Organizing digital photos

[Densha]

I have tons of photos from my digital camera on my pc. They're all in folders and I place the edited photos in other folders but I just keep losing track of everything and it's a big confusing mess of data.

Anyone who recommends a way to organize my stuff? After editing a photo I also want to keep the original intact.

[the_weird_one]

Depends on how you want to do it. I use Bridge but Picca's also ok:-

 

My method - HDD purely for photos though you can use a folder for it.

 

Folder for temporary downloads - I use Downloader Pro, it allows me to convert my RAW files to DNG, but most importantly renames my files as they are downloaded off the memory card.

 

Once the card has been downloaded, I move the folder created by Downloader Pro within the temporary download folder to a relevant folder, and in there created a PSD folder where I store my edited photos

 

This method allows me to keep my original RAW files, my Working DNG files, and Edited PSD's in a dated and named folder.

 

Works for me, but I know it won't work for everyone. I also use Synchredible to back up my hdd when I shut my computer down.

[Martijn Meerts]

I toss them in Apple's Aperture, and then pretty much never look at them ever again ;)

Edited August 9, 2013 by Martijn Meerts

[Ochanomizu]

Hello Mr Densha,

 

I use PC.

 

Firstly, the softwares I use come from www.faststone.org

 

Please consider their products.

 

I use Faststone Image Viewer (freeware) to edit, view and resize images.  It allow batch conversion of files to another folder or append file name, etc.

 

Also, in Windows Explorer I right-click on the image, choose "properties", and go to details tab.  There are many fields that you can add tags and information to.

 

I rename my images in generic way  Such as: Front View, Headlight Detail, Drivers Cab, etc.

 

Then I zip all photos of one topic into a single file, such as 20130731-E217系-Yokosuka.zip.  This tells me the date of the photoshoot plus common theme about the photos inside the zip.

 

I use Faststone MaxView (shareware) to view images in the zip without having to unzip them.

 

Perhaps some of these idea will be useful to you too.  :)

[Densha]

I don't use raw files, my camera supports it but I don't have the photo editing skills to make use of it.

I intend to make folders according to "year"->"month"->"date/event" for my unedited files. Placing the edited files in that folder in an "edited" folder could be quite a good idea.

I know of Adobe Bridge but it is much too expensive, and I don't want to use Picasa when I upload my photos to flickr.

 

That program certainly looks interesting Ochanomizu! I will take a look at it.

 

Now first I will have to sort out the big mess of files on my several disks. I also want to back up  to my external HDD but what program do you recommend for that? I also want to make a regular backup of many other documents on my computer.

[Martijn Meerts]

I would suggest using RAW if your camera supports it, there's a ton of advantages to using it. Photo editing skills have nothing to do with it.. Being able to adjust exposure and white balance and the like after taking the picture without losing detail is rather nice ;)

[Densha]

Could you explain that to me? The software Ochanomizu linked does support it and it's looking quite good at first instance although it doesn't look like it has an automatic "back-up original files" function.

And the space, RAW takes up so much space...I need larger sd cards.

[ToniBabelony]

I back mine up in Google photos. I just have to remember the date and they are easily retrievable. It also has decent enhancement software for my purposes, so I just keep it like that. Whenever I get a better quality camera, I'll probably stick with Google as well... I have no plans for an expensive camera, so meh...

[Martijn Meerts]

Could you explain that to me? The software Ochanomizu linked does support it and it's looking quite good at first instance although it doesn't look like it has an automatic "back-up original files" function.

And the space, RAW takes up so much space...I need larger sd cards.

 

http://photographyconcentrate.com/10-reasons-why-you-should-be-shooting-raw/

 

They are (in some cases much) bigger, but SD cards aren't exactly expensive these days. Also, while you might not need the advantages of RAW now, you might in a year or so be much more into photography and you'll regret not having taken pictures in RAW. As an indication, my camera is a 12 megapixel DSLR, it's RAW files are around 19-20MB.

[Densha]

I don't really like to store my photos on the net, I want to have them at my local hdd and not be dependent on google for that.

 

Okay next time I'll be shooting some pictures I'll do it in RAW and see it for myself.

[cteno4]

Densha,

 

sorry there is no magic bullet for this process... ive been around this tree many times in the last 20 odd years with myself and with many clients (pro photographers and orgs with big photo libraries). ill give you the intro i give a lot of folks as maybe something will help in your looking at specific solutions.

 

here are a lot number of programs out there to index to full indexing and editing and each take a slightly different approach to how they store, backup, and index your work. The other big variable I have found with this (i have several clients and friends who are pro photographers) is the process that you the photographer uses in their shooting, editing, storage, system, etc. tis is probably the biggest variable as folks get set in their ways and trying to get them to change process (even if its to a better one) they have become habituated to can sometimes be a very nasty loosing battle. So its usually best to find the software that fits your style the best and make sure your process is as efficient as you can make it (ie retraining yourself where you can) and covers the bases you need to rather than selecting a program as its best for someone else, but does not fit your style. even if the program is better, trying to change your flow is the real killer in this type of process as it only works well if you can do it very efficiently, cleanly, and innately.

 

the other big killer to moving to a db system is that there is a big investment in time in moving the old content into it. most all systems can pull out meta data if in the files, but you will still need to organize and fill in info like categories, edits, keywords, etc. this can be killer even if it takes 30 seconds per image if you have thousands of images. ive had several clients wait years as the time investment seemed too high to do right then, but every year it just gets worse as there are more photos! nothing in new software can fill in that info in your head into the system!

 

its best to find a new system and start with all your current and new stuff in it to get everything worked out and happy before you go back to older stuff. then go back with an eye to what stuff you will need to access the most and give you the biggest return on your investment of time. unless you are really a person who wants everything complete many find that they end up not doing a lot of misc older stuff in the long run and only do the best of from that stuff. then if they need something from there they just use a viewer program to scan for what they want in a decent directory organization of that stuff.

 

backup is another game on top of this. there are lots of ways to do that and again its very dependent on how complete you want to be and how much you want to invest into it in equipment and services. luckily hard drives are pretty cheap. online services are getting cheap but can be slow if you have a lot of stuff to deal with even with a very high bandwidth connection. rotating your back up hd offsite is also smart. every week or two rotate with one in another location or in your car boot. fire and theft have taken out a number of backups on friends and clients that had the only backup drive right there with the machine.

 

other simple backup now days is to just raid 1 your main machine drive with a second drive. does not get around fire/theft, but little chance a blown drive will screw up a file and is a failsafe for being tardy on other backups. anyhow a good backup plan that again fits in well with your habits and processes is best. trying to do something that you just dont always remember (or like) to do will blow the best backup plan. worth a small amount of money to get it to where it fits your needs (ie how critical and expensive is the data) and your style. recovering from data loss can be one of the most devastating and costly things these days so a little time and money here is great insurance (and murphy's law says if you do it there will be no problems!). ive had clients spend tens of thousands of dollars in drive recovery and time getting past a data crash, not to mention the loss of face with their clients with work loss and delays...

 

cheers

 

jeff

[the_weird_one]

If your camera supports it you can always shoot RAW + JPEG, but as Martijn said RAW has massive advantages to it.

 

You don't have to use Picasa to upload to Flickr though it did have a good plug in to be able to do that last time I used Picasa, I also use Faststone image viewer but don't like it for indexing my photographs.

 

Your folder structure looks to be ok though I would recommend 

 

"year"->"month"->"date/event" -> "RAW"

                                                 -> "JEPG"

                                                 -> "Edited"

 

that way all three folders are top level within the event folder rather than have all your photos at top level and then have a folder for your edits, I just find it keeps things neater, I've attached a screen cap of what my system looks like.

[Densha]

Interesting read Jeff.  Efficiency is exactly what I'm looking for, I'm tired of all the hassle of my current (non-)existing system so that's why I made this topic. :)

I copied all my photos to one place today so I have them all together. In first instance I will sort out my now hundreds of photos and put them in folders and delete the bad out-of-focus and duplicates photos. Then I want to start working with tag words and hope to create a bit more okayish database.

 

I also tried out Picasa again after years but I can't even make shadows lighter or overexposed parts darker so it's quite useless. The program Ochanomizu linked appears to have some weird image distortions around lines when I use raw files and when I save them to jpg they're still there so that's absolutely not good, the program does have good editing tools though. I don't know of any programs that support simple word tagging, good raw support, and a bit more elaborate editing options.

 

But the big point is that I don't edit all files and there are files I only put in my archive and may never look back to so it's a bit confusing because you don't know if you have an edited of a file or not. But that problem would be solved with raw right?

[cteno4]

Densha,

 

yeah it does take playing with the apps to see which one suits you the best after hearing/reading suggestions.

 

one simple way to track if you have an edited version is just to keep a strict file name control. I have gotten into doing this over the years after doing so many big asset number multimedia projects where we have sometimes tens of thousands of assets along with multiple versions of each. doing a consistent version number is also really helpful in the long run when you come back to figure out what you were doing or if you want to revert back to something earlier.

 

first if you are using your camera photo number in the file name it creates, make sure you never go back and reset where its numbering starts from! i blanked a canon slr once and forgot to reset the file number pref and only discovered it about 500 shots later, so i ended up with 500 photos with the same name as the first 500 i shot with it! luckily a little file renaming app was able to fix the numbering for me.

 

then doing good directory structures and names to put your master archive photos in is always a big help. i always do this when i pull the shots off the cards. fast and easy to do at that point. if i try to do it later i find its harder to remember exactly what was what or end up with a large pile not sorted. trying to put photos into individual folders as you pull them specific to its content (ie all photos you have done of a series 0) can be really tedious to do at the directory level. this is where you need cataloging software to group photos with keywords.

 

when you edit a photo file then just append some sort of code to the front of the camera number/name that is regarding your current use for that edit. then also put version numbers after it. ie DSC_1001.jpg is your original then when you edit it make the new file "projectx Series 0 DSC1001.01.jpg" this way if you ever want to look for files you may have created by editing the original 1001 file just search your directory file names for "DSC_1001". or i can search on series 0 or project x as well. gives me just enough info in the file name to get an idea of what is in the file. this lets you keep various edits of a photos in project specific files as well. best to keep your archive and your project files separate. trying to have a db keep track of all this info is possible, but it can get really tedious, not all can do this, and if anything happens to that db later or you want to change all that info can be lost or hard to convert. good file name habits and standardization though is really great in the long run as the number of files and the complexity of their history just keep on growing and growing so the more random you are the more chaos will seep into the whole thing.

 

raw wont help any of this. the advantage of RAW file format is does not throw out info that jpeg will so you can do better of tweaking the exposure and such later. downside is larger files that open slower and in fewer programs. like weird one said if you can save both a raw and jpg then that gives you the best of both worlds to have sitting on your hd. use jpeg for cataloging and quick editing but have the raw there if you need to really do something nice with the photo.

 

software with built in editing tools are nice, especially if you are doing something like web galleries where you have a pile of photos you want to tweak for web profile and then the program will spit out the proper image and html files for the gallery. but in general i fall in the camp i want the cataloging program to catalog primarily and do it the way that makes sense to me. i can always edit individual files in photoshop or if i do need to pop a pile of photos into a gallery i can always import them into the appropriate program to tweak and create the gallery in a batch.

 

like i said there is no magic bullet that does it all, but finding what you need is important. also lookout for conflicting desires like want to collect all information but also do it really fast. so after you get your needs go thru for conflicting ones to be aware of that and any re-evaluation. also before you dive in and spend money or do lots of work try out the demo on like 50 photos to see how things go. it usually takes a while before software clicks for you but if there is a gocha they usually show up fast.

 

using a more complex data base is also a bit of a return on investment calculation for yourself. db can take quite a bit to get going and then time entering info for new stuff and then doing the old archives as well. usually with my directory structures i can keep good track of most images i need to find something pretty quickly. large sets ill import into iphoto with multiple libraires or use a directory browser app to scan folders for images. this amount of time to do this is way less than doing a full db system for me. Some will want a full db just because they like having everything all tidy and if thats what you want/need then it can be worth the investment, but for me im more into just containing the chaos rather than trying to totally control it, i dont get the return on investment to totally control the chaos...

 

treat your backing up as a separate issue that just does you needs on the resulting directories/files your photo archiving/editing/storage system creates.

 

cheers

 

jeff

Edited August 9, 2013 by cteno4

[Ochanomizu]

Could you explain that to me? The software Ochanomizu linked does support it and it's looking quite good at first instance although it doesn't look like it has an automatic "back-up original files" function.

And the space, RAW takes up so much space...I need larger sd cards.

 

Hello Mr Densh,

 

I am not expert about this, but I believe that RAW is a special format.  Whenever you edit RAW you never lose the original data.  Editing RAW is like applying a set of filters to tell software how to display the original data.  The original data is always preserved, even if you crop, blur, and alter the colors.  I am told that such changes can always be undone with RAW, although I have not tried this myself.  Therefore, there is no need to back-up original files.  But if you edit the file and like the result you should save a snapshot of that to .jpg or similar.

 

This is what I am told.

[Ochanomizu]

...

 

The program Ochanomizu linked appears to have some weird image distortions around lines when I use raw files and when I save them to jpg they're still there so that's absolutely not good, the program does have good editing tools though

...

 

Hello Mr Densha,

 

Please allow me to provide some assistance with Faststone Image Viewer.

 

To improve the viewing of RAW files please open the software, hit F12 to open "Settings".  Click on "RAW" tab.  Select "View RAW files in Actual Size (Slow). Select "High-quality color interpolation (Slower).  Select "OK".

 

So sorry, but the images will become slower to work with.  Such is the cost of accuracy.

[cteno4]

Raw is basically the raw sensor data (with just a bit of modification by the camera). Digital cameras have processors and software that then processes that data taking into account some of the camera settings and sensor profile and then do the rgb jpeg compression to create the jpeg file that is usually stored. If you have a camera that can store the raw file then you can use that for later editing software,

 

When you open a RAW file in image editing programs that can read them they covert that data into their own format used within the program that you then adjust with all the various tools of the software and convert it to rgb or cymk format. Any time you save that resulting changed image it's never saved back to the original raw file so you can always go back to it to apply a different set of filters, adjustments, tools,etc.

 

Of course you can do this same process of loading your jpeg (it to is converted to a different internal file structure in the software) edit it and just never overwrite the original file (which you never want to do anyway!). Difference is the jpeg starts out already modified quite a bit in the camera and some of the pixels are modified by the jpeg compression as well.

 

Many photographers like raw because they want to make all the changes to their pixels as shot and not some stinkin camera processor or compression algorithm.

 

Jeff

Edited August 12, 2013 by cteno4

[Martijn Meerts]

RAW does allow non-destructive editing yes, if you have a program that can do so. Then again, same applies to JPEG if the program supports it ;)

 

I pretty much always shoot in RAW only myself. I have done RAW+JPEG for a while, but discovered fairly quickly that I just never used the JPEGs directly.. 

[Densha]

Hello Mr Densha,

 

Please allow me to provide some assistance with Faststone Image Viewer.

 

To improve the viewing of RAW files please open the software, hit F12 to open "Settings".  Click on "RAW" tab.  Select "View RAW files in Actual Size (Slow). Select "High-quality color interpolation (Slower).  Select "OK".

 

So sorry, but the images will become slower to work with.  Such is the cost of accuracy.

Works perfect! Thanks! :)

 

I also really like the lightning tool because you can make shadows lighter while making the overexposed parts of a photo darker.

That really improves my photos a lot, I was looking for a way to do this for a very long time.

 

I see no reason to do RAW+JPEG at all when I have the better quality RAW file already.

 

I'm now using the Faststone program and it works pretty good. I decided to not do word tagging, at least for the time being, because it's a hell of a job and I have the photos organized fairly well in folders now. Not to forget that the program does not support it and I would have to use windows explorer for that and I don't think you can tag RAW files either.

[Ochanomizu]

Hello Mr Densha,

 

I am so pleased that Faststone Image Viewer is working for you.  If you store your images in a zip or rar file for convenience like me, then please remember that with Faststone MaxView you can view your images without having to unzip them.