Just wondering if people tend to keep their raw files or just convert them to jpg and bin the original source documents. I'd also be interested in how people organise the files on their computers - and I'm not just talking about the 365 photos - but all the photos that you take. Do you have folders with titles for example, people, scenery, animals or maybe you organise them by month or year? I'm trying to organise myself but getting into a bit of a muddle and those raw files are taking up a lot of space on my computer so I'm thinking about binning some of them!!
I organize by date, and keyword the pics before import or add keywords after import, older photos I store on an external drive, that way it does not take up space on the computer drive
I keep my RAW files on my external hard drive to save it clogging up the hard drive. Then my 365 and other photos are in Monthly folders, I used to do it by type, eg; landscapes, people etc, but I find much easier by month. : )
@karo How do you add keywords to a photo? @lorraineb If you took a photo of say a cat in a meadow a couple of years ago, how would you find that particular photo if you only organise by month?
Depending on your operating system you may be able to relocate the default location of your pictures folder to an external drive. I have Windows 7 and I set it up so Pictures is actually one of my USB drives.
For organizing I use Picasa which is free and understands most raw formats. Picasa protects your originals, if you make any kind of edit from Picasa, it will keep a history of changes that can be undone, and it will keep a copy of the original picture in safe location. Picasa can be setup to auto arrange your imported photos by date, and it will auto detect if you organize the folders by hand. I like to break them down by year/month/day so every week or so I take whatever I shot and move them into their respective month folder.
Once you have a ton of pictures the date is not enough for this, you will need to get used to the idea that you have to tag your pictures as soon as you import them. I didn't, so now I have 10 years worth of digital pictures that I can't search except by date.
Backups: many online backup providers will give you a few gigabytes of storage for free. Comodo and iDrive for example.
The one thing I never do: delete a single picture I take unless it is obviously bad or it is something I don't want to keep.
I have my main folders by year, then each of those folders has sub folders of what I have done with a date (e.g. London Zoo, February 2011 or South Africa Tour, February 2012), then those may have sub categories (South Africa Tour, February 2012 is then divided by day, with a mini discription what I did that day). I also have a 365 folder for each year that I've done it, with each month as a folder, and a seperate 365 randoms folder with the various months in sub-folders. Not all photos go into the 365 randoms - only the ones without an actual event attached.
@pvera Thanks for that I'll have a look at Picasa. I'm on a mac and use Photoshop. There must be a way that I can tag my images. I just haven't found out how to do it yet.
On my desktop and external hard drives, I keep my photos firstly organised in a time of my life, so I have my 3 years of PNG shots in a PNG folder and before then I lived somewhere else, so I have that folder and a folder for before then and a folder for where I live now. Each of these folders are divided into subject matter then years and then months. So an example would be Townsville>Insects>2011>March. And I title each photo so it has keywords in it. So a Frog eating a Dragonfly would be Frog Eating Dragonfly and that way I know if I want to look for it, I can search either Frog or Dragonfly and the shot will pop up in my search. On my Macbook, which I use for the 365, I only have the images that I have used for the 365 and a few wallpaper shots. All the RAW files are on the desktop and externals, all my little edits shots for 365 are here.
I put all of my photos in iPhoto. I trim the fat, and keep the rest. It does everything I need it to do, as far as organization goes. I store this on my internal hard drive, and usually back it up at the end of the year.
As for my RAW stuff, I usually cook it up in a little olive oil or steam it with some ginger slices and soy sauce. A little salt, maybe a little butter (not too much, I'm watching my figure), and I have a delicious little snack!
When I catch the right kind of stuff, I'll make sushi.
I organize pictures by folders per month and in the title of the folder I add what is shown on the pictures (for instance: 201203 Family visiting here, walk in the park, etc.). If I need something, I just browse the files by showing everything in thumbnails. Then again, I delete a lot of pictures and I also have an online album storage space, so I don't have that many pictures yet. Then again (again), I only just started doing the 365 project 4 days ago... ;)
@lorraineb How do you name images? If a picture shows 5 people, do you mention all 5 names in the title of the picture and perhaps also that it was the birthday of one of them, etc.?
i struggle with this too... i hate the tagging features on my photo software... they are so cumbersome, and i haven't figured out how to batch tag... ie: if i took 25 pictures of the same freakin' flower in macro, they all should have the same tag and i should be able to just do that ONCE! at the beginning of the year i bought a very basic cheap daytimer, so now for each date i make a few notes about what kinds of pics i took... eg: downtown toronto, walk in park, kids at coffee shop, etc...
@ohappiness Sorry, but it came across quite sharp, I'm on mac so i have iPhoto, which also helps as you just need to scroll across the thumbnail and you get a good idea of the images in the folder. The photos I don't send to trash, I save with a general name. I'm finding that monthly folders work for me at the moment, but old stuff thats on my external hard drive can take quite a while to search through. Hope you enjoy 365 as much as I do! : )
@lorraineb I didn't mean it like that, sorry for that. It's just that I tried that too, but apart from being a very big and time-consuming job to give a name to every picture, I can't imagine anyone doing that for 'fun'. ;)
And thanks, I'm enjoying 365 quite a lot! Really vibrant community as well!
@Kareen, not only there's Picasa for OSX, but iPhoto is even better as an organizing tool. Most of what I described from the point of view of Picasa applies to iPhoto.
By the way, if you get used to pick your favorites from each batch and immediately dump them into picasa web albums, even if you turn off sharing, you'll have a quicker way to browse for just the pictures that you consider important. If you need more space, Google charges $5/year for 20GB of space, which is shared across all of your Google services. This means that you can zip batches by month or year and dump them into your Google Documents as a backup.
Another cool thing about both iPhoto and Picasa can auto recognize people's faces and allow you to search for them. This feature is priceless for anyone that takes lots of pictures of family gatherings and that kind of thing.
@lorraineb@ohappiness After reading your comment it encouraged me to look a bit deeper on the mac. If you go to info for the image you can add spotlight comments and add a nice long description with lots of names if you want. You can then do a search for any of the words in the description. It actually works quite well - a lot like tags. But I haven't found a way to do this for multiple pics.
@pvera I have a lot of photos in my iphoto but I know that I don't utilise it enough. The face recognition feature is brilliant though. I like the sound of picasa and google as the files are saved online so is safer than my computer. I will investigate. Thanks for the tips.
This is one of the things I use Lightroom for, and I'm another mac person. I shoot raw and always keep the original files untouched. Then I also keep the jpg files with whatever changes I've made, so I can re-edit them if I want.
I started to store my pictures on CD and DVD, but have had some that have failed or have had corrupted files. So now I've put them on an external hard drive (got tired of the slow USB drives so I bought an eSATA card for my laptop and use a docking station with bare hard drives).
Lightroom can batch keyword pictures. I use DNG files (my camera can shoot it natively) and LR can save the keywords directly in the file, rather than using sidecar files. I try to remember to keyword when I import/copy the files initially. Lightroom can automatically copy the files in a date folder, and I don't bother renaming them as they are sequential and by date. I can find things relatively easily through the Lightroom catalog's keywording system.
I rename the files that I've processed and saved as jpg, and I keep them in completely different folders. I'll add a word to the file name to give me an idea what the picture is, but leave the original picture number after the word, for two reasons - one, so the file name is unique and two, so I can easily find the original raw file if I need to for some reason.
@kareen i use lightroom - you can keyword before importing or after, i am still trying to find the best system. before lightroom I organized by place then year, month, day, if you use bridge you can batch rename them under tools, I think
Write a Reply
Sign up for a free account or Sign in to post a comment.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
@lorraineb If you took a photo of say a cat in a meadow a couple of years ago, how would you find that particular photo if you only organise by month?
For organizing I use Picasa which is free and understands most raw formats. Picasa protects your originals, if you make any kind of edit from Picasa, it will keep a history of changes that can be undone, and it will keep a copy of the original picture in safe location. Picasa can be setup to auto arrange your imported photos by date, and it will auto detect if you organize the folders by hand. I like to break them down by year/month/day so every week or so I take whatever I shot and move them into their respective month folder.
Once you have a ton of pictures the date is not enough for this, you will need to get used to the idea that you have to tag your pictures as soon as you import them. I didn't, so now I have 10 years worth of digital pictures that I can't search except by date.
Backups: many online backup providers will give you a few gigabytes of storage for free. Comodo and iDrive for example.
The one thing I never do: delete a single picture I take unless it is obviously bad or it is something I don't want to keep.
As for my RAW stuff, I usually cook it up in a little olive oil or steam it with some ginger slices and soy sauce. A little salt, maybe a little butter (not too much, I'm watching my figure), and I have a delicious little snack!
When I catch the right kind of stuff, I'll make sushi.
And thanks, I'm enjoying 365 quite a lot! Really vibrant community as well!
By the way, if you get used to pick your favorites from each batch and immediately dump them into picasa web albums, even if you turn off sharing, you'll have a quicker way to browse for just the pictures that you consider important. If you need more space, Google charges $5/year for 20GB of space, which is shared across all of your Google services. This means that you can zip batches by month or year and dump them into your Google Documents as a backup.
Another cool thing about both iPhoto and Picasa can auto recognize people's faces and allow you to search for them. This feature is priceless for anyone that takes lots of pictures of family gatherings and that kind of thing.
I started to store my pictures on CD and DVD, but have had some that have failed or have had corrupted files. So now I've put them on an external hard drive (got tired of the slow USB drives so I bought an eSATA card for my laptop and use a docking station with bare hard drives).
Lightroom can batch keyword pictures. I use DNG files (my camera can shoot it natively) and LR can save the keywords directly in the file, rather than using sidecar files. I try to remember to keyword when I import/copy the files initially. Lightroom can automatically copy the files in a date folder, and I don't bother renaming them as they are sequential and by date. I can find things relatively easily through the Lightroom catalog's keywording system.
I rename the files that I've processed and saved as jpg, and I keep them in completely different folders. I'll add a word to the file name to give me an idea what the picture is, but leave the original picture number after the word, for two reasons - one, so the file name is unique and two, so I can easily find the original raw file if I need to for some reason.