How do you manage your digital photos?

[Eric S]

i have lots of old photos, from a few different eras of my career, on different computers, memory cards, external hard drive, etc. I need to compile all of them, and start an online gallery page. i was wondering how you keep track of your photos. do you keep them all by date, in folders, or by style, by the # of the photo taken, or do you resize and name each picture, then have a folder for each piece? sounds like a lot of work.

I was also wondering if any of you use any file managin programs, like picassa, or something.

[ALIEN!]

C:glasspics/
new stuff
new pipes
pics

So I have a directory for glass pics, a folder for new non pipe stuff and a folder for new pipes then the rest of C:glass pics is old pics that have already been edited, used for internet (the archive).

I only take pics of my nicest stuff, no prodo, unless its pendants or something I want to put on ebay, etsy etc.

Windows is the fastest and easiest way to navigate IMO solely for the fact that it is the fastest program running most any time. It also makes it easier to drag and drop and to back up the pics to another drive, DVD etc.

[MUPH]

I dont have too many archived photo's but I think some data CD's would be a good way to manage. You could lable all the CD's then and not worry about a hard drive crash

[menty666]

How do I manage my digital photos?

Not well :)

[Dale M.]

Interesting question and I think menty's response is typical....

I am now in middle of working my way through big thick book on digital photography and there is only one thing that becomes really apparent for "archival" of photos and that is some sort of independent storage is necessary.... Meaning a removable disk drive or CD/DVD storage.... Book recommends something like one of the new removable hardrives (USB) because you get lots of storage for minimum bucks (500 gig for $100)... And your storage is separate from main system drive and if you have a main drive failure you do not "lose everything"...

As for how you catalog them is still a uncertainty... I would think a system that may work would be to have several folders with popular names, like "Family", "Glass", "Cars", "Pets" etc... And sub folders like "pipes" or "marbles" or "sculpture" or "Goober" (family dog)... I think "dates" or "file number" (camera format) are kind of cryptic and does not identify what picture is all about (unless you have cross reference sheet).... Also so book stresses NEVER edit or modify the "master" photo, always work with a COPY, because if you save a reworked picture or over original the original (master) is altered FOREVER and there is no going back. So I should think one would want to have masters saved as a "read only" file.... And always save "master" in its original format (size) because again once you alter it, its forever and you lose some "picture quality" (data) once you resize or edit it...

Anyway that is direction I'm going (started this way before big thick book) and it seems to be working....

Dale

[menty666]

Periodically I clean off my SD cards and I have a folder on my computer aptly named, 'cardDump' where there are month folders for me to push stuff into. So if I'm looking at the list date on an Etsy listing I can go find something, or if I'm looking for my kid's birthday photos I know what month to look for.

I follow the never edit your originals edict too, but that means you have duplicates all over.

I try to keep stuff sorted out best I can, I have an Etsy folder that has month subfolders in it and in there are often originals and cropped copies. You'll notice at this point now I have 2 copies of the 3mb original. That adds up fast. So, I'm working on that.

I name the cropped photos something mildly descriptive. A group of photos of a single pendant made on 5/29/09 might be pnd_05292009_001a.jpg That way each photo of the pendant that I'm going to list goes up in letter, and if I list more than one pendant, that next pendant is 002, 003, etc.

But they're still somewhat scattered since I dabbled in Artfire, plus not everything goes straight to the store, so some of it's in a facebook folder, etc.

[Swampy]

I put work from the camera directly into dated folders.

ie: 2006 Month 01, 2009 Month 07, &c.

That way I can remember better and the folders are listed in chronological order.

From lifetime experience everything I create is stored on a parallell drive (E:) and all that is copied every ten days or so to an external drive (F:).

The C: drive is only used for running the OS and programmes.

[mouseclone]

I don't know if they have it for windows or not, but FSpot is a nice photo manager. one sec i will look it up...

...nope, no windows version..

It is made for Linux using Gnome libs. Stop the techie talk...

ACDSee used to be a good photo manager. I don't know how they are now, but they have Windows support.

What I really like about F Spot is it will import your RAW image files. When you edit the files you can just make edits to a copy of the file and keep the RAW file as well. The edited file still has the meta information about when the image was taken. This helps to keep them in chronological order while you do your crops, rotates, and other image manipulations.

So time programs can be to feature rich, and all you want is them imported and put on your computer. But F-spot would even upload them to a Gallery-2, Flickr, and google images(name slips my mind at the moment).

It might be worth having a Linux computer to be able to do all of this for free. that is if you have a spare computer laying around the house and you have to have windows to do your work.

[Dale M.]

Google's PICASSA does about the same thing although editing features are not as elaborate....Also IRFANVIEW is a decent freeware graphics image manipulation program..... Also there is GIMP which is a free work alike to Adobe Photo Elements... Irfanview and Gimp will do RAW formats with added optional accessory programs... Any photo program will change the "properties" of a photo once you save over original... Good practice is to NEVER manipulate original image, always keep it pristine and untouched....

Dale

[sunray]

I use Picasa 3 and its free.. I converted over 4000 old slides and put them on Picassa and also saved the card from the converter. Just upload to picassa under a file- e commerce, family, products , friends etc...
works for me...