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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Orgnanizing Images
Jason Joseph, Photographer
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Dublin | OH | USA | Posted: 10:46 AM on 01.26.07 |
| ->> I know that this is a dead horse topic, but if anyone could point me to a previous thread or has any suggestions on organizing images I would certainly be all ears. I have a mess of images that date back over the past 6 years that I really, really, really want to get into a better structure. I have tried a few different software apps and also just using Windows Explorer, but can't get comfortable with any. Thanks! |
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Jamie Roper, Photographer
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Lawrence | KS | United States | Posted: 1:56 PM on 01.26.07 |
| ->> Check out The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, by Peter Krogh. I'm just getting into it, but i understand that it's one of the best and most comprehensive resources on this subject. |
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Trevor Walker, Photographer
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Powell | OH | USA | Posted: 2:10 PM on 01.26.07 |
| ->> There is one for sale in the classified ads. |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 3:09 PM on 01.26.07 |
->> First, I recommend Photo Mechanic. It makes it easy to sort through images and move them around into groupings. But as you're finding out, creating order from chaos is not easy. You've got to start with an organized system from the first day because every following day the task of getting organized gets harder. Apps can only help you, they can't do it for you.
What types of things have you been shooting? Events, portraits, landscapes/nature? For each type I'd break them down a bit differently, but they'd all end up in a tree-structure, starting with the most general moving to the most specific as I step into sub directories.
For events I use event name -> year -> day_date -> individual daily events. The day_date is the name of the day, plus the YYYYMMDD date.
For landscapes I use location -> time of year (or month)
For nature I use one of animals, insects, or flowers, followed by what type it was, so I might have animals -> lizards or flowers -> poppies and inside those I might have locations.
It's basically how you'd use filing cabinets, with each cabinet being a different type of shoot, each drawer being a different event or person or thing, and each folder in a drawer being your most detailed grouping.
A large part of keeping my images organized is the file-naming convention I use within Photo Mechanic. PM calls the process of downloading images from a card or drive "ingesting". When I ingest images I set up my IPTC fields to have the info that's common to all the images I'm pulling in right then. Sometimes it's the images from one chip, sometimes it's images from multiple chips. Either way it's always the same info that I'd use to group the images on the drive. If I have multiple events in a day, I'll use individual cards so I don't have those events fall into one folder. Sorting them out later is doable, but causes a lot more work.
In Photo Mechanic, it's easy to plug in the event, and then let PM figure out the day/date info using its variables. It is also set to automatically rename my images by YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS (year, month, day, hour, minutes, second) format during the ingest and append a letter if the name collides with a previous image name. That date info is extracted from the EXIF info in the image which was put there by the camera as soon as the image was stored on the card. By doing that I know where on my drive to look for a particular image later on if I know its name, because I know when the particular shoot or event occured. A client will call and say they want image # such-and-such, and I can search for it and find that unique filename, or jump directly to it because I'll have a good idea what the event was.
This naming works well when you've got multiple cameras too. Sync their clocks just before you shoot, and ingest all their images into one folder. The image renaming will automatically group the images by time, and, if you need to identify an image by the camera you can search for the serial number embedded in the image's EXIF data. Doing that I can tell whether a shot was from my 1D, my old D1x, or one of our 20D bodies. And, from the ID of the 20D body, I can identify the shots my wife took vs. mine, and get jealous when she makes a sale of a killer shot.
I also have PM insert the original name of the file before the ingest into one of the IPTC fields so I can refer back to it. That's how I deal with old images I'd taken before I had PM. I let PM do its IPTC templating magic to those files, then would rename them to fit into my organization structure.
As PM ingests images it puts them into a folder automatically named for the date of the ingest. Sometimes that'll happen after midnight, so the folder name will be wrong, so I'll just rename it to the correct date, and drag the folder into its place on my drive.
Then I'll start editing out shots and categorize them using PM's ratings. I'll add individual notes to the IPTC info in images if there's something particularly interesting, like the name of the thing or person. That way I can search for it later using PM or Photoshop or iView or whatever else is available to search IPTC fields.
I think it's really important to have unique filenames. Some people will manually rename the images with something to define what it is, but that slows the process, and, in my opinion, increases the chance of filename collisions later. I use the organization come from the hierarchy of folders, and rely on the IPTC info for individual details.
Whatever organization method you choose, plan on spending a lot of time moving files. It's a lot easier to use an app like iView or Photo Mechanic or even Photoshop's Bridge than it is to use the Finder or Windows Explorer. The apps let you view your images as if they're on a light-table, then select groups of images and label, move, delete, or whatever needs done to the group. You can search for rudimentary EXIF and IPTC info like dates and camera settings to help group images. Once you've done that a couple times the task will get easier, but it'll still be a lot of manual work.
Hope that helps some. Good luck! |
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Jody Gomez, Photographer
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Murrieta | CA | USA | Posted: 5:41 PM on 01.26.07 |
->> Greg, your knowledge is priceless. Thank you for all the great tips you put on this board for all of us to learn from.
Jason, Greg is right on the money with this one. I use basically the same method as Greg. Having individual cameras time-synced is critical and time sorting has saved me many times when I need to identify athletes or keep the images in the correct shooting order. The color coding in PM is very helpful for me because I like to know which images I liked the best from each shoot, so I mark them accordingly and can easily refer back to them.
:~) |
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Stanley Leary, Photographer
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Roswell | GA | USA | Posted: 7:46 PM on 01.26.07 |
->> If you put your information in the captions and then for naming the files use the date stamping option in photomechanic then you can use a database program to further manage your photos.
Very soon SS Member Chris Gooley will have his premier system which USPresswire uses for individuals--that is the rumor.
But naming your folders and searching this way quite cumbersome. I presently have 105,000 images which I can search any of the IPTC data fields and the EXIF fields as well.
The really cool thing about Gooley’s system will be you can upload to the server using web browser.
If you are on Mac and have the Tiger OS system you can use spotlight. Spotlight lets you do Find/Search all of your documents, images, emails and applications and view the results literally as fast as you can type in search words.
The key to organization is to remember searching is text based. So input your information into the IPTC (I prefer PhotoMechanic) and have a unique name for each image and you are on your way to organization. |
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Jason Joseph, Photographer
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Dublin | OH | USA | Posted: 8:48 PM on 01.26.07 |
| ->> Thanks to everyone! I have so many new methods to try out and so much new info to play with. But I have to say that the first thing that I will be doing is getting a copy of PM, especially since my trial version that I have been playing with will expire in 2 days. And I knew in the back of my head, but now know for sure that I have A LOT of work ahead of me to get things back in order. Thanks again! |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 12:04 PM on 01.27.07 |
->> Just remember to put as much info into the IPTC fields as you can up front.
IPTC fields are used by so many photo editing and cataloging apps that they're you're best bet at having a flexible search method.
Like Stanley said, even the OS can tie into IPTC search. The Mac's Sherlock technology, which unlies the Finder's Search box, is IPTC savvy so you can search at the Finder, or inside any app that is Spotlight aware. And, since Spotlight is a Mac technology that they want apps to use, you'll see more and more apps inherit the ability to locate your photos. That's what Photo Mechanic implemented. (Just be careful to not enter a search in PM, then backspace to clear the term and press return to submit a null search or Spotlight will tell PM to show you everything on the drive, including a lot of things that it doesn't know how to display and PM will go off into la-la land.)
There are a lot of cataloging techniques. Most rely on a backend or underlying database and they will outrun any pure file-based search. Even Apple's Sherlock uses pre-scanning of the info and builds a database under the covers. If those databases get corrupted you'll lose your search ability so keep them backed up and do whatever periodic maintenance is suggested to keep the database indexes optimized.
If the database dies for or is unavailable for some reason, you'll need a way to search manually, so keep those folder hierarchies named in a coherent and sensible manner. If you've ever had to navigate through a directory structure that's been built by an application you'll appreciate how important this can be.
For a sample, take a look at the folder and storage method used by iPhoto. It's a rats nest of numbers and dates that doesn't help much when you need to locate a file via the OS. That's why I like how apps like Photo Mechanic or iView handle their searches. It's based on how you set up your hierarchy, instead of forcing you to use their way of thinking. I avoid those types of programs because of this rats-nest approach, and the usual "do it my way or hit the highway" photo management approach, Adobe's Lightroom has a more flexible and mature approach and learned to use files in-place rather than attempt to control it for us. Something in the back of my mind says that iPhoto might have also grown up that way too, but in general be wary of apps that insist on organizing your images for you. That way lies madness.
As you build your categories, make sure you don't dump thousands and thousands of images in a particular folder. Those will slow the OS and everything above it that tries to show those images. That's just the way computers work and is an issue on every OS I've ever used..
Even a database-driven search will suffer from similar problems if your IPTC info is too similar. Database indexes rely on uniqueness to provide the fast searching, so the more detailed info you can provide, the better the database can do its job. If every IPTC field is identical the app will take forever to churn through the database to find a particular image.
Also, the larger the image catalog you have, the more important it is that you keep backups because the odds go up that something will occur. Bigger image catalogs mean bigger database files which means they're bigger targets for something to go wrong. |
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