Lightroom

June 6th, 2010
Does anyone use Lightroom to organize your photos? Mine are out of control and I need a way to organize other than copying to various folders. I usually date all my folders by day and subject but then I have to remember at least about when I took them. I can spend way too much time looking for a particular picture. I am wondering what other people do to organize them.
June 6th, 2010
Hi Suzie. Google Picasa is your friend! I've used this for a while now and its very functional. You can set it to monitor your choice of picture folders and it has various editing tools but I use Photoshop. What's good about it is you can do things like geotagging and uploading straight to the Picasa web albums with one click as well as emailing straight from the Picasa window. I upload my photos to 365 using the email button in Picasa.

Meanwhile, I name my photos using militaray date format in sub-folders organised by year. Any edited photos I add "A", "B" etc. For example:


20100606 (1)
20100606 (2)
20100606 (2A)
20100606 (3)

And so on. This will always keep your photos in the order you took them and Picasa has a "Sort" function if they ever get out of order in the software.
June 6th, 2010
If you have Microsoft Office and choose to follow Matt's advice, they have a piece of software called Picture Manager which lets you rename photos sequentially in bulk. It's stored in the Microsoft Office Tools folder in the start menu (in the Office folder).
June 7th, 2010
You can also just highlight a range of files, right-click on the first one and name it as your first photo for that day and all others will be numbered in sequence.
June 7th, 2010
I'm using Lightroom for all my pictures and I had the same problems as you pointed out. I downloaded a Video tutorial from the Luminous Landscape blog which really brought light into the dark: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/videos/wamp.shtml

It's not free but I think you can preview it before you buy - I can really recommend that tutorial and I'm not affiliated in any way with those guys (I wish I would, though :-))

June 7th, 2010
What I am trying to do is find a way to sort by 'tags'. When I want to see all my pictures of alligators or sailboats, I have no way of finding them. I thought that Lightroom did that but not sure.

Matt, I also assign an 'A' to a changed picture. My pictures are already numbered so I just put them in a folder with the date and a title like -" June 3, 2010 - Graduation". But inside that folder may be a picture of something special like a plate of lovely food at graduation dinner. And if I can't recall what dinner it was taken at I might spend way too much time looking for it.

Anymore ideas?
June 8th, 2010
Picasa (which is free) has a tagging function. It's possible - but I'm not sure as I haven't checked - that the tags may embed directly into the photos with the latest version of the software. Geotagging certainly does.

Even if you end up going back to Lightroom, I strongly recommend you have a play with Picasa for a while to see if you like it and it works for you. It's free and a very functional piece of kit, especially when uploading to the web. One of the newest functions is face recognition which, so far, is very effective - sometimes too effective! lol

EDIT: I've just been tagging a bunch of photos in Picassa and when I viewed them in Photoshop the tags were imported into the metadata fields. I have no idea, though, whether they've embedded themselves in the JPG files or it's just Photoshop reading from the Picassa database. Anyone know?
June 9th, 2010
Lightroom does allow you to add keywords to your images. I really should start doing this... I have almost 16,000 images stored, and even with the thumbnails, finding the one I want can take ages.
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