cropping, resizing and organizing

[MACollum]

I've been struggling to get my pictures organized for months now. My biggest problem is that I do a lot of cropping as my composition still leaves something to be desired. Lucky for me, my Rebel XTi takes nice big pictures so I have a lot of leeway when it comes to cropping. Since a majority of my pictures (the keepers anyway) will end up as 4x6 prints I've decided to save all my JPGs in folders according to their print size. Cropping leaves some of them different sizes and it drives me crazy! So I've decided to save them all as 1800x1200 pixels (dpi is 350 so no problem there) so they'll all be the same size. Then if I want a different crop I can go to the original RAW file (I've got 2 copies, one untouched and one corrected for color, etc.) and crop to 8x10 or 5x7. Does anyone see any issues with this method that I haven't yet thought of? My folders are a mess. Of course, I do have some JPGs that I took when I first got the camera and wasn't using RAW, those will be in a separate folder to remain unedited (the originals).

 

[Big Mike]

I don't think I have a perfect system but this is what I do.

I shoot mostly in RAW but sometimes in large JPEG. I upload the photos to a folder with the date. This are my originals, I don't save over them. When I edit the photos, I make a new sub folder called 'Photoshop'...these will usually be lossless files like PSD. Then I make another sub folder 'print'...where I save a JPEG copy for printing. I might even save different versions for different print sizes. (pic1001-4x6, pic1001-8x10 etc). Then I may make yet another sub folder and save copies that are resized and compressed for web viewing.

I've started using Raw Shooter Essentials to convert my RAW files...and it automatically saves the output files into a 'converted' folder...so I just continue making my sub folders from there.

 

[MACollum]

I figured that as long as the size (pixel x pixel) is big enough, and the resolution (dpi) is big enough, it really was just a waste of space to keep them bigger. When they're printed I didn't think that the loss of pixels would matter (as long as the dpi wasn't reduced to below 200) since when you think about quality there is only so much that can be discerned on a print.

I still don't rename the files when they come off the camera because I'm not sure what to name them. When I take lots of pictures in one session I can put the files in a folder named for the event (example: 01-07-2007_Motorcycle_Riding) but if I named the files the filenames would be so long. I realize, though, that someday I'll go through all the numbers and have duplicates. I figured I'd rename files then.

Sometimes I go to a garden and take pictures of flowers, for example. It's much easier to find them if all the rose pictures are in a rose folder instead of all being in a session folder. I can't remember when I took pictures like that. I might be looking for a particular picture and don't want to have to dig through months of folders looking for that ONE picture that I know is there somewhere.

Organizing all this is seemingly impossible but I know there's a way...