Program for sorting photos into separate folders

[Dr_Grumbler]

Hi,

I'm trying to make panoramas out of pictures taken during my last holiday. I have a lot of pictures but only some of them will be used. Is there a program that would allow me to preview my photos and organize them into groups located in separate folders on my hard drive? This is in opposition to having them organized into galleries or whatnot just in the program but still remaining in the same place on the hard drive. I found many programs that can do the latter but that is useless for panoramas as when I go to my panorama stitching program I still have to go through all the pictures. Could you please suggest software with the described functionality? Any help will be greatly appreciated

 

[The_Traveler]

Any file handler like Windows Explorer or XYplorer will do this.
Lightroom will allow you to move pictures but, even better, it will allow collections of photos where pictures you choose exist in a collection that can be handled as a folder but that has no physical existence.
That allows pictures to be in several places at one and never really move.

How I use Lightroom?s Collections | Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider

 

[bratkinson]

I recently shot a week-long church event that ultimately worked out to about 400 'keepers'. I was shooting with the intents that various overlapping 'subsets' on CDs of the 400+ pictures would go to 6 or 7 different persons or groups, including 1 set for general distribution of a bit of everything on it.

Once I got all the keepers into one folder, I simply copied that entire folder to as many new, appropriately named folders, one folder per subset. Then, by using Windows Picture Viewer (pops up automatically when the JPG is clicked), I step through one by one and simply jump back to the folder listing to delete 'ranges' of pictures, leaving only the ones I want in a particular 'set'. It's free (other than disk space), it's easy, and it takes about 10 minutes per subset to produce.

 

[The_Traveler]

I recently shot a week-long church event that ultimately worked out to about 400 'keepers'. I was shooting with the intents that various overlapping 'subsets' on CDs of the 400+ pictures would go to 6 or 7 different persons or groups, including 1 set for general distribution of a bit of everything on it.

Once I got all the keepers into one folder, I simply copied that entire folder to as many new, appropriately named folders, one folder per subset. Then, by using Windows Picture Viewer (pops up automatically when the JPG is clicked), I step through one by one and simply jump back to the folder listing to delete 'ranges' of pictures, leaving only the ones I want in a particular 'set'. It's free (other than disk space), it's easy, and it takes about 10 minutes per subset to produce.

This is interesting and intricate and, if you have LR or Bridge, unnecessary.
As you import each day's shooting into LR, you add keywords to the files in batches.
For example, Church Shoot, Group A, Group B .........., old people, young people, church officers, baseball players, choir
So each file will end up with at least two tags but some files will have many.
Then you create 'smart' collections that automatically create virtual collections without moving a file.
The advantage is that individual files can be in multiple places (collections) at once without moving.

For example, again, if someone drops out of choir, just remove the choir tag from his/her picture and that picture will automatically be removed from the 'choir' smart collection.
This makes LR into a relational database with built in standard queries.

 

[sashbar]

I recently shot a week-long church event that ultimately worked out to about 400 'keepers'. I was shooting with the intents that various overlapping 'subsets' on CDs of the 400+ pictures would go to 6 or 7 different persons or groups, including 1 set for general distribution of a bit of everything on it.

Once I got all the keepers into one folder, I simply copied that entire folder to as many new, appropriately named folders, one folder per subset. Then, by using Windows Picture Viewer (pops up automatically when the JPG is clicked), I step through one by one and simply jump back to the folder listing to delete 'ranges' of pictures, leaving only the ones I want in a particular 'set'. It's free (other than disk space), it's easy, and it takes about 10 minutes per subset to produce.

400 keepers in a week.. wow. I have never had more than 5. I have only had about 150 keepers this year. And probably 50 of them are not really worth keeping.. It solves the problem of sorting though

 

[GlennT]

The flagging and keyword tagging in Lightroom is extremely useful. Originally, I relied heavily on the Pick/Reject flags and star ratings. If I wanted to break out photos into a separate collection, I was using color flags. I would export 3+ stars to a hard drive, while being more restrictive with uploads. I now add keywords for the year, location, names of people in the shots, and generally something about the location, event or whatnot to give additional context. I can easily create a new collection that contains all camping photos, for example. We're heavily involved with things like Cub Scouts. I may have an entire event in one collection, but those photos would also appear in the "Cub Scouts" collection automatically I can create another that shows all photos that include a particular child to share with their parent(s). When I tag new photos with that child, they automatically appear in that collection and I can quickly republish. If that child is also in baseball, his photos also appear in his collection. I also use those keywords on Smugmug to create smart galleries, so I don't have to publish the same photos to Smugmug more than once.

For what you want to do, I would likely tag those photos "Panorama" and create a Smart Collection under the "Hard Drive" publishing service. You might have a \Lightroom\Panoramas" folders for example. To further organize, use another keyword to separate them into subfolders. e.g. Beach, Panorama would go in \Lightroom\Panorama\Beach. I generally get more detailed than that, putting a particular event until its own subfolder with the date. e.g. \Lightroom\Panorama\2013-07-04 North Beach

This keeps the originals where they are consistently organized the same way and thus easily found, sorted, searched, etc. When we're looking for publicity shots for Cub Scouts recruitment, I can quickly find all Cub Scouts shots, and even narrow it down to particular events. Again, extremely useful. Extremely powerful.