Advice on workflow and software for storing and cataloging images

[JClishe]

I first got into digital photography seriously last summer, then fell away from it through the winter, and am now getting back into pretty seriously again. As the amount of images that I'm storing increases, I'm just curious as to how other people store and manage their images, and what software you use.

My current process is this. Once I import my pics to my PC and delete the rejects, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery to tag the images as appropriate, and also use Photo Gallery's people tagging feature to tag people. Then I upload all of the images to my Windows Home Server, using a seperate folder for each month.

I realize that Windows Live Photo Gallery may seem pretty amateurish, but it does offer some nice features. My wife likes to review the photos that I've taken, especially the photos of our boys, so she's able to use Photo Gallery from her laptop to view the images that I've uploaded to our Home Server, and she can see the tags that I've created and create her own filters to see new my new photos of our boys, etc. Also, Photo Gallery has plug-ins to natively upload photos to Facebook, Skydrive, and Flickr, so Photo Gallery has become my one-stop shop for all of my image management tasks.

That said, I'm certainly not married to it. I use it because it's free and I really didn't want to go out and buy something to manage my photo's until I had a better idea of what I was doing. But I definitely like the ability to natively upload from Photo Gallery to social media sites; The ability to create tags that other people in my household can filter on from their own PC's; and the ability to tag people (and the people tagging persists with the photo when you upload it Facebook, which is also really cool).

Does anyone have any experience with Microsoft Expression Media 2? Is it any good? I work for Microsoft so I can get it for $25, so even if it's marginally decent at photo management it may be worth it for me. From what I understand it has some limited offline library capabilities, which would be nice because as I mentioned I store all of my photos on my my Home Server, so obviously I have no access to them from my laptop when I'm remote. So some offline library features would be nice.

Thanks!

Jason

 

[musicaleCA]

Hmm. You could probably manage to get Lightroom to act in the same manner; keep catalogues on the server and then just open the catalogue. Though that would be a very slow way to edit photos; access through USB 2.0 or IEEE 800 is always going to be faster.

Anyway, you said you were curious about how others do it, so: I use Lightroom to manage my photos, and they are all kept on my Drobo (two 1TB, one 500GB), connected with IEEE 800. I've lost all my data before, and photos irreplacable, so the redunancy helps to keep me sane.

 

[JClishe]

Thanks for the info!

I didn't specifically mention this, but I edit photos before I upload them to my Home Server, and if I wanted to edit a photo that was already on my server, I'd download it locally first. Although, I do have a gigabit network so my network performance is quite good. And, and I have multiple disks in my Home Server and Home Server has built-in data redundancy.