How do you organize & store your photos?

kyzen

Golden Member
Oct 4, 2005
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It seems the number of pictures I take a month has been steadily increasing. While during my first month with my camera I took about 2 gigs worth of pictures, last month I took 30. I'm going to Hawaii in a week, taking 34GB worth of memory cards, and am somewhat worried that that won't be enough.

Initially I just kept the pictures in my "\My Documents\My Pictures\" folder like any good newbie. As hard drive space dwindled I opted to buy a new machine, so all my images were transferred to an external 320GB drive, where they still are.

I have a habit of not deleting anything but the worst of the worst shots (i.e., incredibly underexposed or horribly overexposed), so a decent portion of my images are really just junk that i probably should have deleted.

I also organize things into just one level of folders, "\pictures\mm-dd-yyyy\" and am starting to think I should break it down a bit more granular, such as "\pictures\yyyy\mm\dd\" for ease of searching and archiving.

And speaking of archiving, I don't even really do that at all :(

So, fellow camera addicts, how do you deal with your images once you get home from shooting? How do you organize stuff on your machine? How do you keep your computers hard-drives clutter free once you're done working with a set?
 

Aharami

Lifer
Aug 31, 2001
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right now I keep them manually sorted in folders - "YYYY MM DD - brief description". but it makes finding a certain picture or a picture with certain person in it very tedious. Im thinking of switching to lightroom and keep all my pictures properly tagged. It will take a while to label/tag my pictures properly, but should make my life easier in the future. Also I just bought my first DSLR and took about 20 gigs worth of RAW and JPEG images over my honeymoon. I think I will only keep the best of the best on my HD, and back up everything on few DVDs
 

kyzen

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Oct 4, 2005
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I got Lightroom awhile ago, but I guess I haven't really leveraged its organizational capabilities at all, I might have to look into that tonight...
 

fuzzybabybunny

Moderator<br>Digital & Video Cameras
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Jan 2, 2006
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Yeah, I would consider using Lightroom and using its keyword capabilities. There's only so much you can do with Windows Explorer and folder/file names, especially when you get into ridiculous volumes as you're starting to. And lightroom has the whole "backup catalog" and "import photos into a primary and backup location simultaneously" capabilities as well.
 

kyzen

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Oct 4, 2005
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One thing I'm still frustrated with is when I plug in a camera and use Lightroom to import photos, it doesn't clear them off the device when it's done - is there some obvious setting I'm missing somewhere to do that, or do I need to manually wipe the card each time?
 

fuzzybabybunny

Moderator<br>Digital & Video Cameras
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Originally posted by: kyzen
One thing I'm still frustrated with is when I plug in a camera and use Lightroom to import photos, it doesn't clear them off the device when it's done - is there some obvious setting I'm missing somewhere to do that, or do I need to manually wipe the card each time?

I don't believe that Lightroom can do this, but it may be for good reason. Seems like a lot of places recommend deleting the card in-camera for whatever reason. I've deleted and formatted the card through Windows and it has always been fine though.

I'm generally not a fan of any kind of "auto delete" feature though. If something goes wonky during the transfer or something bad happens to the HDD afterwards, and the program automatically deleted the images off the card already, then you might be in some moderate trouble if you didn't know to just hit the card with some easy recovery software.

I prefer to do the deleting (and the decision) myself in-camera.
 

Deadtrees

Platinum Member
Dec 31, 2002
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I let Windows to handle transfering files in the first place; all the pictures go into the dedicated HDD following the date order.
Something like "2009-June-Any" for regular pictures. If anything special, it's labeled like "2009-June-IndependenceDay."

From there, I use Picasa to browse pictures. I use it because it's damn fast, neat and I can just navigate pictures without having to change folders.
The interface is very easy, straight-forward, and the basic editing functions work great. The best feature is its 'straighten tool,' Photoshop, LightRoom or whatever painfully sucks when comapred to the Picasa one.
If there're certain pictures that I like, I throw a star so that I can just find those pics simply by clicking a star button.

For 100% viewing, I use Faststone. And both of Picasa and Lightroom is linked to external programs I work with; simple shortcut or mouse click would direct me to exif data viewing, Photoshop, LightRoom, DPP, and anything.



 

randomlinh

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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I used to organize by date, and then by "event" as I usually shot that way. Then I let Aperture handle it in my iMac phase. I quickly learned I can't let the tech side of me go and need more control =)

I have LR pretty much do year/mon-day/, and when I shoot both my 20D and 40D (or any other camera), I subdivide that by camera as well to avoid overwriting. I sort through what I want to keep, then keyword everything to my best ability. I try to be consistent, but I've found it's difficult sometimes, and sometimes I get lazy, heh. I also add a keyword for the event usually.

Then I organize in LR usually by event, family, friends, travel, etc etc.

I hate to tie it all into LR, which is why I try and keyword events, but tis the nature of non-destructive editing.
 

Zenmervolt

Elite member
Oct 22, 2000
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Folders on an external drive. Each dash (-) below indicates one level of nesting (e.g. "-" is one level, "--" is two levels, etc.)

YYYY-MM-DD
-Event Name
--Keepers
---JPG_PROOF (folder created by Bibble when I generate small proof-size images)
---JPG_FULL (folder created by Bibble when I generate full-size final JPGs)

ZV
 

Aharami

Lifer
Aug 31, 2001
21,205
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if you shoot raw, do you keep the RAW files after you've converted them to JPEGs, or discard them?
 

corkyg

Elite Member | Peripherals
Super Moderator
Mar 4, 2000
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I keep all my images on an external drive, and that is replicated by two more external drives. I have digital images back to 1997, and they are organized into folders and sub-folders based on event, subject and/or date.

All are in JPG format at the camera's largest resolution/size. The ultimate usage is for CD or DVD slide shows, so RAW is never used except on a special basis for a print.

As of now, I think there must be over 12,000 images so stored and backed up. Most involve travel to foreign countries. Two of the external drives are eSATA, and one is USB. They are all identical.
 

randomlinh

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: Aharami
if you shoot raw, do you keep the RAW files after you've converted them to JPEGs, or discard them?

before non-destructive editing, I still kept them along side any final edited ones. I have made it a point to trim what I keep overall though, since early on, I had a habit of keeping the crap shots too for some reason, heh.
 

corkyg

Elite Member | Peripherals
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Mar 4, 2000
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If USB ports are limited, consider adding a powered hub - 7 more ports!
 

California Roll

Senior member
Nov 8, 2004
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Thanks to this thread I checked out Lightroom, and wow. I'm a really casual photographer mainly taking family and event pics. I've used Explorer to organize our 10k pics and Lightroom is awesome. I think I won't even need to use PS for most of my retouches. Will still need it to add lolcat captions to pictures of the kids tho :)
 

soydios

Platinum Member
Mar 12, 2006
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I've been using Lightroom since version 1 beta 4. It's just about exactly what you want, particularly if you shoot RAW. Just about nothing matches it for batch RAW processing.
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
80,287
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C:\My Documents (I changed the location of my documents with RegEdit)
Then Personal\Nikon D40
Personal\Sony P50
Personal\Sony F717
And so on for all the cameras I've ever had.
Within each camera type (folder) I have another folder for location and or activity. Like:
Moms house, Xmas 2006
Lake house
Hooters, summer 2008
China Lake, 2003-2006
Dads House, Xmas 2002

and so forth

Some of them are generic like:
Moms flowers
Dads models
Chevy S-10
Reddish Knob visit

As for management, I pretty much always use ACDSee. Have been using it ever since I found ACDSee 95 for free on a photo disc. Now I am up to version 2009. They also have pro versions but I dont feel like spending that kind of money.

Also, Windows Explorer with Thumbnails, SUCKS! Its slow, its clunky, you cant change any options, you cant do quick edits or batch renames or anything. Sucks. Plain and simple.
For those who dont wanna spend money on something, I recommend Picasa. You dont need an online account if you dont want. But Gmail is free and you automatically get a buttload of picture storage with it. May as well use that too.
http://picasaweb.google.com/shortylickens
I'm only using 108 megs of my FREE 1024 megs, and upgrades are dirt cheap.