Photo Sorting and Storing

[kipper]

This is probably a no brainer for some but I'm interested to see what other people do when it comes to storing of photos. The problem I have at the moment is that I've just come back from overseas with roughly 3000 photos. Some of them good, some bad. I want to first sort them out into some sort of categories. However I'm not sure which way I should do it.

For instance, one way I was going to do it was have country, then in that folder list the united kingdom, france, australia etc. Then in each folder have the location that I was at eg. London, Middlesbrough, Whitby.

The other method that I've currently got but not happy with is categories eg. landscape, building and structures, people, animals, plants, objects etc

However with the latter method I'm having difficulty categorising because sometimes the item falls within two categories. For instance I have quite a few photos of Chinon, a beautiful French Chateau but it's set on a beautiful landscape. Does it go into Building and Structures or Landscapes?


So my question is, which method does everyone else use?

[Onyx]

I sort mine chronologically. So when I want to pull up images from the past, it forces me to think back and recall the time/place I took the pics.

For o/s trips - I did it by weeks. ie. week 1, week 2, etc. instead of locations visited. So say I wanted pics of monkeys taken at Bronx Zoo - I have to force myself to remember that I visited it on my 7th week, so it'll be in the folder "week7".

It's perhaps not suitable for those with forgetful memories, but I keep this system as it forces me to exercise my brain more - to prevent me developing brain decay.

You could do it by location, countries and cities visisted - but then you'll have the same categorising dilema with images taken while travelling inbetween locations.

[the foto fanatic]

I do all my shooting using NEFs, and I store them in Windows folders by date. Within the folder, they are in the same numerical hierarchy that the camera applies - I have my D70 set to sequential numbering.

As I PP pix, I keep the resultant images in folders according to their subject; eg NZ Trip 2005. I give the JPEG file the same number as the NEF original, but as a copy; eg _DSC1877copy is the JPEG file of _DSC1877, which is a NEF in the NEF folder.

I used to use Adobe Photoshop album to sort images by subject, but now I find it unnesessary as I can find the file relatively easily anyway.

[kipper]

CricketFan, sequential numbering?
So that it never resets the number when changing CF cards or format them?

[the foto fanatic]

That's it kipper. The numbers just continue on and on (up to 9999, I think).

Page 159 in the manual has the guff on this.

[Marvin]

For all of my trips I just put them in places - eg Paris, Rome and the date of the trip to the place in the folder name. I use Thumbsplus to categorise them.

[phillipb]

Kipper, there are some programs that let you categorise on many different fields so that one particular photo can be associated with 3 or 4 subjects. I can't recall now which programs let you do this, but I'm sure other people who are using them will let you know.

[xorl]

I put each batch of photos I store in a new session directory (the sesson number increments each time). The photos are automatically renamed to represent their date. Eg: "20040812-123410-02.nef" is 12th Aug 2004, 12:34:10pm, 2nd photo taken that second. I had to add the extra subsecond field after getting the D70 . This gives every photo in the collection a unique filename. These files are never modified.

I have a NOTES file in each directory which describes each photo (and the session in general). I use a simple script to import these details into Gthumb (http://gthumb.sf.net/) so I can easily search through my entire set of images and create galleries. I'm sure there are similar programs for Windows/Mac which will let you do this. This system is much more flexible than renaming each file and directory to try to describe the images, it takes less effort too .

[Miliux]

The way I sort is by a chronological method. eg. "Bondi Beach 17-02-05" That's my photo album folder title.

In that I have seperate sections for "Low Resolutions" and "Photoshop" folders.

I never throw away the originals or overwrite them.

[kipper]

Yep, at the moment I'm looking into ACDSee and their database program. Seems to work quite well from what I've used of it. However something that worries me is if I rename the file or move it. Does all this categorising get lost because the file as far as I know doesn't store this information. Or am I wrong, do JPEGs and NEFs store this information in their headers?

As for sorting by chronological or by date/time from the EXIF. If I remember correctly I think I forgot to move the date/time to French time for the first week or two. Don't think I changed it at all when I was in the UK so it would of been an hour out there. Which reminds me, better change the date/time now

[Deano]

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements v3.0 which has built in cataloguing, version control, backup, offline storage etc. For those using PSCS the equivilent would be Adobe Album v2.0.

Cheers
Dean

[kipper]

Deano, how do you go about moving files and keeping the catalogue data with the file?

[Deano]

Moving them to where? PSE3 imports direct from the CF card and stores them in a directory named for date and time of import. From then on I use the PSE3 interface and never have to go to the directory. Tagging allows me to categorise photos by any number of categories and then locate them easily. A calendar view shows photos by date taken. Version control allows editing while keeping the original intact. If I fill the hard disk I can archive to a removable disk, cd/dvd etc. In this case a proxy thumbnail(user selectable size) is kept in the catalog with all the tags still active.

There is an option to write the tags to the image files but I've not done so and have no idea what this actually does.

Cheers
Dean

[kipper]

Well for instance at the moment I have the files split over multiple directories. Now if I move these files from one directory to another it loses all the data that I've set for the file (eg. category and keywords).

[leek]

Kipper,

A pro-photographer was raving about iview media pro last week. He claimed that it coped well with changes to folders and file names and allowed multidimensional categories as you require.

Photoshop Album does the same, but in my experience you have to operate exclusively within the file management of the program. As soon as you start making changes in Explorer or in a photo-editing tool, Photoshop Album doesn't pick them up and you end up with broken links in your catalogue. This is definitely the case for version 2.0... Elements version 3 may have improved on this.

[kipper]

I had a look about what could of been done and I reckon the following would of worked quite well.

When you add a file to the database it should create with exactly the same name something like "filename0000.db" and when you move files you have to ensure that you move the .db file aswell.

The other work around I've found I could do in ACDSee is to copy the DBs data to the EXIF Image Description and User Comment fields as I'm not using them. After I move them I could import it back into the DB.

[Deano]

Using PSE3 I don't find a need to move files except if I save for upload in which case I save a copy into a directory, upload and then move to another directory for published images. All of these ones are outside of the PSE3 catalogue but the original is in the catalogue.

It is possible to end up with files disconnected from the catalogue if you move them but there is an option to reconnect missing files and the software will find likely matches based on filename, date, size etc. and you choose the correct one by comparison to the thumb stored in the catalogue. I know how this works because I manually moved all of my images to an external drive and then had to reconnect them all. What I should have done was use the PSE3 move function which would have taken care of it all.

As far as workflow goes, I understand people use directories for sorting into keepers, rubbish etc. and then more directories to keep track of what step in the workflow you are up to. To do all this I have created tags in PSE3. I go through newly imported images and apply a "Candidate" tag for those worthy of PP, a "Crap" tag to those not worthy of anything. I then have tags for "In Progress", "Processed", "Published" and "Printed". No need to move files around at all.

An image may have many tags so I also have sets of tags for events, places, people etc.

The other thing is that integration with Photoshop editor takes care of file naming for saving versions or copies etc.

All up I really like PSE3 and Album 2 before that.

Cheers
Dean

[kipper]

Also a mate of mine pointe me towards this program:

http://www.picasa.com/index.php

[leek]

Hmmm... I'm just experimenting with Picasa due to the fact that it claims to support NEF files... I've just imported all my photos and it does indeed allow you to view NEF files but they all look very washed out and almost sepia in tone...

Has anyone else experienced this??? Is there any way to fix it?

Edit: Just answered my own question... It seems to be a common fault with D70 NEFs - will just have to wait for them to fix it I suppose...

http://forums.picasa.com/viewtopic.php? ... ef+support

[birddog114]

Hmmm... I'm just experimenting with Picasa due to the fact that it claims to support NEF files... I've just imported all my photos and it does indeed allow you to view NEF files but they all look very washed out and almost sepia in tone...

Has anyone else experienced this??? Is there any way to fix it?

Edit: Just answered my own question... It seems to be a common fault with D70 NEFs - will just have to wait for them to fix it I suppose...

http://forums.picasa.com/viewtopic.php? ... ef+support

One of our members, Woody tried and posted a thread somewhere in this forum, I knew it's garbage!

[kipper]

Just looking at picasa now and I can't understand why it has year on the left side that says 2005 then 2004 underneath but most of the photos are in 2004 but they were shot 2005. Wierd program.