Digital Archive Mess

[rondo]

How do you organize your photos please?
(You can also point me to an old thread here or elsewhere)

The PC finally turned into an unmanageable mess...Can't scroll effectively through pictures anymore. I need to delete a lot of stuff, but need a system to sort, tag, classify images etc.
Viewing thumbnails seem to be less effective than contact sheets. Any windows based applications that resemble contact sheets? How do you decide what to keep and what to throw away? Do you print small size before final selection?
How do you name the pictures? What kind of directory structures do you create?
I would think film people can also give me some valuable suggestions. I would think many principles for selection would apply.
The problem with digital is hard disk space! If you have one negative worth keeping in a film strip, you don't have to cut it out and throw the rest, context is also very valuable and meaningful reminder on how the picture was made.
I really enjoyed this video,for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ0SkmAh7d8
But with digital this translates to lots of wasted unnecessary gigabytes-especially if you are not koudelka!

Thank you all and again happy new year....

 

[gavinlg]

Digital file management solution - click here

 

[rondo]

Digital file management solution - click here

Lightroom? Isn't that mainly for editing? I don't see how it helps to organize photos-not even mentioned under "features"?
Thanks,

 

[ChrisN]

See post #3 in this old thread

 

[sepiareverb]

I assign each card a number just as I always assign each roll of film a number. Bridge generates a proofsheet which I occasionally print out, but mostly use as a pdf, stored in the same folder as the images. Images can be searched by number or date much more easily- which is how I've always searched for film based images. I do add keywords to the folder the images are stored in- places and people mostly.

Finalized files are stored in a series of separate folders by job/client name or project. Other images from the same shoots are easily found from these files numbers or dates. As I finish with a job or accumulate enough images for a project a proofsheet is generated. for easy review.

Not perfect, but neither is my film workflow.

Lightroom does allow for lots of metadata entry, and is pretty flexible about batch entry of data & keywords. I myself hate entering metadata, and dislike LR for all but the initial work on scans of color film- mostly white balancing and the other initial stuff I do to a RAW file. From there I work in PS.


Oh, and I back-up.

 

[Sparrow]

iPhoto, actually seems to work OK, it automatically references by date and I add the film type and number from the negative storeage files; film-135 3674 is my last entry

 

[maddoc]

I only need storage space for my film scans but since a 16Bit TIF file of a single 135 frame scanned with 4000dpi already needs ~135 MB ... 😱 Anyway, I use the system of creating a own folder for every film scanned and these folder are organized by year and month. So the first film developed and scanned this year is 2011-01-M7-1600PR-35LUX and the corresponding files with the identical filenames + number corresponding to the frame are in this folder.

 

[jarski]

am using also Bridge and Mac file system based archives. but OP's problems sounds like the case for iPhoto or Lightroom.

 

[zumbido]

iPhoto gets dicey once your library grows beyond about ten thousand images, even on a workhorse of a machine. It just wasn't built for that. Aperture or Lightroom would be the way to go, or ruthless culling.

 

[GSNfan]

FastStone Image Viewer

http://www.faststone.org/index.htm

 

[al1966]

If you want to just sort through the files of photographs how about Picasa ? its free but does the looking through photos job well. I use it on my net book it only gets used when we are traveling so there is no point paying for a photo viewer. I use Lightroom on my Imac and Photo Mechanic. With 100mb+ files anything but a mega powerful computer will be slow!

 

[user237428934]

iPhoto gets dicey once your library grows beyond about ten thousand images, even on a workhorse of a machine. It just wasn't built for that. Aperture or Lightroom would be the way to go, or ruthless culling.

iPhoto has no tree structure to navigate through your photos. Organizing all your photos in a flat structure is problematic with more than a few hundred photos.

 

[user237428934]

Lightroom? Isn't that mainly for editing? I don't see how it helps to organize photos-not even mentioned under "features"?
Thanks,

Under features it seems they they only presented the new or enhanced features of LR3. Don't you know all the features of LR2 😉

LR3 is very strong in organizing your photos.

 

[gavinlg]

Lightroom? Isn't that mainly for editing? I don't see how it helps to organize photos-not even mentioned under "features"?
Thanks,

Is Lightroom 3 a photo-editing tool or a workflow productivity tool?

Lightroom is both an image-editing tool and a workflow productivity tool. It provides what photographers need to manage, edit, and showcase all their images in one clean, uncluttered, intuitive package.

Nope, lightroom was actually originally made as a digital 'solution' to the film darkroom. Meaning that you are able to import photos, store them in an organized and structured 'library' sorted by various rating implementations and keywords. Then you can selectively 'develop' the images with all the main photographic manipulation tools, and you can also print directly from it.

Look up 'non-destructive editing' - lightroom and aperture use it. It basically means that when you import a file into lightroom it stores the original raw file in a folder somewhere on your computer (you can choose where) and when you make adjustments to that image you're only actually making adjustments to a referenced file, not the original raw. Meaning your 'digital negatives' are always untouched, and your adjustments are saved to a separate file in the library.

Download the trial on the adobe website and watch as many instructional tutorials as you possibly can for the first few days. When you get the hang of it you'll never want to use other software.

 

[zumbido]

iPhoto has no tree structure to navigate through your photos. Organizing all your photos in a flat structure is problematic with more than a few hundred photos.

Yes, it does.

Research shows, though, that people aren't terribly effective at finding things in tree structures unless the labels are of high quality (which isn't surprising if you think about it)--and if you have quality labels/textual metadata, searches will be more efficient anyway.

 

[Andy Kibber]

Sounds like a job for Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom given that you're using a PC.

After six months with Aperture I can't imagine going back to separate file management and editing programs.

 

[ottluuk]

Another vote for Lightroom. I work with a mix of RAW files, old scanned TIFFs and assembled panoramas (several hundred MB-s each) and it just hums along. If you have the discipline to keyword your images appropriately as you add them to the catalogue, finding specific photos later is very simple.

 

[ZeissFan]

You need to pick up those external drives. With 16GB 32GB and memory cards now available for inexpensive prices, it's much more than a DVD can hold. So you need several terabyte drives to hold all of these photos. After a while, buy more drives and unplug the ones that are simply storing images. That's just the reality, as image sizes (digital, as well as scanned negatives) get larger.

I generally will rename file folders with something that makes sense: Location, date and camera

With film, I put the camera name, film type, date in each folder's name. Each scanned roll gets its own folder. Within each file is a small text file with processing information (if it's black and white), such as developer, dilution, time and temp. I'll also include a note about where the photos were taken or if I was using a specific lens or doing a lens test.

 

[Gazzah]

DAM good software

DAM good software

I use IDImager (http://idimager.com/). very good, just have to remeber to tag everything. Worked better on digital camera files than scans as it picked up everything from the exif, but so long as you spend a bit of time tagging then it is great. Does simple edits, prints, CD burning, backups and can be scripted to perform a lot of things automatically.That and a good raid array NAS box has everything safe(ish).Gary NH

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I use iView MediaPro, which is solely a database for images. It works far better for that than editors like Lightroom or iPhoto. Its a lot faster and generates a single database file that you can open on any computer and it can catalogue stuff on external hard drives and CDs and picks up anything you enter in Photoshops File Info command as well as letting you add your own descriptions and keywords. Lets you organize files into categories without changing their actually location on your drives.

Microsoft bought it a few yrs ago and renamed it Expression Media. I'm still using iView, never needed to upgrade.