look up a photo by date (or even remember the date, “Hey Honey, what year did we go to Iceland?”)
So -
-Friends
–Friend1
–Friend2
-Trips
–Iceland
–London2009
-Christmas
–2009
–2010
-Houses
–Ourhouse1
–Ourhouse2
----Ourhouse2 - kitchen remodel
And then there are miscelanious files for some catagories
-Flowers
-Sunsets
-Pets
A folder for each year, and inside that folder, one for each day.
If I need to see all the photos from a month or year at the same time, to figure out which day they were taken on, I use Windows Photo Gallery to scan through them.
I take pictures almost every day… if I was an event-only picture taker I’d probably organize them by event, too.