Wed, June 9th, 2004 by roderick -
During an average week I manage to go through one 36-exposure roll of film and about 60 pictures on digital cameras - about 100 photos a week. Of course, this number can vary from week to week. My hard drive is being filled with hundreds of megabytes (even gigabytes) of photographs, and lately I’ve noticed that it is starting to get out of hand.
One way that I was going to start managing my photographs is to have a Microsoft® Access® database that corresponds to photos that are on my hard drive. An entry is made in the database with the date, keywords, whether is it digital or film, and any other notes. Then a folder is made that corresponds to the database entry, and photographs are dumped into that folder. This system has its limitations, but for right now it seems to provide for what I need.
I was wondering how you manage your ever-growing collection of photographs. Do you keep a database? Are they just stuffed in various folders?
June 9th, 2004 at 6:15 pm
A use a combo of applications for this.
Being a Mac user i have the wonderful application iPhoto. It organizes the pictures automatically, crating folders.. An example It makes a folder for the year 2004, then a folder for the month inside the folder of the year. that would be 06. Inside that it makes folder for the day the photo was taken, putting it in that folder. I like that system.
iView MediaPro is also a wonderful application for both viewing, searching, applying comments to the pictures etc.. iView MediaPro is made for both windows and Mac.
I'd say throwing them in an Access database would be too much work.
Anyways, I've started shooting RAW only, which iPhoto unfortunately doesn't handle all to well. So I just use iPhoto's folder system, copying the RAW files myself. If I had Capture One I'd use that for sure. It has picture organizer in it.
Just my 2 cents..
June 9th, 2004 at 6:39 pm
100 photos a week? I come home with more than that every day, way more on good days.
I use iView Media Pro (Mac & Win) and I really like features like Batch Rename. It imports right off my Nikon, runs fast no matter how big the catalog, and has lots of features -- I used it to create Web pages all the time in the old days, pre Movable Type. It can open a photo in Photoshop or any other app on my hard drive, it creates back up CDs on demand, lets me manage all the exif data. My main gripe is its price -- way too high at $200.
June 9th, 2004 at 7:02 pm
I wish I could find a good answer. Right now my organization is purely file based. I have all my photos in a file server with the format
/YYYY-MM-DD - description/FILENAME
Where FILENAME is sometimes a descriptive name, and sometimes (much more often) the default filename that comes out of the camera.
I'd love to throw them all into some sort of program to organize them, but I haven't found something that's "just right". The big requirement is that I need access to them from several different machines, so the files have to stay where they are and if they are managed/moved around in a tool they should be moved in the physical filesystem as well.
I've played with some windows programs (adobe photoshop album, jasc photo album, and a couple of others) but nothing does it quite right. The more "complete" tools like imatch don't have the nice end user stuff that something like photoshop album has, but the user tools are too tied to the system it's installed on, and don't follow how I want to manage filenames/etc. Some programs (jasc) don't do RAW. Lots of the stuff I've tried is crap, some is almost there, nothing is competely there for me yet
Looking foward to what others say though.
June 9th, 2004 at 7:12 pm
Compare... download the trial versions of Extensis Portfolio and iView Media Pro and use them for a month..BOTH of them. Most folks seem to like one or the other or both for different reasons. Portfolio seems to be better for cataloging and iView for browsing. Just see how they work for you.
June 9th, 2004 at 7:43 pm
wow, you guys are taking way more pictures than me. I just cleared off 3gigs of data onto CDs but that was from Jan 2004 to present. I can't imagine how much space you guys are using for photo storage.
As for storage management I throw them in one big folder called "MY PHOTOS", lol no just kidding ;). I organize them manualy which can be a pain. They are organized by category such as food, work, beach. I am going to start categorizing them by month and year though since the software that comes with my digital camera seems to have automatic settings for doing that.
Oh and my film fotos go in a shoe boxs that says "Vans" ;).
June 9th, 2004 at 9:37 pm
the disorganised person that i am.. i chuck my growing collection into folders based on months. which is a bit silly really. they are such HUGE folders. lol .
for a disorganised person, any system will do!
June 9th, 2004 at 10:50 pm
Ugh. I seriously need to get it under control. Right now everything goes into folders by month. Then I crop my favorite images and save them as PSDs. Then I save another version of the faves in a web folder where everything's junked in together. The PSD files are huge. I really should burn CDs of all the so-so images and delete them off my hard drive. I'm that ridiculous person with 3,000 emails in their inbox though, so the photos are not likely to get cleaned up until my hard drive is nearly full. I drive myself crazy sometimes.
June 9th, 2004 at 10:53 pm
Here's one vote for the Breezebrowser/Downloader Pro combination. Downloader Pro can be configured to perform relatively sophisticated file-naming as it downloads images from my card reader, and integrates nicely with Breezebrowser. I think the main issue I would have would a database is managing both the database entries AND the files in the filesystem.
The one thing I've learned is to discipline myself and just delete the crap; I can pretty much tell one or two days later which photos I will never use again. Because I shoot RAW, I 'free up' gigs of data this way!
June 10th, 2004 at 12:11 am
I'm another iPhoto user, It does it by month, as stated before, and I have different categories I dump them into so I can find them easier. I'd never remember what month, much less day I took a picture
June 10th, 2004 at 1:20 am
iPhoto is initially nice -- but you might encounter serious perfomance problems with > 5000 images (rumors has it that some Apple developers from the iPhoto-group left the company in early 2004).
No experiences so far with Picasa.
Both are consumer orientated.
Canto Cumulus, Fotoware Fotostation, Extensis Portfolio, iViewMedia Pro -- those are today the TOP four for people seriously interested (not ranked).
June 10th, 2004 at 3:04 am
wow. i am such a slacker. i just save them in albums in my picture viewer from fugi (TM!) and then save them on a usb memory stick for when my computer crashes, again. i have an old, old machine from the dark ages and don't even have a cd burner! i am so old school. :O
June 10th, 2004 at 3:13 am
For film:
A cabinent for negatives and prints (everything is filed by date and camera).
For digital:
Images are downloaded into folders (configured with the help of Downloader Pro) that look like "/YYYY/YYYY.DD.MM/FILENAME.ext".
At the end of the day everything gets moved to a Maxtor OneTouch hard drive
June 10th, 2004 at 7:48 am
I have a directory structure which looks a bit like this:
photos
- originals
- year
- month
- psd
- lomo
- month/year
- bumf
- assorted folders
- prints
- year
- month
- stn
- final
Each time I take a new batch of photos they're dumped in the originals folder under the year and month, with just the filenames as they come off the camera.
When I do any photoshop work to them, the photoshop file then gets stored in the psd directory under the originals folder.
If I want to do a print, I'll generally use the genuine fractals print pro plugin to upsize the photo, so I'll save the stn file in that directory under prints. I'll then open it and save off the final images at whatever the print resolution is under the final directory.
Anything for web goes in loosely themed bundles under the bumf folder, or when I finally get my photolog sorted out properly, will be saved by title under year/month in a photolog folder.
I'll then burn CDs of the original folder (or I would more often if I were more organised), including original jpgs and psd files, so that in the event of a catastrophic hd failure, I haven't lost much other than print files kept for convenience.
As for how I view them, I mostly used Paint Shop Pro for it's image browser, and for doing quick and dirty adjustments, but now I find that I'm using the Nikon Viewer software I got with my camera more often than PSP, and doing any adjustments by using the Nikon Viewer to launch Photoshop.
All of which makes me sound far more organised than I actually am.
June 10th, 2004 at 8:41 am
I use iView Media Pro (Mac OS X version) and I'm very happy with it. Yes, the price is a nasty bugger. Very nasty. It's also a pity that iView exports to html with lots of tables (no clean css and xhtml option, yet).
Lot's of friends of mine use iPhoto, but for me (taking lots of pictures) it doesn't have enough options. iView has.
Cheers.
June 10th, 2004 at 9:19 am
Great topic - I struggled with this and continue to rething my strategy. I am not a large volume shooter, so scalability is not an issue for me yet. I used to use Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (free) when I was on a PC. It had a great tagging ability to categorize photos. I now use a Mac and spent alot of time reviewing options. Extensis Portfolio and iView Media Pro both were a bit overwhelming to me at first (demo versions). I gave iPhoto a try. It took some time to "get it". It has a fabulous slideshow option, that is integrated with iTunes. Now I review and flag images for work in PhotoShop. My pictures for web are saved in a differnet directory with a different name. iPhoto runs smooth for me (with 1 gig of ram), but only about 50% of my shots are digital. I back up my images (now) on DVD.
My slides and negatives are sleeved, and in airtight rubbermaid boxes, scattered around my study.
June 10th, 2004 at 9:58 am
I've yet to find a data base program that does all I want it to. Some of the advice is this thread is very helpful.
I'm shooting about 75-100 shots a day at the moment. (Nikon D100) Over the past year I've racked up about 25 gigs of information. I use my own system: Month - date. I then take the best photo or two from each day and save it by date in a seperate "finished" file. It works for me and keeps me orginized. iphoto can't handle a ton of images and I hate where it puts my files. I've heard some similar complaints about Adobe photo album. Anyway, who would have thought 80 gigs of harddrive space would have been a good start!
June 10th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
I have a cupboard full of negs and slides. I don't keep anything I scan for more then a month, then it just gets trashed. I used to scan *everything* but now choose carefully what I scan as I just haven't got the time anymore to scan everything and archive it all.
June 10th, 2004 at 4:17 pm
I generally seperate my daily photoblog type photos into folders by date. I use the EXIF tag in the photos to categorize and title my photos. I use ACDsee 6.0 to modify the EXIF or photoshop cs.
Periodically, I burn the folders onto DVD for storage.
If I shoot for a specific event, I will create a folder using the event name.
I generally don't rename my photos. My 10D counts up to 9999 then starts over. I haven't hit my 10000th photo yet.
June 10th, 2004 at 5:27 pm
oh boy ... is this ever a timely discussion for me.
Being relatively new to digital, I had been just downloading under a main folder, separated by date. Heh heh. Sounds easy enough except I've been shooting sometimes hundreds in a day. I was starting to feel stressed and so was my hard drive.
So, I spent a good day, sorting through, deleting ones that were not save worthy, using ACDsee for batch renaming and then sorting them into categories I can live with and sorting those within reasonable time frames (seasonally) and burning to disc.
Its not perfect and its quite time consuming though if I do it every couple of days, its not so bad to keep on top of.
Film is in some ways much easier. Negatives are kept their sleeves in a container. Photos are kept in folders in a box and/or sorted in albums. I only scan as I need to and always delete since I already have the negative.
If I'm going to keep doing this, I may need to find a better process and am going to look into some of the programs mentioned above!
June 10th, 2004 at 5:48 pm
manage?
June 10th, 2004 at 6:04 pm
I'm a complete pack rat and I often shoot 100+ RAW files in a day, plus I scan negs a lot and those are huge. My solution has been file naming by exact time and date, in folders named by date. I've been buying external harddrive enclosures and archiving everything on 160GB harddrives (I think 160gb is the current sweetspot in $/MB ratio).
Then I have keepers, which I sort by theme and such. But these do not replace the RAW originals (or the original scans) which always get archived separately.
June 10th, 2004 at 6:17 pm
Forgot this part:
For viewing jpegs and tiffs I use ACDSee 5 (Not 6, which never works for me). Being an obsessive archivist I do not modify exif data.
For processing RAW files I use either C1 DSLR for Canon 300D files (which is phenomenal but very expensive) or for Canon G3 files I use the excellent (and considearbly cheaper) BreezeBrowser. I tried the Adobe Photoshopâ„¢ Camera RAWâ„¢ plugin but I didn't like it because I found it wanted to make everything pink.
June 10th, 2004 at 8:31 pm
Photo Management - How Do You Do It?
The blog over at asks the good question of how do you managing your photographs. Right now mine are managed...
June 11th, 2004 at 5:19 am
Another vote for iViewMedia Pro. I keep everything but the really crappy shots, and I add keywords etc to the ones I believe show potential.
iView automatically offers date views (via EXIF info or file date if EXIF is not available) and other nifty features.
That, and I can use it on both Mac and PC
June 11th, 2004 at 11:54 am
digital asset management is a pain. due to the amount of time it takes to properly catalog work, I've resorted to simply using folders to organize my work. it's fast and flexible. and if needed, I drop a README.txt file in the directory.
structure as follows: (typically only 3 levels deep)
[type_of_photography] > [YYYYMMDD_projectname] > [raw_files | processed_highquality | processed_forprint | processed_for_web]
for ex.,
D:/daily/20040610_fishingtrip/PRINT/
naming convention:
[RAW | EDIT | WEB | PRINTSIZE]_[SeriesNo]_[FileNumber].EXT
for ex.,
D:/daily/20040610_fishingtrip/PRINT/PRINT9x12_01_001.jpg
it seems the most important information consists of a type of work, a date, a context or project name, and a combination of series_no.+image_no.
I save everything. ugh.
June 11th, 2004 at 3:35 pm
Create categories that make sense to you and find a program like fotostation which built to manage photo files and folders
http://www.fotostation.com/
BUrn lots of CD's
June 11th, 2004 at 5:26 pm
we use ms access at work and i love it, but it's too much work for at home. and iphoto is too slow on my poor pismo... it can't handle the amount/weight of my photos.
i keep everything organized in folders by year, then month, then day, then auto-numbered file name, and use the thumbnail-maker app "Image Indexer" ( http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8954 ) to make thumb-display index pages so i can browse thru my folders pretty easily... like digital contact sheets.
every few months, i back everything up to disks (2 copies), label as tightly as i can, and i keep copies of the thumb indexes on my drive, if i'm on top of my game --- but most of my capabilities rely on my aging memory or on my site as a touchstone of what my archives contain... 95% of the time, that works fine.
June 12th, 2004 at 1:57 am
Here's a very good site for this topic
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/
More specifically This page talks about all the different applications for image databases.
I'm currently doing a very poor job of managing my images - mostly using a monthly folder system for daily stuff and other folders for assignments, portraits, fashion, etc..
I use Photo Mechanic as my primary image browser (batch renaming, batch captioning, etc) and to make web-sized (600x600) images for my Gallery area. However, Photo Mechanic is not for "cataloging"
I need to start properly archiving my images - I've got iView Media Pro, but I'm not using it for archiving yet. Ideally I would create master iView catalogs for anything I've burned to CD and DVD
Best things ever - DVD Burner and an external 160GB firewire drive. I offload my powerbook hard drive every week or so to the 160GB drive - then burn DVDs whenever I get the urge.
June 12th, 2004 at 1:59 am
dang... not sure why it did not include the other URLs:
See This page at controlledvocabulary for a list of image database apps.
June 12th, 2004 at 1:59 am
sorry about the double post -- typepad must not like inlined hypertext links..
See http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/programs.html for a list of image database apps.
June 12th, 2004 at 2:05 am
OK - sorry - one more post
Someone mentioned the HTML output from iView Media Pro being icky...
You can FULLY customize the HTML export stuff via templates. It takes a bit of work to figure it out - but no harder than working with Movable Type templates.
June 12th, 2004 at 4:26 am
currently, all the photos straight from my 10D go into 1 folder '10D' (duh), which divides into seperate folders per upload - e.g. today's photos go into '2004_june_12'. so since october when i got my 10D, i've got 22GB's of photos to backup on CD very soon!
processed photos (the ones i resize) go into another folder 'photos' under 'cameratype_filename' e.g. '10D_traceyphotos.jpg'
when i need to look through them all, i just 'thumbnail' them via Explorer, or RAW files via FileViewerUtility
it's been serving me right since the beginning, so i don't feel the need for anything fancier
June 12th, 2004 at 4:51 am
I basically have one folder called "cats" and then I put everything into that folder (because I only take pictures of cats.) each roll I scan has its own folder within the "cats" folder, which is named by the date I got it processed and a brief description of the cat, and also the type of film. example: "2004 05 28 (Abyssinian) Velvia". within those folders, I save my scans by their frame number on the roll, as in "36.tif". I always save my untouched TIFFs, and make duplicate Adobe® Photoshop© files when I make my alterations. that way I can go back later in case I screw up the cat with the Brightness command or something.
June 12th, 2004 at 1:05 pm
I decided a while back that it was too limiting to organize my collection using a purely date-driven system or a purely topic-driven one. I separate them on my HD as either part of a "collection" item where date isn't important, or an "event." The collections include "Electronics", "Atlanta Scenery", "Dorm", "Nature", and things like that. The items in the Event folder are named like many people do, "2004-05-20 Tech v. UGA Baseball" so that the folders are chronological when ordered alphabetically.
When I am ready to sort my photos, I dump them all into a "New Photos" folder and delete the files not worth saving (I save most of them). Then, I sort them into the collections or make an event folder for the things that are centered around a chronological event. I duplicate this structure on my webserver with shrunken versions of the images. The organizational structure of my photo site is the same as the structure of the folders on my PC that contain the originals. This system seems to be the most flexible for my tastes.
plugIt's here, for the curious: http://photos.hydrous.net /plug
June 12th, 2004 at 3:16 pm
I do it all manually. In My Pictures I have a folder for every month. Inside each month are category folders. Floral secenry partys etc.. Then at the end of each month I burn that month onto a CD.
I also delete way more photos than I keep. Im not offering prints to anyone and usually can tell if I will ever be using them again. Occasionally Im wrong and end up cursing myself..but it doesnt happen often enough to warrant changing my file system yet. For my film photos I throw them in shoe boxes. Yeah Im totally unorganized.
June 12th, 2004 at 4:10 pm
Peaches on the rocks.
Yes yet another post today. I think Im all caught up now. Im hoping I can control myself and only post once a day from here on out. Not making any promises to myself though. Go with the flow, ya...
June 12th, 2004 at 5:25 pm
For me - both professionally and domestically - there can only be ThumbsPlus (www.cerious.com). I've been using it for many years and it does everything I want an image database to do. Worth a try if you're a serious image horder. I love the slide sorter and gallery functions and you can also link it to MS Access or fire-up Photoshop direct from any selected image.
June 12th, 2004 at 9:44 pm
~I just added more memory, 120 gb, then burn to cdr~
June 12th, 2004 at 11:24 pm
I'm a lazy old skool pack rat, so it's Windows native folder structure for me, divided first geographically (Portland, for example), and then by month (Portland | June 2004). Not the best way, but just like most things in life, I rely way too heavily on my memory . . .
June 13th, 2004 at 2:07 am
For myself, since I use linux there hasn't been much that I've found that works exactly the way I wanted it so I ended up building one. Still in the end, as someone else said, make a directory structure that makes sense and most importantly, stick with it.
The one that's working for me was breaking down the directory structure into geographic location then by date with a small topic. Shots at work would be something like /Canada/BC/Vancouver/Work/Lunch/2005-06-12_yummies So far there's around 16k of images in there and I can generally find what I want.
My ideal situation would be one that could:
- keep a database of thumbnails and smaller images
- can keep a temporary cache of originals that when the cache fills...
- can be burned to CD and...
- the system would always know where the orignal could be found
- have keyword lookup
- and allow uploads of selective images with the web (w/ the option of uploading the original as well)
- sync with the blogger software to allow downloads of comments (so searching becomes easier too)
June 14th, 2004 at 2:10 am
I shoot all digital and mainly cover events where I take 300 to 600MBs worth of images in a few hours. I have a 30GB hard drive where images live. I pull images off the cards into one folder and title it based on the event and a date. Like "061004AshlynParty" or "051404brian_lu_wedding". Any editing that I do ends up in a subfolder. I usually leave the camera's subfolders in tact, too. Like "534CANON". That is from lazyness. Instead of opening each folder to transfer, I can just grab the 3 or 4 camera's folders and transfer all in one click. Every once in a while I sit down and burn 3 or 10 CDs to clear space (labeling each by folder names). I use ACDSee to browse thumbs then drag the ones I want over to PhotoShop for editing. I never rarely rename the original image, rather save to a new folder. This helps me find it again later. I hope this helps anyone.
June 14th, 2004 at 2:35 am
I have two 250GBs external HDs, and my laptop holds 40GBs, so I have 540GBs of hard drive space. However, I'm paranoid they will shut down one day, so I update with DVD-Rs every once in a while. Oh, and I just organize with Windows Explorer. Nothing fancy. If I need something advanced (like EXIF), I check them out in Photoshop CS' File Browser...
February 2nd, 2005 at 1:00 am
I have spent a lot of time investigating photo catalog software and have put together a comparison of all the major products, but from the perspective of critical features (eg. do they support true versioning?).
http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/
Select "Cataloging" then "Comparison"
Fortunately, all applications I've seen offer free trial versions for download.
In addition, I have also tried to develop a file naming strategy (and hierarchy) that could accommodate a mixture of digital camera photos, scanned prints, scanned slides and non-photos, all in the same tree. Perhaps this might give some ideas to others.
See my pages under "Naming Strategies" then "File" or "Folder".
Hope that helps,
Cal.
March 29th, 2005 at 1:29 am
Here's the direct link to the comparison of photo database software:
http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/flow-catalog-compare.html
April 22nd, 2005 at 4:16 am
I was wondering if anyone can help me?? i am using iPhoto, but my built in harddrive is filling up quick, i do have an external harddrive....is there anyway i can save ALL my pictures to the external and have iPhoto grab the pics from the external instead of having all of my pics on my computers internal harddrive? I tryed an alias naming it iPhoto library, and it didnt recognize it, what do i do? Or is it even possible, ive exceeded my computers memory!
June 29th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
Comparison of photo catalog software
April 5th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
if you want to managing your photo well, you can use Picture Indexer Pro, i have use it ,find it cool!
many other tools you also can choose at http://www.yaodownload.com/video-design/