Storing Images

pborgbarthet · Jul 5, 2007

I have a very big problem with storing and sorting out my images on the PC. I have many which I consider personal photos...of friends, family and so on. Then I have others which I consider more artistic and creative.

I have a big mess on my PC at the moment with images mixed up, uncategorized.

Can someone please give me an example of how I could sort out my hard drive to categorize the images in a more organised way... ie. should I rename all the images? Should I file images in many named sub-folders.. irrelevant of the date they were shot?

Also, which is the best way for me to back up my images, just in case anything goes wrong..

Really appreciate any ideas and examples.

Thanks

hyakuhei · Jul 5, 2007

Just use a decent photo manager, I use F-spot.

It will import them all for you, then you can tag them as you like, you can even export to flickr,picasa and many others straight from it.

Sweetsomedays · Jul 5, 2007

I sort mine into folders each time I upload. As for backing up we have two lap tops, a PC and an external hard drive so I just hope the don't all fail at once. I also like to backup my images onto DVD especially the ones of my children cuz they are so important.

WDodd · Jul 5, 2007

I organize my pictures into different folders that say the date and the subject. I use Lightroom and it has its own organization method but I like to put all the files into folders myself.

Its really a personal choice as to what you use, and how you do it. Whatever makes sense or comes naturally to you would be the best idea.

As for backup, I have an external hard drive I back up too using SyncToy which is a Microsoft XP powertoy. Apple has a similar function if I'm not mistaken. I don't use my Apple for anything involving photos yet I'm still in the process of getting used to it.

panocho · Jul 5, 2007

I use folders, which I name after dates/occasions. Later I transfer them to CD's. No real backup, then, since the CD ends up being the only storage.

Garbz · Jul 5, 2007

I go "Thing - Location [Month Year]", i.e. "City Night - Southbank [June 2007] but then i have a good memory togo with it.

bdh1974 · Jul 5, 2007

I like to load into folders using date & event info eg 2007_06_29-FNWTR. I use this for work stuff all in the one folder.

For personal I have Folders like friends, family, cats, dogs, blah blah blah. Then when I load photos into these I use the same subfolder option as before, date & name. This seems to work well.

Then after I upload from card, the first thing I do before even looking at any photo, is to burn them straight to DVD, I make 2 copies. 1 I keep at home & the other is off site, at the moment I keep that at my work office. Pretty safe here.

I have learnt from my mistakes, I lost all my honeymoon photo's when I had a harddrive crash. I have been thinking about taking it to see what I can get recovered.

So store it in a few places & not on the same harddrive.

Cheers

Brad.

b3av3r · Jul 6, 2007

I put sets of photos in separate sub-folders usually named according to the event and then I have individual photos all together named for what is in the photo. This is the easiest way for me to keep track of everything.

Also I just found a great, free program you can use to rename tons and tons of files all at once in pretty much any way you want. Do a search on google for "bulk rename utility". I spent maybe 5 mins. playing with it and now I can completely change the file name to anything I want to any number of files all at once.

jon_k · Jul 6, 2007

hyakuhei said:
Just use a decent photo manager, I use F-spot.

Know of any program like this for Windows? Too bad they don't build a Windows version. There /is/ a GTK toolkit for windows after all. ;-(

I've never used my Linux machine for photography. Photoshop, etc won't run on it without running Wine or something, which slows it down. However, a program like this on Windows would be great.

hyakuhei · Jul 6, 2007

jon_k said:
Know of any program like this for Windows? Too bad they don't build a Windows version. There /is/ a GTK toolkit for windows after all. ;-(

I've never used my Linux machine for photography. Photoshop, etc won't run on it without running Wine or something, which slows it down. However, a program like this on Windows would be great.

I'm sure that there are plenty - You'll end up paying for them though

As for Wine being slower, I'm afraid thats just plainly inaccurate, Wine is not an emulator is an implementation of windows api calls to native linux calls so the only real slow down would be the extra stack operations involved with various mappings - thats a little compsci for this forum though. I have photoshop here but out of principle I always use gimp :-D

Picasa http://picasa.google.com/ will do a similar job and do it very well, but neat things like export to flickr obviously won't be a possibility, if you don't want that sort of functionality though - you may want to give it a try.

F-Spot is a mono application so I doubt it would be hard to port to windows....