So Many Digital Photos... How Do You Organize Them?

[Nifty]

Hey All,

I'm looking through my "Media" hard drive and specifically the digital picture folder which contains all my subfolders for pictures. They are getting quite messy and I need to do some major clean up / organization. My question: What (if anything) to you use to organize your digital images?

Currently I'm simply using folder and file naming conventions. Our old camera would automatically create a new folder for the days the pictures were taken and name the folder the date. This was WAY cool, but unfortunately none of the Canon models (or other manufacturers I was looking at) do this.

Here is my organization:

Pictures
-2004
-2005
-2006
--07-06-06-zoo
--08-25-06-birthday party
--09-05-06-park

Love to hear suggestions on quick / easy picture organizing programs and/or how you organize your many photos.

 

[Molitor]

Not exactly a swift response, but I use FastStone Image Viewer: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

It will copy files from a memory card into sorted folders, plus a whole lot more. It's fast, has tons of useful features, and can deal with thousands of images without choking. It's also free.

I organize all my pictures in folders by date: 2005-08-03, which would be August 3, 2005. I keep them on them on a RAIDed hard drive, plus I've burned the important ones off on a data DVD. I keep an active backup on DVD-RAM.

 

[digitalthirsty]

I just use IPhoto to organise and then feed it my digital picture frames using a memory card.

 

[Nifty]

digitalthirsty, thanks for the post! I was surprised more people didn't have exciting solutions to this problem of organization.

One thing that has helped me GREATLY is that I discovered (quite accidentally) that my Canon camera has a program called ZoomBrowser Ex. I usually avoid packaged software and copy images over via USB or card reader. Well, this nifty program has a driver that allows me to plug in my camera and it auto downloads all the images, puts them in folders by date, and deletes the images from the camera. Pretty darn cool!

I look forward to the day when image recognition gets so good that I can search for my wife's name and it will grab all the images of my wife.... check this out:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/better-way-to-organize-photos.html

 

[fotofreek]

Nifty - the image catalog portion of Photoshop Elements (v.3 and above, I believe) lets you describe "tags" and tag each photo. You can do it by name, event, etc. and it also works by date. I still use the system you first described - by year, month, and day plus event or other identifier. Guess I am still a creature of habit from DOS days methods of organizing data.

 

[Nifty]

Yeah... I'm old school too. I don't like tags and other "behind the scenes" or program specific data. I've been burnt by that before. It's a bit more laboreous, but I'd rather just have the filename / foldername hardcoded with the date and event details.

 

[panos]

Recording event details on the file/folder name is enough for Picasa.

Try it and you may never look back.

 

[l_d_allan]

Here is my organization: (some info follows)

This is a Really Old Thread, but I'm curious what you are using now. My speculation is that you've learned a Lot during the intervening years.

What software are you using for edits (Lightroom, PhotoShop, PS-Elements, etc.) and have you found it satisfactory? How many photos a year would you estimate you take?

Here's some of the info I've accumulated since getting a DSLR in early 2009:

* Photoshop is folder-based, and Bridge has filters, keywords, Collections, and Smart Collections. Non-trivial learning curve.

I believe PS-Elements has Catalogs, but I'm fuzzy on how they work.

LightRoom also has something called Catalogs, but my impression is that the LR catalogs are not compatible or all that similar to Element's catalogs. Drat. My impression is that LightRoom is more capable of organizing thousands to tens of thousands of pictures than PhotoShop Bridge, but the learning curve isn't trivial.

When I started a new master folder for 2011, I decided I was Long Overdue to get much more organized. I had been relying on naming conventions for files and folders. I'm finding that doesn't "scale" all that well once I recently started printing.

Also, I use YYMMDD rather than MMDDYY so files are sorted by filename. I suppose I've got Y3K problems on the horizon?

 

[Nifty]

Great question! I got a new Canon camera and their software upgrade was crap. I started looking for alternatives and figured I'd finally give Google Picasa (desktop) a try.

Well, I LOVE IT! Not only is the way it pulls pics from my camera WAY better, but it gives me more options, etc. Also, all the tools and features are really impressive. Doesn't hurt that it is free too!

So, my organization is still YYYY-MM-DD in folders which just works fine for me. Now it actually works better because in Picasa I cn browse between folders way easier.

Oh, and the geo / mapping feature is AMAZING. Almost convinced me to get a GPS based camera (which I think they all should have by now).

Add in facial recognition and you have the best photo system EVER!

I mean, how cool would it be to always be able to do a photo search like:

Show me all pictures I've taken of my wife taken last March within 5 miles of Disneyland.

BAM!!

 

[Redbrickman]

I am using a Mac but yesterday I bought a Igotu2 external GPS tracker.

In UK they are about 30.00 GBP which is a great price for something so versatile. Comes with PC software to create tracks, blogs, and trips.

http://www.i-gotu.com/

Haven't used the PC software yet but on Mac I have a similar program which imports all the data in the tracker and assigns to your photos by time/date.

Early days yet, but I'm pretty impressed.