How do you organize your (digital) photos?

[rivan]

This post might go better in Software, but I thought I'd try here first.

I've got a few thousand family photos I'd like to organize in their original formats, while making some available online for extended family. I don't want to use an online gallery connected to a print service - I'd prefer something that could sync with my own personal hosting, and automate the process extensively.

So how do YOU all do yours?

 

[Kelemvor]

I just have mine on my hard drive in folders based on the topic (family, vacation, etc).

I only put ones online if they are special or something.

 

[xchangx]

I user pbase.com

They allow you to batch upload pictures by uploading a zip file.

 

[Aharami]

i store them in my hard drive sorted by folders mostly based on date the pic was taken. exceptions are general categories like macro shots, etc. I hear Adobe Lightroom is supposed to be awesome at organizing photos

 

[Kaido]

Picasa & 500gb backup hard drive

 

[ElFenix]

picasa and folders organized by trip/subject matter.

 

[tfinch2]

Directories for each event. Each directory has the RAW files and three subdirectories. (unedited TIFFs, edited JPEGs, web JPEGs)

All RAW files are backed up on CD or DVD, depending on how much storage I need for the images.

As far as online, only web JPEGs make it to PBase.

 

[markgm]

This is where cross linking files could be cool. For the most part I have folders for each event/trip, but then I have a few general folders such as 'Me and Friends, Family, Me and Family, Friends... I have them stored in 3 places that replicate to each other. I lost a bunch of Air Force photos I took from trainer planes when a hard drive died and I'll never store them on a single device again.

 

[Ausm]

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Ausm

 

[Crafty35a]

ACDSee

 

[edro]

Picasa is really good and I make all my non-computer literate family members use it.

I just use the original DCIM folders for organization (by date), Photoshop for editing, and Coppermine if I want to make a web gallery.

Now that I think about it... I should probably use Picasa as well.

Edit: For backup, I burn to DVD and I also use Carbonite (online backup service, $50/year) to backup my Photos root folder. (~20gb)

 

[Brainonska511]

I have pictures in folders where the folders have the following naming scheme: Year-Month-Day - Event (or Place)

Pictures get named by what is in the picture. If I don't remember the name, then it retains it's IMG#### tag.

 

[mugs]

\\Photos\YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD_<event_name>\<camera name>_YYYYMMDD_HH24MISS_<original_filename>

So for instance, I'll have something like this:
\\Photos\2007\2007-01-17_Maui\Canon 30D_20070117_155903_IMG_3065.jpg

At some point I'm going to sort out all the best pictures and put them in a separate folder in each event folder.

I use Robocopy to make sync the copy of my photos directory on my local PC with a NAS drive every night. When I want to put pictures online I use Gallery2's XP publishing wizard.

"Syncing" with your website doesn't make much sense to me, as there will be pictures you don't want to put up on the web, and once they're there they likely won't need to be modified... Gallery2's XP publishing wizard makes it really easy to put pictures up though, and I'm sure other photo hosting services have a plug-in for the publishing wizard as well.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: mugs
\\Photos\YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD_<event_name>\<camera name>_YYYYMMDD_HH24MISS_<original_filename>

So for instance, I'll have something like this:
\\Photos\2007\2007-01-17_Maui\Canon 30D_20070117_155903_IMG_3065.jpg

At some point I'm going to sort out all the best pictures and put them in a separate folder in each event folder.

Talk about redundancy, and long file names make baby jesus cry.

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: tfinch2
Talk about redundancy, and long file names make baby jesus cry.

That system probably is vey easy for Mugs to work with, is efficient for Mugs, and means a lot to him. But ask anyone other than Mugs to find the picture of Mugs' friend Bob wearing the red hat and it is an impossible task. Someone may spend weeks searching in vain only to realize that Bob was a good friend in 1996 not in 1997.

I have an imperfect system myself. I have big categories: vacations, friends, family, pets, housing, work, etc. Within each main folder I have sub-folders that anyone in the world could understand. For example in the family folder, I have immedate family, siblings, parents, grand-parents, extended family, etc. Within those, I keep adding more sub-folders until there is a managable number of photos in the final group.

So if I ask any one of you to find my college friend Bob wearing a funny hat, you just look in "//Friends/College/Bob/Silly". Everyone could find that photo quickly and easilly. Heck, just do a computer search for "Bob" and you'll get it. The drawback is that I have redundant photos. That same photo may also be under "//Vacations/North Pole/Bob". But I'll deal with my redundant photos for now and I'm happy that I can find any photo for any subject in under 5 seconds.

Note: In reality I have no friend named Bob, I have not been to the North Pole, and this imaginary friend Bob dislikes hats. I just randomly picked an example.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: tfinch2

Originally posted by: mugs
\\Photos\YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD_<event_name>\<camera name>_YYYYMMDD_HH24MISS_<original_filename>

So for instance, I'll have something like this:
\\Photos\2007\2007-01-17_Maui\Canon 30D_20070117_155903_IMG_3065.jpg

At some point I'm going to sort out all the best pictures and put them in a separate folder in each event folder.

Talk about redundancy, and long file names make baby jesus cry.

Yes it is redundant, but it ensures everything stays in chronological order if sorted alphabetically (well, I put the camera name first so that the pictures in each folder would be sorted by camera, then chronologically). The long filenames ensure that all of my filenames are unique (since Canon reuses them every 10,000 pictures), I can tell at a glance when a picture was taken (and thus can find it easily in my folder structure), and it preserves the original filename in case I ever care about that (i.e. to ensure I don't lose any large groups of pictures).

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: tfinch2
Talk about redundancy, and long file names make baby jesus cry.

That system probably is vey easy for Mugs to work with, is efficient for Mugs, and means a lot to him. But ask anyone other than Mugs to find the picture of Mugs' friend Bob wearing the red hat and it is an impossible task. Someone may spend weeks searching in vain only to realize that Bob was a good friend in 1996 not in 1997.

I have an imperfect system myself. I have big categories: vacations, friends, family, pets, housing, work, etc. Within each main folder I have sub-folders that anyone in the world could understand. For example in the family folder, I have immedate family, siblings, parents, grand-parents, extended family, etc. Within those, I keep adding more sub-folders until there is a managable number of photos in the final group.

So if I ask any one of you to find my college friend Bob wearing a funny hat, you just look in "//Friends/College/Bob/Silly". Everyone could find that photo quickly and easilly. Heck, just do a computer search for "Bob" and you'll get it. The drawback is that I have redundant photos. That same photo may also be under "//Vacations/North Pole/Bob". But I'll deal with my redundant photos for now and I'm happy that I can find any photo for any subject in under 5 seconds.

Note: In reality I have no friend named Bob, I have not been to the North Pole, and this imaginary friend Bob dislikes hats. I just randomly picked an example.

Yeah, I used to use a categorization system like that... and faced the same problem, one picture fits multiple categories. I also like to keep pictures that were taken at the same time together. One solution to this is Picasa. It allows you to apply multiple labels to each picture, so one picture could be in the "Bob" label, the "North Pole" label, the "Hats" label or what have you. This is something I started doing, but gave up for a few reasons:
1. With over 20,000 pictures, it would take a while.
2. Labels are not hierarchical. My "cats" label would be incredibly large. I have the same complaint every other place Google uses their "labels" instead of folders. Why must there only be one level??? Google is smarter than that! I hate it in gmail, and I hate it in my Google Toolbar bookmarks.

However, Picasa does make it pretty easy to find the pictures I'm looking for by scrolling through the thumbnails (although I wish the scrolling controls were a little more precise... i.e. they should use the industry standard scrollbar and not Google's crappy idea of how a scrollbar should work).

 

[Safeway]

I use Picasa.

 

[markgm]

I wonder how long until a photo search engine comes out. The biggest issue with cameras is that you usually take photos of everyone but yourself, it's everyone else that took photos of you (but not *themselves.*) If we could just upload those all somewhere and then do a search for our face, we could get all of the photo's we're in. I wait for that day.

 

[rivan]

Originally posted by: markgm
I wonder how long until a photo search engine comes out. The biggest issue with cameras is that you usually take photos of everyone but yourself, it's everyone else that took photos of you (but not *themselves.*) If we could just upload those all somewhere and then do a search for our face, we could get all of the photo's we're in. I wait for that day.

You just blew my mind.

 

[randomlinh]

camera -> aperture, organize accordingly -> backups to 2 external drives, one ~weekly, the other monthly and kept at work

A copy also gets uploaded to flickr at maximum jpeg quality (blast no online raw support).

 

[Compton]

Originally posted by: Ausm
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Ausm

Yeah, same here. I sort the unnamed photos by hair color and breast size.