We have about 10 years worth of digital pictures now. They are saved in a completely haphazard folder structure. I have an external hard drive for backups, and I also periodically burn to DVD when I have enough to fill one. But I like to have access to all of them on my PC whenever I want. I have 2 main folders, “Backed Up” (meaning burned to disc) and, wait for it… “Not Backed Up.” Within each main folder is a bunch of sub-folders with no real organization. Some are based on function (…'s 3rd Birthday.) Early on I naively started folder-ing by month (January 2003). Needless to say it’s a huge cluster now and if I need to find a specific photo it can be a royal pain.
So, who has a great idea for redoing the whole thing? I don’t care if it’s just a logical organization plan or perhaps there’s software out there that can do it for me?
I use iPhoto, but before that I stored them in folders labeled YYYYMMDD-EventDescription. So pics of my birthday were in a folder called 20110718-MyBirthdayParty. The folders automatically sorted themselves by date and I could do a simple file search for the topic. When backing up you could leave the folders and just erase the photos.
I use Year\Month\Event[Subevent] folders, and I rename all my photos to YYYYMMYY@HH:MM:SS_xxxx (xxxx is a unique number to prevent clashes from burst/multiple cameras).
If I was you, I would backup everything, then start with a photo renamer (eg here) that uses EXIF data and can move the output into new folders, and set up Year\Month\Day folders, and then group/split days into events (Holiday in Texas, Child_A Birthday Party, etc).
Then you can use Picasa or some other tool (I like DigiKam, a linux photo management tool, there is a Windows version but that seems a bit flaky).
We had a similar ‘To be sorted’ folder when my husband was in charge of the photos. I have since sorted them into folders by year and then by event. (We don’t pull out the camera often.) I back them up each time I remove photos from the camera.
When I decide to print some, I go through the folders and label the ones we want with <EventName>Print, copy those onto a thumbdrive and go.
I have a separate folder for each year. The filenames for the pics are AAAA-BB-CCC.jpg, where AAAA is the year, BB is the month, and CCC is the sequential order within that month. I make sure the year has four digits so that 19** appears before 2***; similarly, single-digit months (January through September) are preceded by a 0 so that September will always appear before October. Also with the number of the pictures that month: if I have over 100 pictures from that month, then they all get three digits to ensure that picture number 001 appears before picture number 137. Less than 100 pics? Two digits suffices.
For years I have used ACDSee for photo viewing. It includes some handy features for renaming entire series of image files in this manner. There may be other file management utilities available that offer similar features.
Picasa. I finally got in the habit of naming the folder when I transfer files (e.g. ‘Dudelings 2nd birthday’) and that’s about the extent of my organization. But Picasa makes it very easy to see and scan the entire library.
A great feature is its ‘upload’ function. Fairly seamless and easy. My only whine is that I’m about at the limits of free storage. I have hosted space with plenty of room. If there was a paid program that worked similarly but was installable on a PHP Web server, I’d love to know.
This is where a proper photo tagging system helps. DigiKam makes it really easy and fast, but other tools are just as good. When my wife wants to scrapbook a photo album, she looks at the photos and tags them (6x4, 5x7, 3x2 etc). Then I can copy the tagged photos to a suitably labelled folder, and send them off to a printing service. If she wants lots of small photos, I combine them onto single images and print on a single photo.
I also tag people and places, so I can pull collections of our children out quickly.
I also rate the images (1-5 stars). I can pull out great photos just by selecting 4 or 5 star images.
Gallery3 is pretty good, but not perfect. I really, really want a decent server based photo storage back end (that does all the photo/database/tag/album management) and a front end that is as good as DigiKam (or is DigiKam). That would be perfect. A number of tools could access the datastore for different purposes, but the backend would make thumbnails/low/med/high res images so I don’t load an album all the images over a wifi network all the time.
I started using PhotoShop Elements, which has a relational database capability. You just assign as many tags as you need to a photo, i.e., Oregon, Coast, Ocean, Dog, etc. The photo can then be called up with any, some or all of those tags, along with all other photos with the tag. So if you type in “Dog”, you’ll get all your dog photos. If you type in Coast and Dog, you’ll only get photos of your dog taken at the coast. This works really well when you can’t remember what year or folder you’ve assigned the photo to.