|
How do you keep track of all those photos? That’s another question that I get asked a lot. I’m not a pro photographer with a studio and a million or more client photos on file, but (at the time of this writing) I do have about 57,000 images cataloged on my system, 48,000 personal and another 9,000 work-related. Keeping track of an image for recall, especially a work-related one, takes a bit of effort. Believe me when I say that it’s time well spent! So, how do we find stuff? Back in the days of film and paper, we all made albums of the keepers and most of us just put the others in a box with the negatives and, if we were thinking ahead, labeled the box with the year or something identifiable. If we did slides, we had the little boxes labeled and the regular shows in the stacks of carousels ready to dull the senses of an audience at a moment’s notice. Most people had several hundred pictures to deal with and if you were an avid hobbyist like me, a few thousand. On the other end of that scale we all had, or knew, an “Aunt Betsy” who had a camera, but only developed a 24 exposure roll every two or three years. Her storage method was a drawer with a couple hundred photos collected over the last thirty or forty years, most with scribbles on the back like “John Boy and Suzie – Disneyland 1969” or “Billy and unknown cousin – 1965”. Not a real chore to find the picture you wanted and even easier to just flip open an album (or pull a handful out of Betsy’s drawer) and re-live the past. Setting up the projector and screen took a bit longer, but was still pretty simple. Welcome to the digital age… Here we are seven years into the twenty-first century and photography is in the midst of off-the-charts growth as is the number of photos taken annually. Granted, a lot of those photos on the stat sheets are from camera phones, but even if you set those numbers aside, a lot of folks are taking a lot of pictures. What are they doing with them? According to industry analysis (pick your analysis, then pick your number…I took an average), the average, non-professional photo enthusiast prints about 35% of photos taken with a digital camera. Average. That means, as usual, extremes at both ends. Some people (few) will march into Costco with their chip in hand, slam it into the kiosk and order one or two each of the contents. When they get home, they will clear the chip for the next batch. Some (many) will review their images, delete the blurries and put the keepers on CD for transport to the aforementioned kiosk. A significant number of these people are uploading their chosen images to online photofinishing services instead. The pictures are either mailed to them or picked up at a local outlet. Some (many) will do the review and print them themselves on one of the vast number of affordable photo-quality printers available today. Others (still few, but growing) are turning to other forms of display like DVD slide shows, multimedia PCs attached to HD TVs and displaying their photos online. The last group still does printing, but rarely and those are usually enlargements for display. Of course, these groups are generalized and there are many shades of grey between them. What all these folks have in common (except for the first group) is that they will end up with a hard drive full of images. Now what? Note: The following methodology was not found chiseled in stone at some historical site and it is not intended to be a guideline for professional photographers with customer images totaling in the hundreds of thousands. It has, however, worked well for me over the last five or six years. It also does not address backing up your images to prevent loss. That's an important subject for an article of it's own. Since your camera probably incrementally names files as you take them (DSC_0001, DSC_0002, etc.) saving files in one big, happy “My Pictures” folder will work out and nothing gets over-written. This is fine if you take pictures like Aunt Betsy and have amassed a total of a hundred or so photos in the last ten years. Finding the picture you want or just browsing is a snap. The problems begin for the average user when these hundreds of images turns into thousands or, in some cases, tens of thousands. I hit the wall at about 1,000 photos when I realized that the numbering format only had room for 9,999 images before the chance of over-writing became an issue. This brings up the subject of how cameras identify images taken. Most cameras offer two basic methods;
Variations of these include setting the single folder to re-start at 0001 every time the card is emptied (c) or a new card is inserted and setting the date folder method to keep the numbers incremental even when the new folder is added the next day (d).
Many advanced cameras let you add and name folders as well as choose where you want new images stored. Personally, I use method a) in my cameras. It’s simple and straightforward. Moving images to the computer. I keep my photos in a folder named “PHOTOS” (sorry, all my creativity is tied up in photography) in the My Pictures folder under My Documents. Like this:
Under that, I have named category folders with named sub-categories.
Etc… The dedicated folder “\PHOTOS\Digital Staging\Import” is where I load the files for general sorting. In the Import folder, the files are all given names that relate to their subject. In the case of single subject shots, like a car I saw and snapped a photo of, I will name the file directly - ”Blue 2007 Mustang_2345.jpg”. Note the numerical suffix. I use the sequential number from the original file name and replace the DSC_ or PICT with the descriptive name. That way Yellow Lily_2345 won’t conflict with Yellow Lily_7690 taken later that year. I then move them to their respective sub-folders. The descriptive name allows for rapid searching whether you use your operating system’s search function or a cataloging program like Google’s Picasa or the organizational features in Photoshop Elements. In the case of a series of shots of the same subject, I’ll use the IrfanView batch rename utility. (This is such a useful tool that I wrote a separate article on this utility HERE.) This produces sequentially numbered filenames in any form you choose:
Nancy’s Birthday 2006 001.jpg Nancy’s Birthday 2006 002.jpg Nancy’s Birthday 2006 003.jpg etc.. Those photos are moved to a folder named “\PHOTOS\Family\Gatherings\Nancy’s Birthday 2006\”. When we return from a trip with hundreds (and hundreds) of images, I create a folder under “\Digital Staging” specific to the trip: “Alaska 2006” for instance. I’ll then create sub-folders for whatever method of sub-categorizing I decide on, usually by day; “\Day 3 – Ketchikan”, “\Day 4 – Juneau” with separate folders for large collections like “Whale Watching” or “Ship Photo Tour”. I then sort the images by date and use the IrfanView utility to rename and move them accordingly. A note on Picasa. You can add captions and further organize images into albums for ease of access without duplicating the actual image on the disk. For instance, a picture of my two daughters ice skating together from our June 2005 cruise that is in the “Eastern Caribbean 2005\Day 6 – At Sea\” folder can also appear in the “Kassandra” and “Tara” albums for browsing and slide shows, but only physically exists and is still visible in the original folder. It took me a while when I first decided to do this and had to go through a thousand or so pictures and sort them out, but it was time well spent. I now spend very little time whenever I add photos to the collection and if I want to find something…no problem! So, go forth and organize. I hope this article gave you, at least, a starting point. This works well for me and ties in nicely with my collections and folders in Picasa but, as usual, your mileage may vary... Happy shooting!
|
