Photo Management problem

[sunlou]

Hello all,

I totally lost control of my pictures in my computer. Good ones, bad ones, Post processed...

I think light room can help with that but I moved the pictures around in my computer.

What are the best practises out there on file management?

thanks...

 

[WhineAndDine]

from experience, the most user friendly application is iPhoto, which is free with all Macs. Aperture is much more intense, with thousands of features, but of course its more complicated.

what have you been using thats left you frustrated so far?

 

[sunlou]

brute force windows explorer... And at work I work ultra hard to get people to buy Product Data Management Systems for thousands of $. guess it would help to follow my own advice...

so aperture you say...

I'll give it a try

 

[sunlou]

I am on PC

 

[WhineAndDine]

my condolences

 

[bdavison]

Sometimes ya just gotta go into windows explorer, and start cleaning up manually.
Once you get things organized, come up with a system for cataloging the photos.

I keep all my photos under the "my pictures" folder in windows. Then there are sub-folders named by topic such as portraits, aircraft, racing, runway,landscape, street,wildlife, weddings,etc. Then there are sub-folders under those with specific shoots.

For example say I wanted to find a photo of the 1998 wedding shoot with Mary&David.
The folders would be:
C:/My Pictures/Weddings/Mary&David1998

I also have a folder named "Portfolio". This is the folder that I store all my portfolio shots in, so I can print or use them at random.

Under each folder, I have the original camera photos. I store the RAW photo from the camera which I leave alone. I only work on copies of the original, never the original. Once I start post processing I save it as "edited1", "edited2", etc. Once I have all the post processing completed on the edited photo, I rename it to "final1", "final2", etc.

If I do a HDR or something the title of the final photo will contain what type of editing Ive done to it like "HDRfinal1"

The most important thing is backing up ALL of your photos. I do a backup after every shoot to two seperate hard drives. Once a year, I make a entire backup to hardcopy DVD, and store it in a firebox.

 

[sunlou]

thanks ... i'll try your structure...

 

[WhineAndDine]

if that system works for you, all the power to you. personally i could never do that. i would drive myself crazy. im an organization FREAK. the sight of extra folders gives me a panic attack. when you use software for organizing, it does all the folder making and organizing for you in the background. for example if i import pictures from my camera, it automatically makes folders based on date and versions. the best thing about aperture is that it always saves the master copy. check out this screenshot i just took. as you can see near the bottomn, you see the original, and the processed image. if for whatever reason i decide to start from scratch, the master will still be there for me.

 

[sunlou]

thanks... I guess that the PC counter part for aperture is lightroom. but does it have managing capabilities?

Because I am trying to prepare a correct architetcure as advised by bdavison but I really see myself successfully have the discpline to keep them organised myself.

Anyone uses Lightroom to do such management?

 

[redtippmann]

i love picasa b/c its free

 

[gravity0]

thanks... I guess that the PC counter part for aperture is lightroom. but does it have managing capabilities?

Because I am trying to prepare a correct architetcure as advised by bdavison but I really see myself successfully have the discpline to keep them organised myself.

Anyone uses Lightroom to do such management?

Two of these too.

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:thumbup:

 

[royalWITHcheese2]

thanks... I guess that the PC counter part for aperture is lightroom. but does it have managing capabilities?

Because I am trying to prepare a correct architetcure as advised by bdavison but I really see myself successfully have the discpline to keep them organised myself.

Anyone uses Lightroom to do such management?

I use Lightroom and it is great. I used to have the same problem you do, and then I learned Lightroom and never again will I have the problem. I've never used Aperature but I believe they are extremely similar programs.

You import your photos from you computer and it keeps them in a catalog. I don't know if you've seen Lightroom before but I posted a screen shot so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

On the left are my folders, and at the top are the different sections of the program, i.e. Library for viewing them, and Develop for most of the editing you'll need. Any other specific questions I could probably answer for you too, just let me know.

 

[WhineAndDine]

nice. yes ive heard great things about lightroom from my PC wielding friends. they are essentially the same program. looks like this is the solution for you.

 

[Tony123]

First Post! Yippie...

I have everything under my pictures and then have folders by year and then month. I then have a folder for each occassion that is labeled with a descriptive word. At that point, Picasa has the search feature that almost always pulls up what I need.

I'm currently at about 50,000 personal photos. Maybe this doesn't work with a larger library? What's considered "a lot of photos"?

 

[GeneralBenson]

Lightroom is the king of managing. I have almost 20,000 images on my hard drive right now, and could find any one of them within 30 seconds. Unless my computer wasn't on, then it would take 2 minutes.