Help Organizing Digital Photo Collection

[Aztech]

So I took digital pictures for years, and would just dump them on my hard drive in various folders, etc. I have a LOT of them. I'm finally getting around to trying to organize them, and want to do a better job of that in the future.

So, how do you guys organize/store all your pics? I also finally bought an external HD to put them on for a backup. My main question is how do I keep that synchronized with all of my new additions and or changes on my internal HD?

Any tips or tricks before I dive into this project, which I think will take days...?

Thanks.

 

[Homerboy]

1st off, wrong forum

2ndly, I usually do /<year>/<date taken>/<date-time stamp - resolution>.jpg
I used Picasa2 to organize/manage/browse

 

[Ns1]

marked, never found a good solution even w/ picasa

 

[JoeBleed]

The way i store mine is i create a directory structure as follows:
camera name
4 digit year
month (i do mine in 2 digit numbers, but you could do yours in the name if you want)
2 digit date taken
(note, i use 2 digit months and days to keep the directories in order easily when sorted by name. I think vista and 7 compensate for this, but why not do it this way from the beginning?)

in the root where it starts i keep a text file for a kind of index of what i did and the date. (trips, cars, whatever i specifically want to remember) to help find when it was taken.

As for syncing them to external drive, you can either store them only on the external drive or, better, set up this structure on your computer and use synctoy (assuming you use windows) and sync it to your external drive now and then depending on how often you take pictures.

Assuming you kept the time set correctly on your camera(s) you should be able to use the exif data to get the date taken. If not and you aren't sure when they were taken, just try and narrow it down to the year and month if possible and put them in a generic grouping directory.

 

[theflyingpig]

Step 1: Buy a Mac
Step 2: Put photos in iPhoto

Congratulations! Your photos are now organized, and ready to be presented to anyone who may want to see them. The combination on iPhoto and Mac OS X is superior to all other choices. Everyone knows this.

 

[spidey07]

marked, never found a good solution even w/ picasa

Same. I really need a good organizing and searching solution.

 

[Homerboy]

Step 1: Buy a Mac
Step 2: Put photos in iPhoto

Congratulations! Your photos are now organized, and ready to be presented to anyone who may want to see them. The combination on iPhoto and Mac OS X is superior to all other choices. Everyone knows this.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/whats-new.html
picasa does all that.

 

[theflyingpig]

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/whats-new.html
picasa does all that.

lol. And you can program with notepad.exe. lol.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I organize my RAWs by date. i.e. pictures/RAW/year/yyyy-mm-dd/*.DNG

For simple jpegs from my P&S cams, I do categories like "colorado", "family and friends", etc...

...but I hate it. I'd rather organize by date like my RAWs but, AFAIK, there's not a standard tagging format between gallery programs like iPhoto, Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Lightroom, etc...

 

[Homerboy]

lol. And you can program with notepad.exe. lol.

Rather than making vague and useless posts, why don't you offer something, you know... helpful... for ONCE in your career here at ATOT.

Exactly what makes iphoto soooooooo much better? I'm genuinely curious (as it seems others here are also)

 

[doan]

There's a program called Downloader Pro (about $30) That will sort pics into folders according to the EXIF data. You can also define a backup location so as you add new pics it will copy them to 2 locations. I have it set up to put pics in folders by year and month.

It is also smart enough to manage raw files and video.

 

[ChairShot]

I've been shooting pro for 5 years now and what I do is create a folder (YYYY-MM-DD)_Name of assigment. I then dump the pictures in there from that particular assignment Sub folders are for chosen pics from the many I take and then another one for the pics that are ready to be sent.

For all my browsing purposes I use the program photomechanic linked to Photoshop CS5 for editing. I tried using Lightroom 3 but I'm too used to Photomechanic... For the searching part... since all folders have the assignment's name, searching via explorer is easy.

I have a external 1TB Backup RAID1 that backsup manually as soon as I'm done sending pictures.

oh and I FKN HATE iphoto!!!!

 

[Homerboy]

oh and I FKN HATE iphoto!!!!

B-b-b-b-b-ut it's the best! Everyone knows this!

 

[edro]

Picasa rocks.
The facial recognition is awesome too, but a little creepy.
It recognized my niece's face from infant to 5 years old.
How the hell it can recognize that is beyond me.

 

[vshah]

Picasa rocks.
The facial recognition is awesome too, but a little creepy.
It recognized my niece's face from infant to 5 years old.
How the hell it can recognize that is beyond me.

 

[theflyingpig]

lol

 

[xSauronx]

1st off, wrong forum

2ndly, I usually do /<year>/<date taken>/<date-time stamp - resolution>.jpg
I used Picasa2 to organize/manage/browse

i never renamed pics, but i sort by year > month > [day, holiday, event, misc]

took a while to get my stuff sorted a couple of years ago, but ive managed it now so its easy to do

 

[Homerboy]

i never renamed pics, but i sort by year > month > [day, holiday, event, misc]

took a while to get my stuff sorted a couple of years ago, but ive managed it now so its easy to do

picasa has a nice, built in renamer that will name by EXIF info.

 

[blinblue]

Picasa rocks.
The facial recognition is awesome too, but a little creepy.
It recognized my niece's face from infant to 5 years old.
How the hell it can recognize that is beyond me.

I've had it recognize my sister as a baby from a painting that my aunt did. And the painting was off in the corner of the photo. Either a testament to Picasa's recognition or my aunt's painting ability (or both)

 

[IronWing]

I still prefer Thumbs+.

www.cerious.com