How do you file your images?

[ckiang]

Hi,

how do you file your images?

For slide shooters,
1. By roll
2. By date
2. By subject

For neg shooters,
1. By roll
2. By date
3. By subject (a little difficult though)

Digital,
1. By date
2. By subject
3. By "roll" (pictures from a particular photo shoot put together in the same folder)

Please share some tips. Thanks in advance.

Regards
CK

 

[Goondu]

I am using digital camera and I am saving my images by dates. I am using Downloader from Breezesys which is quite a handy program.

The distinct advantage in filing by date is the easiest. The disadvantage is that you will have a hard time looking for an image that you remember but forgotten when you shoot.

My thoughts.

 

[dbchoong]

I file with date in front (yyyy_mm_dd) plus a short description of the contents.. like "2002_04_03 Baby Birthday Party". The yyyy_mm_dd makes it easy to sort.

 

[StreetShooter]

I renumber the pictures after deleting the lousy ones, using Irfanview's Batch Rename command, to avoid duplication. I use an eight-digit number with no prefixes eg 00003452.JPG. Then I save in folders with date, number range and description eg

@Digital Photos
2001
2002
2002-05-17 5463-5764 Joel's Birthday Party

This way if I want to find a particular photo and I know the number, I can zoom in on it immediately. And the system will keep me going until I've taken 100 million photos, which should be, um, about two years from now....

 

[mpenza]

mine's (digital) sorted by date, one folder for each day.

printed pics are sorted by theme, e.g. family, friends, office, Botanic Gardens, Zoo, etc.

 

[erwinx]

sorting by date seems the most difficult for later retrieval, especially if you back up to CD-Rs, to me, a CD-R that states 1/1/2002-2/2/2002 doesn't really tell me much.... I would definitely go by themes/specific events

Workflow wise, I would create a folder in Hard Disk called 'Bird Park_Raw'; if the folder fills up to 650Mb (even after u delete your lousy pics ), transfer the contents to CD-Rs (2 copies for safety). I will of course make thumbnails and maybe a contact sheet for easy reference. Then create a new folder called 'Bird_Park_Raw2' and let it fill up to 650Mb.

At the same time, there will be another folder for photos that have been 'photoshopped' for printing (The raw copy will still be in the raw folder in case u mess up the photoshopping and overwrite the raw); these are I suppose the genuine 'keepers' in the sense that it was worth your time to process and print out. I don't have too many of these so I don't think I need a workflow yet... but it should parallel the above process for 'raw' files.

 

[SmokeGrey]

Hello... newbie here. I don't have that many images to worry about, just starting out and all. Buuuut... I'd like to share how I categorize the pictures I take (digital).

After downloading the pictures, I edit in Photoshop Elements. I do a 'Save As -> Save copy', which preserves the EXIF info.

The photos (originals and edits) are sorted by date (year-month = 1 folder) and then sequentially by date. I add keywords for the categories to the file properties, like 'party', 'family', 'pet', 'nature', person's name, whatever. So if I need pictures of, say, a dog, I can do a search for 'dog' and all the relevant pictures pop up.

I'm also planning to use Element's batch feature to create contact sheets for each folder. When I write my originals to CD, I'll use the contact sheets to make a cover booklet.

Apparently all Windows computers (Win2K and up) with MSOffice installed enable the Indexing Service by default, so I can do a full-text search and pull up the relevant files quite quickly. My colleague assures me that the system overhead is fairly low.

So far it works for me because I'm not working with that many images, but I can see the system expanding as I go... I can see it working for scans as well...

Comments?

 

[StreetShooter]

Surprise surprise I don't believe in archiving to CDR.

I burnt a couple of CDR's initially, but gave it up because it was too labour intensive.

My data is backed up on 3 hard disks and synchronized every now and then. So far 60GB is still able to hold everything (I don't shoot RAW), and presumably when my hard disk requirements increase, the technology would have kept pace.

I do this because it's a great pain to load CDR's into the computer, much less burn them and store them (and find them later). My hard disks are at 2 geographic locations (office and home computers), so barring a major isandwide earthquake or planes crashing into 2 different buildings, I'm fairly safe from hard disk crashes, fire or burglary. Transferring the data is a simple matter of sliding a hard disk in a removable rack into the computer and copying them over at ATA-100 speeds. Trust me, this makes a difference when you're talking about 15GB of files (and increasing exponentially).

 

[erwinx]

i agree that in deciding between CDR and multiple harddisks, the question is how often you need to retrieve the full-sized file, because the HD option is more expensive.

Smokegrey: u actually add keywords? Wow. That is real dedication

 

[SmokeGrey]

Mmm. I can see how that would work. However, for me, it's less than practical. My primary computer is a laptop, so that would mean an external FireWire or USB drive. The FireWire's expensive, and the USB is slow. On the other hand, my backups are incremental - I can use DirectCD to save copies... I usually just add files and leave it to write while I'm doing something else.

Maybe I should also back up over my home network...

erwinx: Yup. But I mostly do it for the keepers. I figure I'll be grateful for the extra effort 2, 3 years down the road. It's a couple of seconds per keeper image, so I guess it's worth it.

Originally posted by StreetShooter
Surprise surprise I don't believe in archiving to CDR.

I burnt a couple of CDR's initially, but gave it up because it was too labour intensive.

My data is backed up on 3 hard disks
>snip<
this makes a difference when you're talking about 15GB of files (and increasing exponentially).

 

[ckiang]

Ok, so far we have heard from the digital guys. How about the slide/neg shooters?

Regards
CK

 

[Snowcrash]

anyone uses acdsee or imatch software to manage the way you store your image?

I'm thinking of trying these software.

 

[shawntim]

Originally posted by dbchoong
I file with date in front (yyyy_mm_dd) plus a short description of the contents.. like "2002_04_03 Baby Birthday Party". The yyyy_mm_dd makes it easy to sort.

I file the same way too. Within this folder (eg "Y021225_Christmas_Party") I have my originals, and an "edited" subfolder for my touchups. Within this "edited" folder I have those I resized for the web in "WEB" and those I cropped into 3:2 for developing in another folder "4R".

 

[Tony K]

Hi CK,

Hmmm...you asked something that I also liked to know.
As you know I'm mainly a negative shooter.
With my growing no. of negatives,
negatives management has become more & more important.

My friends could be calling me up to give them a print or scanned image of an recent event or an event that happened a few years ago.

Here how I currently 'manage' it:
After I get back the negatives from the photo lab, I'll give them a new 4-digit S/N instead of using the lab's s/n.
For this year 2003, the 1st roll will be '3001', 2nd roll will be '3002' etc...
For next year 2004, the 1st roll will be '4001', 2nd roll will be '4002' etc...

On the negatives envelope itself, I'll write the individual event/s & date/s for the range of frames.
E.g. 00A - 15A : '20030107 Sentosa'
16A - 36A :'20030101 Botanic Gardens'

Then the envelopes are put sequentially into a plastic air-tight storage box with silicon gels.

After that, I'll also use my film scanner to batch scan all the negatives & name the individual images as NR300100A, NR300101A, etc
- 'N' stands for Negative, Slides will be replaced by 'S'
- 'R' stands for RGB color space (saved as JPEG file) when scanned, l'll substitude it with 'C' if I scanned in CMYK (save as TIFF files).
- '3001' is my negative s/n
- '00A' is my negative's individual running frame number

- I'll create several folders for different subjects. Eg Family, etc
- For each of the subject folder, there will be a sub-folder for a particular day's event.
The sub-folder name will be 'YYYYMMDD EVENT'
E.g. '20030107 Sentosa' , '20030101 Botanic Gardens', etc
In this sub-folder I'll save all the relevant images in it.
If there are more than 37 frames in the sub-folder, I'll create another level of sub-folder by splitting it in to different rolls of negatives. Eg. 'NR3001'


Happy shooting!


Best Regards,
Tony

 

[sljm]

Originally posted by Snowcrash
anyone uses acdsee or imatch software to manage the way you store your image?

I'm thinking of trying these software.

I used acdsee for quite a number of yrs liaoz and its the best software for viewing and managing pictures close would be compupic. Acdsee has one of the fastest JPG decoding algorithms i've seen so far.

 

[Tony K]

Originally posted by sljm


I used acdsee for quite a number of yrs liaoz and its the best software for viewing and managing pictures close would be compupic. Acdsee has one of the fastest JPG decoding algorithms i've seen so far.

Is Acdsee a freeware?
Where to download?


So far i've used

EXIF Image Viewer
http://home.pacbell.net/michal_k/exif_v.html


Irfanview
http://www.irfanview.com/

BreezeBrowser
http://www.breezesys.com/products.html#breezebrowser


Best Regards,
Tony

 

[denizenx]

Originally posted by ckiang
Ok, so far we have heard from the digital guys. How about the slide/neg shooters?

Regards
CK

I never finish a roll with a single theme leh.. so I just dump all together... not very archival.. of course I'd already scanned them into directories named thematically like Zoo091101 etc...

 

[Tony K]

Originally posted by denizenx


I never finish a roll with a single theme leh.. so I just dump all together... not very archival.. of course I'd already scanned them into directories named thematically like Zoo091101 etc...

Sama sama...

 

[megaweb]

below shows how i organise my digital files

sort by camera type and then location

e.g. 5th time ZOO trip taken by D60

/d60/zoo5/

e.g. 15th time BG trip taken by Pro 90 IS

/pro90/bg15/




the reason i dun sort by date/time is the file itself can tell

 

[nuts]

Well, my slides/negatives are a mess, so no comments ;p
For digital, on my harddisk, its sorted using directories, with year, month, followed by the event/shoot, eg.
2001/08/Canada
2002/07/Birthday etc
However, I also store my stuff in CDRs, esp my travel photography. A trip could span several CDs of course. In each CD, I have the original/raw, the processed images and also a copy of Irfanview. The Irfanview can be easily configured to run a slideshow of the images. So, my "archival" CD is not only for archival, its my mobile photo album; I can bring it to my friends computer to show. Now, with so many s/w that burns CDs that plays on DVD/VCD player, I am looking more into this option. With trips that I go with my friends, they get a copy of the CD(s) too (and they become my backup copies ) ... If I'm paranoid, I burn extra copies
Afterall, these trip memories are important!

..NuTs..