organizing photos

Since I need to restructure the way I organize my photos after my computer crashed, I wondered how others organize their photos. Besides just simply setting up folders for each type of bird, are there other files you save better shots in? Files for shots you're preparing to edit? Files for jpg (to go on the internet) or files for tif? What's the secret???

Also - how many pictures do you save? After taking so many pictures and deleting so many, I never know if I should just keep a handful or if it is better to keep more than that.

Since some of my shots are probably lost forever and I did not save many on CD's (I have a lot of nice photos, but not a lot of "great" photos), I felt fortunate to have a CD that I had made to use as a screensaver at work - it held some of the shots I liked the most.

Do you use any type of image catalog software? Over time, you will come to have way more photos than you can mentally keep track of, even in a really good directory structure. I recommend reading Peter Krogh's book "The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographer". You don't have to follow all of his recommendations in terms of directory structure and so forth, but it discusses directory organization, file naming conventions, image catalog software, metadata, keywords, rating and labels in great detail.

You learned the hard way about back up. Hopefully you didn't lose any family photos. Storage really seems to me to be the weak point of shooting digital. I would suggest you save your top 5% best photos onto TWO gold CDs (not regular CDs.)

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Kent in SD

Pat,

It sounds like you're not using any photo management software. Is that right? You should consider trying such a program out. It relieves you of having to figure out a physical directory structure to organize things. With such software you simple associate one or more tags to each photo. You can then sort or search for certain tags. One place to start is with Google Picasa's software because it is free. There are certainly many others though.

Thanks for the good suggestions! I do have a Photoshop program to help manage the photos, but had such a simple way to do it without the program that I hesitated to use it. It's just one more program to learn, and I'm swamped. I guess I'm just hoping for an "easy fix" - a strategy to get organized!

I appreciate the help!
Pat

The recommendation regarding Krogh's book is a good one. The book is VERY thorough. There are several organizing programs. Shoebox Media Manager can be found at http://www.kavasoft.com/Shoebox/index.php. There's also iView but I don't have the website for that. (They may be the company that is being acquired by Microsoft.) I'd suggest a Google search or two.

Good luck,

Alice O'Leary

I haven't really looked at any of the current photography management software tools now being marketed to consumers. However from some I looked at a few years ago, one thing really stuck out with at least some I looked at. And that is unless they provide an export function to allow transfer of the essential data into some other format like Excel, MSWord, or a text file, I would steer away from their use as you may end up with a huge database tied to that one program you will always need to use or if moving to something else, face a huge task of manually transferring the information piecemeal. The same situation occurs with many other simpler software applications that are marketing to consumers for a wide range of applications because it makes sure they remain loyal whether they want to or not.

I've been in electronic engineering here in Silicon Valley since the early days, especially computer engineering. So learned file structures and programming back in the days of text based tools like UNIX and DOS and still prefer to work within my own file structures. However these days I tend to use spreadsheets for a lot of my photography based files including those that manage my fine art print business print listings. If one has a good command of such programs as Excel and html that is all one needs to organize their images.

Storage of digital image files is a totally different subject and will be different for those files that go out for printing versus those one just lists under different trips. For the later, as those from my tiny 7mp Coolpix, I simply use a hierarchial directory structure on my hard drive. After each trip I try and prune out all the useless and redundant images, edit a few, and leave the rest essentially unchanged until I have reason to expend time on them. Rearranging the structure is a trivial task. One useful tip here. The thing I do when I download my digital pics is first run an old DOS command like dir /o:a /s [camera port path] > file_list.txt . That saves the dates and times for all the files before one loses that information and stores it in the same trip directory. ...David