On image organization

mike3996

Legend
Location
Finland
I know people love LR and other propietary tools to organize their catalogue. And why not, they offer crazy good tools to search through thousands of images like that.

Personally I don't know. It seems the metadata is so chained inside one particular software.

Some people like Eric Kim suggest that you export all your good works as JPEGs and you rename each and every one individually to help find it later. Not a bad idea because for example I don't come up with many good images in a month so the extra work isn't bad. But then again, I don't always know what image I will treasure and try to find later on. And it can be a lot of work trying to come up with creative names for one's pictures, especially names that help you find the picture 2 years later...

I thought of this new approach just today. Might work, might be too incredible. Okay, here goes: consider you edit and post-process the images that you think are really nice, and then put them in a Word document. You can write all the captions and technical memoirs between the images that you want. You'll end up with this big document but you can search for your text, keywords, things.

Now, I'm not going to use Word for this but some somewhat related things. The main thing is that I end up with a big, flat file with most everything in it, in chronological order. I believe that the tech I'm going to use will not crash even if the doc starts to approach thousands of pages. This could be a real "photo diary" kind of a thing.

Anyone else battling with image organization and doesn't want to rely on any particular propietary solution?
 
I just put the raw files into the computer's existing folder structure in date order (a folder for each day) where they can be accessed by any external software. Easy. Beats me why anyone would save only within the external software, I've had problems with folder/ file corruption in that regard.
 
Some people like Eric Kim suggest that you export all your good works as JPEGs and you rename each and every one individually to help find it later.
And I'm going to remember all the names for hundreds of files... How?!

I let the Windows photo app auto-download everything into dated folders within the Pictures folder. I shoot M4/3 and Ricoh, so I have separate folders for each, and further separate them by year.

So my Pictures folder would look like: "MFT" > "2018" and "2019" with year/month/day folders, and back to the top: "Ricoh" > "2018" "2019" etc. Older years I move off my SSD to a backup HDD.
 
I just put the raw files into the computer's existing folder structure in date order (a folder for each day) where they can be accessed by any external software. Easy. Beats me why anyone would save only within the external software, I've had problems with folder/ file corruption in that regard.
I do this currently but there's hundreds of directories at this point. I want to look up a particular shot I took last spring, there's still enormous wading-through to do. I want to retain all this but keep "highlights", an index if you will that I can scan quicker so that I can immediately see what date it's from.
 
And I'm going to remember all the names for hundreds of files... How?!
I suppose given Eric and I share a passion for street photography, you don't actually come up with particularly fantastic street shots that often. And when you do, you'll remember it by whatever description you give it. "Woman in red" or "Man jumping over the puddle".

The trouble is that I take other sorts of photos too, and my standards are lower so there's going to be a lot of naming.
 
Regarding the diary approach that I pondered in the opening post. As romantic as it sounds it sadly sounds too unsustainable once it starts to grow in size. The lack of suitable software to manage it might be a problem. But the idea is still too romantic to abandon. I like the idea of free-form prose between the images interesting. Jot down technical notes, emotions about the images, things like that. You probably wouldn't tag an image with "I really love how this turned out, the focus is spot on" but you might write such a caption for an image you won't necessarily share in a forum.
 
I suppose given Eric and I share a passion for street photography, you don't actually come up with particularly fantastic street shots that often. And when you do, you'll remember it by whatever description you give it. "Woman in red" or "Man jumping over the puddle".

The trouble is that I take other sorts of photos too, and my standards are lower so there's going to be a lot of naming.
Eric has a passion for making money and being a talking head, that's about it. I think photography is more his vehicle.

I'm the same as you I think, where I get few street keepers and that's where my heart is, but I also document and keep many of my shots, so my keepers are usually filtered out to Flickr or similar.
 
Folder Structure is by Year. Under that - folder of Event/Location and Month/Year - and the file name is based upon that 2nd folder with potentially 4 digits (I've never shot more than 750 or so frames for any given session). I make two sub-folders for the last level - one is ORG (or RAF/NEF/CRW) which is the original shot file, and a WEB export for immediate publication/reuse.

That makes it about as stand-alone as possible without approaching legacy file naming limitations (I have files dating back to 2001), and rely upon embedded EXIF for the rest.

We tend to commit to Metadata through a product selection - ratings, keywords, etc. The key part is to find alternatives to upgrade to that can take that Metadata forward from the legacy program.

For photos that I particularly "favored" during a shoot - while my memory is fresh and I'm happy with the post-processing, put it into a Selects folder. Over time, as processing evolves and basic file size/resolution suitable (for mostly Web) - if I need to re-use the shot but have to upgrade file size/quality, the file name helps me find it somewhat easily.

That's backed up immediately to a separate local drive, then I have my semi-annual upload to my Cloud Service storage for long term security.
 
Back
Top