OK, so what's the trick to managing all of the pictures you take? We are using three or four cameras--two camera phones, a one shot (for situations that I don't want to bring my good camera, but want better pics than my camera phone) and a the DSLR camera. I want to get this set up right so I don't have to go back and do this again, so curious to know what programs you might be using to manage the photos, how you organize all the pictures (by folders? location? date? etc.) and what you do for storage? Also for those who have been at this for several years, would you do it the same way or what would you do differently?
Barbaraok said
10:50 AM Feb 23, 2015
First, delete ⅔ of the them - no one really wants to see 7 pictures of the exact same thing. Pick the good one and DELETE the others.
Second, caption the photos NOW. Don't wait - because if you do you will all of a sudden have 100 photos from October of '09 and you can't remember exactly who, what, where information.
Then decide how you are going to use them. Blog, photo albumin, Facebook, etc.
We have backup storage and also store pictures online at our blog site.
Barb
Second Chance said
10:58 AM Feb 23, 2015
Mine may not be the best or most efficient approach, but here's what I do. (I've been shooting for over 40 years and have done professional photography in the past. I've digitized about 5,000 family photos from prints and negatives, as well).
I use IrfanView Thumbnails (the free IrfanView - not iView; available on CNET downloads) to browse and sort. I have folders by topic (mostly major branches of the family for personal photos) and subfolders within those by year. I use a bulk/batch file renamer that uses the EXIF dates in the image file for part of the file name. Using the builk renamer, I remove "IMG_" (my digital cameras are Canons; you may have "DSC..." for a Sony camera, etc.) and add a prefix with YYMMDD plus a dash for the date taken. I leave the serial sequence number from the camera as-is so every file has a unique name/number. Here's the bulk renamer I just recently found:
All this is done on my laptop and backed up to a file server at the house. I also periodically back up to a USB portable drive as well as optical media (DVD) to carry in my backpack when we travel (off-site backup).
I'm open to other suggestions, but this has helped me keep about 10,000 images from the past 40+ years (and old family photos) organized in a way that makes them easy to find and - since the files sort by name in chronological order in each folder - convenient to slide-show with IrfanView or another slide-show app.
The raw files from old professional shoots are a different story...
Rob
BiggarView said
11:59 AM Feb 23, 2015
Barbaraok wrote:
First, delete ⅔ of the them - no one really wants to see 7 pictures of the exact same thing. Pick the good one and DELETE the others.
Second, caption the photos NOW. Don't wait - because if you do you will all of a sudden have 100 photos from October of '09 and you can't remember exactly who, what, where information.
Then decide how you are going to use them. Blog, photo albumin, Facebook, etc.
We have backup storage and also store pictures online at our blog site.
Barb
I'd have to go along with Barb here except instead of 2/3 more like 9/10 or maybe 19/20. The pros toss 1000's to get just one shot. Here's my reasoning, it doesn't matter if its a picture of your favorite thing, person or whatever, if it's even a tiny bit blurry... gone. Save only clear/sharp pix that have memorable, truly memorable subjects in them.... awesome sunrise, telephoto shot of that eagle, candid pix of a pet or family member when they aren't hamming it for the camera...
Unfortunately it's hard for people to separate themselves from some things and memories, even blurry ones or ones you can't quite put a finger on what was going on in the shot, seem to be the hardest. You'll realize that you don't need every picture of you past to retain fond memories and great shots of key events are priceless.
If you just can't let go... that is okay too. Just remember they take up space, not only in your head but, sometimes physical as well as hard drive space too.
Now, where is that shot of me being shot down in Iraq with Brian Williams? Over the top? I apologize. Just tryin' to add a bit of levity.
Brian
-- Edited by biggaRView on Tuesday 24th of February 2015 07:09:01 PM
NurseJudy said
12:02 PM Feb 23, 2015
My DH is in charge of the photos! We have been taking exclusively digital for at least last 10 years. He has also scanned and saved around 3,000 "vintage" photos from our earlier days (kids, family, vacations, etc.). He uses a "cloud based service" called Picture Life for an off-site back-up. Since most of his photos are taken with an i-phone, or downloaded directly to his Macbook, he uses mostly i-cloud for this purpose. Probably about once per week he edits photos and deletes those that are duplicates or just not worth keeping (as Barb suggests). The best part of all of this, besides that he does it and I don't have to :), is that with his photo editing program (I think something on his Macbook), he is able to create a continuous slide show that plays as screen saver. We have this on our desk and let it run when we are home. It is really nice to look at our life on display in this way. Our friends & family love it too! They often spend a lot of time when visiting us sitting in front of the monitor just watching the photos change.
Judy
Barbaraok said
02:06 PM Feb 23, 2015
Currently in the process of culling all of the baby pictures of our one and only daughter. Some are prints that we are scanning in, some slides we had transferred to DVDs. This morning I was able to email my daughter who is in Dallas and having a snow day, pictures of her first 'snow' day in 1978. Dave was stuck at home for 3 days when Dallas shut down and he heard "slide daddy slide" from morning to night! So now I have to keep all of that series. Baby pictures are so hard.
Barb
Talensnana said
02:16 PM Feb 23, 2015
We are just starting this process, thanks for the great tips.
Terry and Jo said
07:02 PM Feb 23, 2015
OK. I guess I'm the different one. About the only ones I delete are those that are obviously blurred or have something blocking the subject of the photo, such as a tree captured as we drove along the roads. I've shown pictures to people and they ask if I have a different perspective or a closer shot of a detail in the photo. So, I have a lot of images stored on my hard drive and on DVD discs as a backup.
As for organization, I generally create folders on my hard drive with the occasion (vacation, reunion, etc.,), the location, and/or a date associated with the topic of the photos. Then, if someone asks about photos taken on a off-roading adventure, it can be found easily, first by date/year and then by location.
I used to resize almost all of them to reduce the size on the drive, but after taking a favored photo and getting it printed at 16"X20", I was told by the printer that my 1.5 megabyte image would be a problem to print any larger than that size.
Oh, and anyone that has seen my camera equipment know that I am a "serious, amateur photographer," and take pictures of just about anything that strikes my fancy.
Terry
bjoyce said
08:23 PM Feb 23, 2015
I create folders by year, then below that by month, then by where we are camped, and under that I will separate out day trips, etc. I pull the SD cards out of the cameras and put them in the SD card reader on my main computer to transfer the photos and videos. I use the USB cable to transfer the photos off my smartphone, which varies by smartphone. I have been known to use more than one camera on a day trip, plus my smartphone, so it is all intermingled since the filenames are different. For example, January 2015, the top is "2015", then "January2015", then "NorthFortMyersFL", since we were there all month. Under the folder NorthFortMyersFL are a bunch of general photos, and 12 more folders with names like "DingDarlingJan23", for a daytrip to Ding Darling NWR on Jan23, "Food" for some photos of restaurant food for some online restaurant reviews, "Dashcam" for some videos off my dashcam for an upcoming review, etc. I can then archive whole years on external hard drives and I also have archives on DVD-R blanks. I don't delete as many photos as I should.
The DVD archives are the hardest. I copy the entire year to a second folder and as I add to the DVD I remove the photos from the folder. Some months I have taken more GB than a DVD will hold, so it gets tricky and takes hours. For the external hard drives I use robocopy, which is a command line utility that ships with Windows, but there are similar utilities on Linux/Unix and I could always use a graphic file manager. I prefer robocopy, since it has the "/MIR" option, which creates a mirror image. That means it will not copy what is already there, only new stuff. I can robocopy 2015 on January 15th, and when I do it again on February 15th, only the new photos get copied.
Long winded, yes.
TRAILERKING said
10:03 PM Feb 23, 2015
bjoyce, your coach must be equipped like a "Hi-Tech" space ship.
Lynn and Ed said
10:56 PM Feb 23, 2015
I use Lightroom software to help manage photos. I use a folder system similar to Bill's (i.e., year.month.day (or date range) followed by place/event and where appropriate, subfolders). I also back-up the photos to an external hard drive. Enjoy!
Hdrider said
07:58 AM Feb 24, 2015
I with deleting all but the best. Then I create folders on SD cards by place's we visit. Now and again I will even go through those fodders and delete even more. And a small percentage of the photo's stored on the SD card make it to our blog.
Neil and Connie said
01:19 PM Feb 24, 2015
As a long time photographer…get a copy of Lightroom and use that to organize them as well as process them to fix color, crop, enhance, etc. Use an external drive to back them up.
Now I don't delete anything but photos that are obviously bad…out of focus, unrecoverable exposure errors or the like. So what if I have 300 eagle pictures (actually I probably have 10,000 of eagles alone)…it's what you publish that most people will see.
I store them in folders by year and then month; and in Lightoom I use collections named 201501, 201502, etc and then sub collections under the months named 01 Fort Myers and 02 Everglades. Using keywords allows one to easily find all of your eagle pictures for instance.
After importing them into Lightroom; first pass through is to cull the ones that are worth processing; that's just a series of right and left arrow keys and hitting 3 to give them 3 stars as potentials. Once that's done…and it only takes 15 or 20 minutes even when I come home with a thousand shots from a day's outing…use the filtering to choose all of the 3 star photos which is at most 10% of what I took then take another quick look to find the best eagle shot or a nice series of them that show some action like flying or landing. Those get upgraded to 4 stars.
Select all the 4 star ones and then start processing them. I almost always start with the auto fix button then touch up color, exposure, add vignette if necessary, highlight sections or darken them as necessary until I'm happy. Then on to the next one. Finally select all the 4's and export them for upload to my blog…I export them at 1440x1440 pixel max resolution and then the published ones get 5 stars.
The first one you process will take you a half hour but by the time you've processed 50 it will be down to 2 minutes and by the time you're up to 200 you'll be down to around a minute as you learn the program; memorize all the keystrokes to quickly select tools, learn to copy/paste adjustments from one photo to the next, etc.
I've actually had a few occasions when I went back and ended up processing a photo I had passed on before…sometimes months later. You never know when you'll need a shot of a Cedar Waxwing to illustrate some point in a post and by not tossing the average photos you can recover them for use later.
Hard drive space is cheap…we've been full time on the road for going on 3 years now and since we left I've got about 500 GB of photo files. They actually all live on the file server in our rig and get backed up nightly to another couple of drives in the rig and weekly or so to drives I keep in the truck and car. Occasionally they get uploaded to our cloud account…I use an app named JungleDisk and Amazon's S3 server service for this and pay less than 10 bucks a month to have them stored out on the cloud;which means they're in at least 2 of Amazon's many data centers.
If you need more pointers just ask…there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and how to store, organize, process, and display your shots has all been solved before.
I usually start a new catalog annually…but now that I've shifted from Aperture (Apple's equivalent to Lightroom) over to the Adobe product I think that will no longer be necessary as the catalog files aren't so big with Lightroom.
Camper Chronicles said
09:00 PM Feb 24, 2015
We are keeping by date downloaded and I download after every photo shoot. Based on Lee's recommendation I overshoot often producing many near duplicates. I run through them initially in photo viewer deleting everything that's obviously poor quality. I also flag all the ones I want to use for my blog with a Y so they fall to the bottom of the list. Second pass I pick my favorites of near duplicates and usually delete the others unless they are particularly good. I then Post my favorites of those to FB. Finally I open the blog pics in Adobe Photoshop and save them at high quality to reduce to 1.5 mg. Those I upload to Word Press and then delete the lower resolution ones. What's left are kept In their date folder on a separAte hard drive. It is several steps but I end up reviewing the pics three times which has helped me keep the ones that really speak to me and ditch the others. Hard drive space is cheap but later I want to be able to focus on the good ones
Sr Fox said
10:58 AM Feb 25, 2015
I am a photo pack rat and keep them all. I store them all on my computer and then back them up to external drives. I upload them to my Facebook and also back them up on Dropbox. I name the folders by date and general content. Dropbox gives me 1 TB for $99/year and I like the security of that.
I forgot to mention that I have about 10 TB of storage on my computer so I still have some time to go before I fill it all up.
:)
Penny and Paul said
06:07 PM Feb 28, 2015
Like others, I'm a serious amateur. I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog by year then by month day and location. I use import presets to automate renaming and have Lightroom set to make second copies on a backup drive. Right after importing I go through the catalog and using the reject flag, I ruthlessly cull anything that's obviously bad. Then I go through them again and use the survey tool to whittle down the duplicates. Then I use the compare tool and the flag tool to mark the final cuts as good or rejects. Then I use the library tool to delete the rejected ones from the catalog AND the disk (since I have copies on the backup drive).
I also use keywords to help find stuff. I also have multiple backups on my own cloud drive and several external drive. I use a Mac so the Time Machine Program also alternates back ups of my whole system on two external drives.
It's a lot of work to start out, but once it is, most everything is mostly automated.
OK, so what's the trick to managing all of the pictures you take? We are using three or four cameras--two camera phones, a one shot (for situations that I don't want to bring my good camera, but want better pics than my camera phone) and a the DSLR camera. I want to get this set up right so I don't have to go back and do this again, so curious to know what programs you might be using to manage the photos, how you organize all the pictures (by folders? location? date? etc.) and what you do for storage? Also for those who have been at this for several years, would you do it the same way or what would you do differently?
First, delete ⅔ of the them - no one really wants to see 7 pictures of the exact same thing. Pick the good one and DELETE the others.
Second, caption the photos NOW. Don't wait - because if you do you will all of a sudden have 100 photos from October of '09 and you can't remember exactly who, what, where information.
Then decide how you are going to use them. Blog, photo albumin, Facebook, etc.
We have backup storage and also store pictures online at our blog site.
Barb
Mine may not be the best or most efficient approach, but here's what I do. (I've been shooting for over 40 years and have done professional photography in the past. I've digitized about 5,000 family photos from prints and negatives, as well).
I use IrfanView Thumbnails (the free IrfanView - not iView; available on CNET downloads) to browse and sort. I have folders by topic (mostly major branches of the family for personal photos) and subfolders within those by year. I use a bulk/batch file renamer that uses the EXIF dates in the image file for part of the file name. Using the builk renamer, I remove "IMG_" (my digital cameras are Canons; you may have "DSC..." for a Sony camera, etc.) and add a prefix with YYMMDD plus a dash for the date taken. I leave the serial sequence number from the camera as-is so every file has a unique name/number. Here's the bulk renamer I just recently found:
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php
All this is done on my laptop and backed up to a file server at the house. I also periodically back up to a USB portable drive as well as optical media (DVD) to carry in my backpack when we travel (off-site backup).
I'm open to other suggestions, but this has helped me keep about 10,000 images from the past 40+ years (and old family photos) organized in a way that makes them easy to find and - since the files sort by name in chronological order in each folder - convenient to slide-show with IrfanView or another slide-show app.
The raw files from old professional shoots are a different story...
Rob
I'd have to go along with Barb here except instead of 2/3 more like 9/10 or maybe 19/20. The pros toss 1000's to get just one shot. Here's my reasoning, it doesn't matter if its a picture of your favorite thing, person or whatever, if it's even a tiny bit blurry... gone. Save only clear/sharp pix that have memorable, truly memorable subjects in them.... awesome sunrise, telephoto shot of that eagle, candid pix of a pet or family member when they aren't hamming it for the camera...
Unfortunately it's hard for people to separate themselves from some things and memories, even blurry ones or ones you can't quite put a finger on what was going on in the shot, seem to be the hardest. You'll realize that you don't need every picture of you past to retain fond memories and great shots of key events are priceless.
If you just can't let go... that is okay too. Just remember they take up space, not only in your head but, sometimes physical as well as hard drive space too.
Now, where is that shot of me being shot down in Iraq with Brian Williams?
Over the top? I apologize. Just tryin' to add a bit of levity.
Brian
-- Edited by biggaRView on Tuesday 24th of February 2015 07:09:01 PM
Judy
Barb
We are just starting this process, thanks for the great tips.
OK. I guess I'm the different one. About the only ones I delete are those that are obviously blurred or have something blocking the subject of the photo, such as a tree captured as we drove along the roads. I've shown pictures to people and they ask if I have a different perspective or a closer shot of a detail in the photo. So, I have a lot of images stored on my hard drive and on DVD discs as a backup.
As for organization, I generally create folders on my hard drive with the occasion (vacation, reunion, etc.,), the location, and/or a date associated with the topic of the photos. Then, if someone asks about photos taken on a off-roading adventure, it can be found easily, first by date/year and then by location.
I used to resize almost all of them to reduce the size on the drive, but after taking a favored photo and getting it printed at 16"X20", I was told by the printer that my 1.5 megabyte image would be a problem to print any larger than that size.
Oh, and anyone that has seen my camera equipment know that I am a "serious, amateur photographer," and take pictures of just about anything that strikes my fancy.
Terry
The DVD archives are the hardest. I copy the entire year to a second folder and as I add to the DVD I remove the photos from the folder. Some months I have taken more GB than a DVD will hold, so it gets tricky and takes hours. For the external hard drives I use robocopy, which is a command line utility that ships with Windows, but there are similar utilities on Linux/Unix and I could always use a graphic file manager. I prefer robocopy, since it has the "/MIR" option, which creates a mirror image. That means it will not copy what is already there, only new stuff. I can robocopy 2015 on January 15th, and when I do it again on February 15th, only the new photos get copied.
Long winded, yes.
bjoyce, your coach must be equipped like a "Hi-Tech" space ship.
I use Lightroom software to help manage photos. I use a folder system similar to Bill's (i.e., year.month.day (or date range) followed by place/event and where appropriate, subfolders). I also back-up the photos to an external hard drive. Enjoy!
As a long time photographer…get a copy of Lightroom and use that to organize them as well as process them to fix color, crop, enhance, etc. Use an external drive to back them up.
Now I don't delete anything but photos that are obviously bad…out of focus, unrecoverable exposure errors or the like. So what if I have 300 eagle pictures (actually I probably have 10,000 of eagles alone)…it's what you publish that most people will see.
I store them in folders by year and then month; and in Lightoom I use collections named 201501, 201502, etc and then sub collections under the months named 01 Fort Myers and 02 Everglades. Using keywords allows one to easily find all of your eagle pictures for instance.
After importing them into Lightroom; first pass through is to cull the ones that are worth processing; that's just a series of right and left arrow keys and hitting 3 to give them 3 stars as potentials. Once that's done…and it only takes 15 or 20 minutes even when I come home with a thousand shots from a day's outing…use the filtering to choose all of the 3 star photos which is at most 10% of what I took then take another quick look to find the best eagle shot or a nice series of them that show some action like flying or landing. Those get upgraded to 4 stars.
Select all the 4 star ones and then start processing them. I almost always start with the auto fix button then touch up color, exposure, add vignette if necessary, highlight sections or darken them as necessary until I'm happy. Then on to the next one. Finally select all the 4's and export them for upload to my blog…I export them at 1440x1440 pixel max resolution and then the published ones get 5 stars.
The first one you process will take you a half hour but by the time you've processed 50 it will be down to 2 minutes and by the time you're up to 200 you'll be down to around a minute as you learn the program; memorize all the keystrokes to quickly select tools, learn to copy/paste adjustments from one photo to the next, etc.
I've actually had a few occasions when I went back and ended up processing a photo I had passed on before…sometimes months later. You never know when you'll need a shot of a Cedar Waxwing to illustrate some point in a post and by not tossing the average photos you can recover them for use later.
Hard drive space is cheap…we've been full time on the road for going on 3 years now and since we left I've got about 500 GB of photo files. They actually all live on the file server in our rig and get backed up nightly to another couple of drives in the rig and weekly or so to drives I keep in the truck and car. Occasionally they get uploaded to our cloud account…I use an app named JungleDisk and Amazon's S3 server service for this and pay less than 10 bucks a month to have them stored out on the cloud;which means they're in at least 2 of Amazon's many data centers.
If you need more pointers just ask…there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and how to store, organize, process, and display your shots has all been solved before.
I usually start a new catalog annually…but now that I've shifted from Aperture (Apple's equivalent to Lightroom) over to the Adobe product I think that will no longer be necessary as the catalog files aren't so big with Lightroom.
I forgot to mention that I have about 10 TB of storage on my computer so I still have some time to go before I fill it all up.
:)
Like others, I'm a serious amateur. I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog by year then by month day and location. I use import presets to automate renaming and have Lightroom set to make second copies on a backup drive. Right after importing I go through the catalog and using the reject flag, I ruthlessly cull anything that's obviously bad. Then I go through them again and use the survey tool to whittle down the duplicates. Then I use the compare tool and the flag tool to mark the final cuts as good or rejects. Then I use the library tool to delete the rejected ones from the catalog AND the disk (since I have copies on the backup drive).
I also use keywords to help find stuff. I also have multiple backups on my own cloud drive and several external drive. I use a Mac so the Time Machine Program also alternates back ups of my whole system on two external drives.
It's a lot of work to start out, but once it is, most everything is mostly automated.