Need to Organize all my digital photos! Advice?

[Gertrude]

I am primarily a freelance stock photographer, although I have exhibits of my work somewhat regularly in the surrounding small towns. I literally have thousands of images on my hard drive and need a way to make them easily searchable. I'm no computer buff, and need some help organizing my database for the convenience of my clients and myself. I searched the net and found this program: http://www.a2zkeywording.com/
It's called A2Z Keywording...Anyone ever heard about it?

 

[PhilUldrich]

It's funny that you just posted this thread, I just joined the forum and was perusing about. Anyway, I purchased the A2Z Keywording Program late last fall and have been using it to keyword my photos regularly since. I don't know of any other program that manages large numbers of digital photos with such ease. The price was unquestionably worth it to me, but you ought to download their demos and test run the program to see if you think it will fit your needs: http://www.a2zkeywording.com/downloads.php

I think though, for a freelance stock photographer there is not much better ought there. I wish they had more genre specific options to keyword photos with, I think the program draws its keywords from a thesaurus. I can honestly say the program has paid for itself. Hope this helps some.

 

[Kent Frost]

Generally what I do, is to make sure the camera numbers all the files sequentially, and continuously even if I change the card, this way it doesn't start all the way over from zero. This way when I move all of them over to the hard drive for editing, they'll be in chronological order. I create folders by date, and each corresponding image will go in it's dated folder, which keeps events separated. Then I burn them all to disc, and when I label the disc, I put the first and last dates on it, as well as the first and last image number. Since I do mostly party photography, and quite frequently at that, my website also acts as a sort of directory of all the images. When someone makes an order, they give me the event name, but more importantly, they give me the date, and the image numbers. Makes it easy to locate which disc they're on.

I'll be getting a 250GB hard drive before too long, so most likely my collection will go there as primary storage, and the discs (mostly all CDs, but converting to DVD now) will be backup.