[mike.hiran]

I've been using a topic/subtopic/keepers format, and I've been pretty happy with it. I typically don't rename my files except my jpgs f/ post processing will get suffixes (ie imgp3150 wb crop usm clar comp nr = white balance, crop, unsharp mask, clarify, compressed jpg, noise reduction)... and photo's that I've processed from raw will go into the keepers file (both the raw file and the jpg will go into the keepers file). If it's necessary, I'll just create another sub folder. It looks like the following (except the dashes are subfolders and would show up indented in windows explorer):


car
-- aa keepers
-- HID light mod
-- 5zigen
dc trip
-- aa keepers
-- jefferson mem
-- -- night shots
-- -- hdr's
-- ---- keepers
-- wash mon
-- -- keepers
-- mus nat hist
family
-- new years 08
-- -- keepers
-- x's birthday 08
-- -- keepers
lens test
- p m50 f4 macro
- tam 70-300
- zenitar

---

Last edited by mike.hiran; 05-01-2008 at 08:18 AM.

[c13_]

So let's say you have a July 4th Picnic and you take 400 photos... some family member portraits, some landscape, some of the kids playing, and whatever.


how would you keep them? would you split them into the correct folders (abstract, landscape, family, portraits, etc)?

Yes. the family shots would go into the family folder in their own folder labeled July 4th Picnic, same with all major catagories of shots. That way I can find the photos by subject and event. However if you only have 1-2 landscapes from that event, just label the image itself and leave it in the parent folder for that subject.

[Gimbal]

So for instance, if you go to Central Park and take 500 pics... you'd get back home and visualize EACH picture and tag it accordingly? One by one? I know you could possibly select a range and TAG them at once, but still you'd have to open each one and select them in a group...

I dont see how this works in an efficient way...

That is actually surprisingly easy with IMatch, you select a range of thumbnails and click on an appropriate tag. Select next range, new tag. A special "folder" holds all untagged pictures, so it's easy to see which pictures you have left to tag.

Also when you start browse your pictures by tags you WILL get an wow-experience and start tagging like mad. It's pretty neat when all your family pictures shows up in one "folder" regardless of when, and where they are actually stored. Too many family pictures? Try browsing "family" AND "central park" and there you go.

[BBear]

That is actually surprisingly easy with IMatch,

hmm.... IMatch huh? Let me google this thing and read more about it...

Thanks for the idea!

[baw]

Also when you start browse your pictures by tags you WILL get an wow-experience and start tagging like mad. It's pretty neat when all your family pictures shows up in one "folder" regardless of when, and where they are actually stored. Too many family pictures? Try browsing "family" AND "central park" and there you go.

You got to love the category setup in iMatch
Did you discover the Filters already? Or the Interactive Category builder? Dynamic Categories?

Possibilties are endless once you have your images organised.

(I'm just a satisfied iMatch user. No ties to the company)

[zorobabel]

I organize my pics by shoots (but I mostly shoot when I'm with my wife - hiking, visiting, going out mostly).
My filing system is like this:
D:\backed-up jpegs\071224-26 Sequoia\071225 3446.jpg
This is how it evolved for me: less folders (I was scared by the number of subfolders some of you people have posted; simple is better), more extensive folder names and file names; date and place for folder, date and file number for files. I use "ReNamer" for the renaming.
While I'm not yet doing it, I think there is no substitute for tagging, unless you rename your files including the tags. I'm afraid I might lose the tags when using different software, but I'm probably wrong. I'm not doing it because tagging takes a lot of time...

The random photos, not worthy of their own shoot folder, go in to an 08 (or respective year) miscelanous folder, but have the date and file number in their file name.
I'm planning on keeping doubles of my favourite pictures in some special folder; starring and rating them goes away when switching software or even reinstalling OS for some...
My scarce raw files get the same file treatmentment except for adding the word raw to the folder, then get burned, and never heard of again ... . Shooting scarce raw files complicates things a lot.
About raw - developing takes time - and I'm not getting paid for it. And my wife doesn't want to wait, she wants to see the pictures "tonight"... But shooting raw only would be easier to file than mixed raw and jpeg.

Anyway, I've still got a long way to go when it comes to managing my photos. But I've come to one conclusion: I'm happy if I shoot fewer pictures per shoot. This is obviously the best sollution.
I think another good exercise beside using a prime (or taping your zoom down to one focal length) is to bring only a 512 mb sd-card with you. I just can't find them anymore ...

[attack11]

i rely on flickr. my raw folder is just a dump; and if i need to find anything i can just look for it by file date. the organization/tagging on flickr is imo better than you can get with a filesystem.

i can find images by lens, content, date, etc.

[a a i b]

I use Aperture. My photos are organized in two broad categories:

1. Photos of personal interest are organized by month:

2008.04.01+

any large photo-taking event simply gets its own project

2008.04.19 John's Wedding

Within each project I rename the files with a broad moniker, like "MM in the park" or something. I then tag each photo with keywords, at least one for place and one for each person depicted. Sometimes other keywords are more appropriate, of course.

Within each monthly project I'll make a smart album that collects the best of that month's pictures (4 star or higher). These then get synched to my phone, and a separate collection (with a few more keyword restrictions) creates a down-and-dirty webpages (for family members to view).

2. Photos related to themes or jobs (where the temporal aspect of the pictures is irrelevant) are organized by the theme name or by the job number. Within each category are subcategories (before construction, construction, final) as appropriate. These photos are also keyworded, but there isn't much more needed to add outside of the file structure.

Of course, specific "smart" albums can also be set up that make collections based on calendar, keyword and ratings criteria. These are helpful for both the personal snapshots (making books or webpages) but also for jobs, where the best images are culled into an album portfolio to show prospective clients.

Aperture also backs everything up with a vault. I leave the library on a portable drive and take it home with me at night, so for a little inconvenience I get an offsite back up.

[Scooter]

G'day

Organising your images so you can find them can be a lot of work and requires discipline to maintain BUT it adds huge value to your collection.

Image organisation is also important for non-professionals because being able to find all pictures of your kids with their grandmother is exactly the sort of thing you want to do.

Like you I started by developing a meaningful, hierarchical set of folders. It can work reasonably well but as you expand your collection the folder structure starts to get messy and there are two really big problems with this system:

1. Folder organisation only lets you organise by one characteristic eg family members. BUT most of your photos will have multiple charactistics. Therefore if you want to quickly find all photos of Auntie Maud with your children when you were visiting Sydney last Christmas you cant do it because your organising mechanism only works in one dimension. You need a system that lets you assign multiple Metadata entries to each photo (eg. Auntie Maud, Children, Christmas, Sydney) and then search using AND, OR criteria. I started off using IMATCH for this but now I'm in the process of converting to Lightroom so as to simplify my workflow.

2. The other reason not to use nested folders based on content is archiving. If you have 1 folder for Children it will contain shots from each year. If you want to archive it you have to backup the lot each time. Over 20 years that could get huge! What I'm now doing is locating all photos in a folder for each year AND all photos are heavily coded with metadata.

Using these method I can find things by multiple criteria AND efficiently archive things over time.

It works, I've just got to be disciplined.

[BBear]

I started off using IMATCH for this but now I'm in the process of converting to Lightroom so as to simplify my workflow.

I was about to purchase IMatch as my photo manager... I didnt even know Lightroom had a photo library in it... what are the advantages over IMatch?

I wanna give this tagging a try....

[Venturi]

For pure organizatinoal purposes why not go with digiKam? It's free, runs on Win/Mac/Linux, lets you build your albums (folders) any way you want, supports custom tags/keywords and comments which you can keep solely in its database or write to the EXIF/IPTC meta of the images. It also has built in filtering so you can view by date or by tag/keyword; and it has a query engine in it so you can build your own custom searches to sift through the growing mound of photos in your collection.

It also does RAW conversion (via dcraw and/or ufraw) and has some editing tools. Not the greatest in the world for this stuff but still very much okay for basic PP.

[baw]

I was about to purchase IMatch as my photo manager... I didnt even know Lightroom had a photo library in it... what are the advantages over IMatch?

I wanna give this tagging a try....

IMatch has a 30 day free trial period.
I've played with LR, and it is a very sleek raw converter/editor.
Problem with it's dbase capabilities seem to start around 10-15.000 images. Seen several reports that it chokes on that amount of images.
IMatch dbases of several 100.000s of images are running fine.

[sabarrett]

I don't see digikam for windows, just mac, and a couple of flavors of linux. Looks good tho. However I am trying out iMatch right now and it looks like I probably will make a jump to that soon.

[sabarrett]

I imagine most if not all of us are in the same boat here - its a photography forum, we love to take pictures, hence we have lots of them. Here is what I have been doing, and what I am doing now to relieve the log jam of photos on our system.

I have taken our entire image library (5 yrs worth) and sorted the files by date/daily subject - like this:
2007 Photos (folder for year)
+----2007-01-01 - New Years (folder for that day)
----------2007-01-01-0001.jpg (files from that day)
----------2007-01-01-0002.jpg
+----2007-01-03 - Out sledding (folder for that day)
----------2007-01-03-0001.jpg (files from that day)
----------2007-01-03-0002.jpg
(sorry for the structur - can't use spaces to create a tree view)
and so on. Each file has a unique name, each file is in a folder based on a large scale topic. It got this way using bulk rename utility to batch rename the files based on creation date and serial number(select and it happens automatically - great!!) and, for new files, cam2pc downloader. This automatically creates the date/topic named folders and renames the files on transfer from camera to PC. It has been largely abandoned, however it is vista compatible and the downloader works great!

This was fine for a while, however the files are just getting too numerous. It is getting hard to find the picture you want. cam2pc was not the best at handling tags and such. I need more, so I have been looking at iMatch. Here I have a set of categories for Location (where the picture was taken), Activity (what people are doing in the photo), Event (party, christmas, etc.), People (who is in the photo), Things (items in the photo), Special subjects (special qualities on the photo, like the kids cuddling or something). I am sure this thread will make me think of more tags, and as I try this out for a couple of weeks, I will think of more. I am trying to not get too granluar in the list of categories, as it will get tough to manage. The ultra fine items I am putting in the picture title. Also I am using the 1-5 stars for emotional or likeness quality, and the 5 color codes for technical quality.

Hopefully this makes sense to others, as it does to me. I am up for other thoughts, as I am just getting into iMatch, and prior to purchasing, I would like to weigh other options. Once I do this, I would like to not regret it, as we have over 40,000 images to catalog. I did not like the idea of putting the data in a separate database, but would rather have the data imbedded in the image. That way, if we change cataloging programs, the data will go along. However iMatch seems to have exporting covered in a variety of ways. I hope it will last into the future..

Questions... Comments...?

Scott

[baw]

I did not like the idea of putting the data in a separate database, but would rather have the data imbedded in the image. That way, if we change cataloging programs, the data will go along. However iMatch seems to have exporting covered in a variety of ways. I hope it will last into the future..

Questions... Comments...?

Scott

One of the reasons I went with IMatch is the compatibility with several standards. (IPTC, XMP, EXIF) There are several ways to combine the use of IPTC data with the IMatch Categories. Also the scripting language used in IMatch (VB compatible) can ao be used to export ALL available variables.
For comments on your category setup etc. I would go to the IMatch Forums.
Also have a look at the IMatch Wiki.