I was just wondering how most of you organize your photos from begining to the end.Since I'm not the most organized guy as my wife says I was wondering if anybody had some good ideas,especially after a very productive day with lots of good photos.
So lets hear it so we can get my act together.All ideas accepted:smile:
I'm not the most organized guy either - LOL - but I simply download my shots from the day into a folder to which I give both a descriptive name and a date.
That way I can search either by location or date when I need to.
I bet there are many more sophisticated methods used by our fellow Café members, and I'll be interested in hearing those too.
I use an image management software. I happen to use Apple Aperture, but Adobe Lightroom is the same in the management aspect.
I have folders for:
Assigned shoots- (Shoots that I do for others for pay)
Locations- (includes folders for various states and countries
Family- (personal images)
Sports-
Critters-
I place images in these folders by date format (ie: 2007_May)
I load my images into the computer, then I place them into a document file with the name and date, I burn two copies of the un-edited images, then I process the images and place them in another document file. I burn two copies of the edited images....then delete the edited and un-edited images from my hard drive.
Haphazardly, seriously but there is a method to my madness, yesterday someone ordered a picture for a CD cover and it took me until the third external hard-drive to find it! :smile:
I use iView MediaPro for my image management program. I use Downloader pro to download from the card, adding what information I want, ie, keywords and location and name the folder where I what them downloaded to. Then I use BreezeBrowser Pro to cull, same people that have Downloader pro. The folder or folders then get imported into iView, where all the keywords and locations are shown. iView shows a thumbnail of all my images, and gives there location on the HD or HD's, and with keywords and/or other ways I can call up any photo that I want. I then look through the ones I want to pp and from within iView I can go into NX or PS.
There ya go. Oh, I then keep a copy of MYpicture folder in two separate HD's plus a backup of my catalogs that I have created in iView.
Cheers
Nancy
I'm normally a horribly disorganized person, but my method has worked pretty well for me. Organizing by subject just doesn't work for me, so I go by date.
I made a directory on one of my removable SATA drives purely for digital-camera images (from all my cameras), within that I make a directory every year, and within those I have directories for each day of images I have. The original camera files immediately get "read only" attributes so I don't accidentally erase them.
If I do any edits, conversions to .jpg/.tif, resizes, panorama stitching projects, etc - all get their own sub-directories under the original date.
I have a second 500gb removable SATA drive that gets a mirror image of my first one. Both can be yanked out in a couple of seconds and carried away if I need to leave the house. I have another drive that periodically gets a duplicate of all my files and is stored elsewhere (I do this for my photo work, software projects, and work files).
Using the date obviously isn't a fool proof system, especially if you're searching for a specific subject - but like I said, I'm pretty disorganized and I'm lazy. Taking the time to categorize everything, add tags to the images, etc - would be better for some people, I just have never done it.
I use Downloader pro to download from the card, adding what information I want, ie, keywords and location and name the folder where I what them downloaded to.
That's about the only "downloader" program I've seen that appeals to me. I especially like the built-in geotagger. I'll be looking at that one closely this summer I think.
That's about the only "downloader" program I've seen that appeals to me. I especially like the built-in geotagger. I'll be looking at that one closely this summer I think.
But it would be nice to have a program that can take all that data you would add and put it to use, so you could then call up a particular image. That is what I have iView for. It is a pain to first do, but I tell you once all is done, it is wonderful!! I wish I had done it before.
1. Two main Folders titled "Digital Photos" and "Film Photos"
2. Within each are Folders for "Year"
3. Within each year folder there are folders titled by "Date - Subject"
4. Within each "Date - Subject" folder are the images. Anything edited gets "edited" or "ver #" added to the end of the filename
If I take more than 50 images of any particular subject than the originals might get put on a mini-CD, CD, DVD, or dual layer-DVD as called for.
Wow this awesome.Now were really getting into this .Thanks you guys & gals.
Anybody have more ideas.Lets hear them I know there's a lot more organized
people out there.Don't hold back those secrets.Please help me get organizedAgain thanks everyone for some great ideas ,but we need some more
arnie
Here's my image directory. Each shoot has a folder. The folder names are self-explaining. The shot is from Photo Mechanic. It permits mass image PTIF updating with descriptive information.
Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
I like Rich's idea of putting the subject in with the date too. They'll still get sorted, but the subject is there. I should have been doing that.
To save time looking through individual files off of optical media I also do contact sheets and put them in the root directory. I guess PS does it, but I'd been using Thumbsplus to do it:
But Scott that is what iView does for you, even if they are offline, the thumbnail can be viewed. Photomechanic produces thumbnails too, but not sure about the offline stuff. Rich would know that.
I like Rich's idea of putting the subject in with the date too. They'll still get sorted, but the subject is there. I should have been doing that.
To save time looking through individual files off of optical media I also do contact sheets and put them in the root directory. I guess PS does it, but I'd been using Thumbsplus to do it:
I use a Mac now but I was partial to Thumbsplus when I used the PC. I like being able to compare two-five images side by side in T+ and when you moved the cursor all the images would move to the same spot; great for comparing....sort of like Aperture; but T+ thought of it years ahead.
It doesn't show but my filenames are dates and sequence only. No need for descriptions in the names since the PTIF section carry's the metadata.
2007-05-28-(0001).nef (for originals) .tif and .jpg for production. In the original folder is a "settings" folder for the NX settings file corresponding to the original nef. As the year nears an end I delete the Culls folder; the working folder is for the .jpgs out of the camera. I use them for comparing shots and for uploading non critical images to Smugmug for quick posting. I also delete the working folder. With setings files I can also delete .tif files since all I need to do in NX is load the settings file to the raw and save as .tif anyime I wish. Saves tons of space.
I am still in the process of refining and defining mine:
Right now I upload from CF card reader to the computer to a folder on the desktop called "Incoming" After that, I immediately rename and copy the folder of RAW images to another internal hard drive. Next, I review the images in Photo Mechanic and sort out the goodies from the not-so-goodies and put the goodies into a folder on the desktop labeled "To Aperture." When I get the time, I then open Aperture and post-process the images there. From Aperture they go right to a folder labeled "Upload to Smugmug," which is the next step. After that is where I still am fiddling around with the best organization of my images that have been made into .jpgs.... I need to better structure my system at this point and also determine at which time I will dump the image files from the working hard drive to storage/external drive.
I would never be able to operate as you guys are, as I am all-thuimbs (no pun intended), inexperienced, and, in computerism, dumb as a nail , but in my humble opinion, my ignorance of compu-filing has led me to a very easy and fast method, as I use large thumbnails (size adjustable) of all the pix in any folder, and it's done FOR me, and best of all, it's FREE.....for a lifelong beginner, what could be better? it's called Picassa......
It's like searching for the Holy Grail, but mine happens to be saved in a dated folder then my images are renamed according to the following convention YYMMDD-SEQN. I don't bother using named folders nor filenames because I try to be as detailed as I can with my captioning so I can always search for what I need via the metadata. I prefer to keep my unedited images (originals) seprate from my keepers and final production images.
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Again thanks everyone for some great ideas ,but we need some more
