Organizing and labeling your digital photos

[gmat]

After you've shot your train photos, how much do you organize and label the shots or series of shots?

 

I file them sequentially by date.

 

An example:

1.aug.3.11.wed.setagaya-daita.crossing.north of.shimokitazawa.shinjuku.night.stations.swallow.nest

   a. setagaya-daita.station

       1.express.for.odawara

   b.crossing.north.of.shimokitazawa.station

      1.7000.series.LSE.romance.car.for.hakone

   c.shinjuku.station.night

      1.home-liner.odawara.185.series.oos/for.shinjuku.3490m

      2.tobu.nikko.series.253-1000.oos.parked

      3.home-liner.odawara.185.series.for.odawara.3451m.part.2

         a.detail.shots

         b.platform.destination.sign.

         c.departure

    d.swallow.nest

 

I have the headings saved in a file organized by train lines or shooting locations, for example Shinjuku Station, as I shoot there often. I further have it broken down by day, night or weekends and holidays as there was a difference in the trains and I found it easier to understand what I was shooting. Notice that I don't have the model number for local and express trains, but have the run number as displayed on most JR trains. I can copy the headings and paste it on a folder to hold the photos. I may move towards adding the car model information to my photo folders. Organizing it sequentially by date photo shot allows me to remember the context of where and when the photos were taken. Of course it's more difficult to track down a photo.

 

Rather than writing station after each name, I've lumped it at the end as stations. The grammarian in me dies hard. I used to file non-train photos separately,but have started to have it at the end.

Some photo topics;

71.construction.equipment

    91.compact excavator

71.station.work.force

    91.hand.cart.climbing.stairs

71.train.shots

     81.at.the.platform

     91.train.destination.sign

 

I wonder how other people organize their photos. I'm always up for borrowing/stealing new ideas.

 

Thanks,

Grant

[Martijn Meerts]

I sort them by project/album/folder, and tag them accordingly. All in Aperture.

[KenS]

I'm another Aperture user.

 

I file them in folders (within Aperture) by subject (e.g., model locomotive, layout construction) or by trips (summer 2010 visit to Railway X).  Normally I put a useful description in the caption field (a metadata field that can be made part of the image on export).

 

Lately I've taken to also using keywords and Aperture's smart folders capability to build sets of photos in addtion to the original folders (e.g, all my Electronics photos go in one folder, but I have a smart folder that shows all of the ones tagged "dcc-electronics").  Some photos have more than one tag, so this way I get copies in multiple smart folders without actually duplicating the image.

 

I'm using this as part of the redesign of my website to have a bunch of more focused photo albums, some of which need to have a photo that also appears in other albums.

 

I have taken to using the file name (version name in Aperture) to describe the photo, but it's nowhere near as organized as your structure.  I just use descriptive names (e.g., "de10 river crossing 2137" where 2137 is the unique index number the camera generated for the original). I do this since exporting photos this way gives me meaningful file names for a whole folder of images with one export.