How best to organise photos?

[salty_seadog]

Hi

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to organise digi photos. Ihave the manual for the PADI did photo spec. they recommend saving all the originals and saving copies of edits made in photoshop.

How do peep's keep track of twice the number of photos?

[Steve Sub]

The way I do it:

1. Create a new folder with a unique and easily recognized name. I use "yyyymmdd_subject" eg, "20060616_WorldCup".

2. Import all photos into this folder.

3. Inside this folder, create a new folder "Finals". All edited photos go in this folder. Originals will be in either JPG or RAW format. All edited versions are saved as lossless PSD files, often with multiple adjustment layers!

4. Keep original versions, you may want to go back and try new crops, colour balances etc.

5. Make a back-up!

It all takes a bit of time and lots of disk space, but makes it easier to find the photo you want to print, email etc. Actually, I go one step further and create smallish jpg versions which I import into iPhoto (I use an AppleMac) to create slide shows, screensavers etc. I often end up with 5 or more versions of the same photo!!!
Hope this helps
Steve

[Scuby]

Yeah all my photos are just kept in named folders, eg "2005-12 - Red Sea" or "2005-07 - Portland", etc. Not very sophisticated, but I much prefer it to the strange programs which some people I know use - you can just get at the photos easily, windows has a built in viewer for slideshows, etc.

David

[Scuba1]

I have thousands of fotos and don't organise them at all, that way I have to look at them when I want to find on particular one and it allways brings back memories

[soldave]

I import all of my photos from memory cards in Picassa, which will then put them into a folder itself. I like the program and it does what I want it to.

[gibbon]

First delete the out of focus and ones that we certainly dont want to keep.

Then rename all files to location_date_photographer

Then sort photos into species folders - keeping all relevant information, the photo still has time and date in the photo information and is unedited.

We then separate _good_ones and _photoshop for ones that we have played with.

[CotoChris]

Good posting.

I have the following: folders names (Diving, Dogs, family & general)

the Date & name. The name is usually what the camera calls it, sometimes I rename it.

I admit I find it hard to delete the non essential piccies except for the real rubbish ones.

I view the photos using the Canon Zoombrowser.

I have to get around to printing the better pics though.

[futureechos]

Originally Posted by salty_seadog

Hi

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to organise digi photos. Ihave the manual for the PADI did photo spec. they recommend saving all the originals and saving copies of edits made in photoshop.

How do peep's keep track of twice the number of photos?

If you don't have a Macintosh this might not be much use but using the default free tools like iPhoto (like iTunes for photos!) does all this.

You can import, sort by name keyword size, genre, edit, correct and it auto saves originals etc for you. The smart this is you can create a smart folder and say, any photo that has keyword 'dive' and created between date x and date y taken by a and size this or whatever and they automatically get linked into that smart folder. Create as many combinations as you want.

The really cool thing is when you are happy, you can click, burn to CD, burn to DVD, created Slideshow, or create slideshow on DVD, or export to web etc etc etc and it just does it.

Theres loads more you can do.

Plus photoshop is available for MAC too, you can tell iphoto to edit in any external application, so if Pshop is your bag, you click edit in iphoto, it opens it in pshop, you edit and save, iPhoto backs up the original, pulls the photo backinto its database for you.

An example of the web output:

http://www.diveaddict.co.uk/scuba/RedSea

So very easy. :o)

Don't like the changes a year on? Click revert to original.

Mark

[applepie]

I store originals on a portable HD with DVD backups every year or so.

then I have the edited versions on my PC which I play around with. if I delete them by mistake no worries, I pop in the backup dvd and copy a new copy over.

no risk of overwriting the copy on DVD

also the portable HD lasts longer as I only connect it to copy files over, so the HD isnt spinning all the time. longer life span as its not mechanically spinning towards the 100,000hours its rated for.

forgot, I use Picasa on my laptop (quite a nice bit of software) and I use Adobe Elements 3.0 on my desktop. folders organised by name or event and date.