Image organization

[Corey Deards]

OK, here is the situation I have approximately 40,000 photos on a hard drive, that have, I am embarrassed to say, never been cataloged, key-worded, or otherwise organized. They are in a mix of folders, some as the came off of the memory cards & others in folders that were re-named for the shoot. I am starting to play with the Lightroom 3 beta and think that will end up being my DAM software choice and I am ready to start tackling the work I should have been doing all along. I think my first course of action will be to get all of my photos into new folders based on the date they were shot. What is the easiest way to do this? Lightroom? Or some other software? In some cases I have multiple dates withing the same folder and want to transfer them all to folders based solely by date. year/month/day

Is there some automated way to do this, hopefully just open an existing folder, upload to a new location and have it create folders based on the date and move the photos to that folder?

Thanks in advance for any insite!

[John Chardine]

Hi Corey- DAM is a hot topic in digital photography and I am still struggling with it myself. I use Microsoft Expression Media (XM) and it is excellent, however, Microsoft does not seem to be interested in the product and it may die.

I will say that there is no real need to organise your images according to date. Date is part of the EXIF data in each image and at least in XM catalogued images are automatically organised by date, as if they were in separate folders.

[William Malacarne]

In LightRoom there is different criteria for sorting...Date of Capture(or something like that) being one...as John stated it uses the EXIF info and sorts by date and time photo was taken.

Bill

[Roger Clark]

I'm with Peter. I make long file names that include the original image name, date, and subject. I keep images in directories named for the location, e.g. bosque.dec.2009, or africa.2009/ndutu/cheetahs I'm wary of commercial databases that may not be usable in ten years, or more importantly in 30 years, 50 years, etc, especially family pictures.

Another idea is to make a listing of all the images that includes the directory path and file name and put that into a text file. Then it is a quick search for searching for subjects, e.g. show me all images of cheetahs taken at ndutu, or all eagles in 2009. One could expand on that idea by extracting the exif data on each image and including that in the text file. The one could, for example, search for all eagle images taken with a 500 mm focal length lens. And simple text files will always be readable, and it is very fast.

Making such listing is easy on unix/linux (which also means macs). Not sure about windows. You can use dcraw and jhead (for raw and jpeg files, respectively) to extract exif info.

Roger

[Sabyasachi Patra]

I was struggling earlier but found Lightroom to be good.

I rename my files with YYYMMDD (Year month day) and original file number generated by camera. These files are imported into folders named date wise and are all bunched together according to location. So when someone asks me for a particular photo, I know where to look for it.

In lightroom, you can immediately search according to camera, lens, location etc. Though filing images according to legacy filing structures like location, date etc are redundant by softwares like lightroom, I keep it as such. If needed, I can quickly see the thumbnails of raw files through my windows explorer as well.

If you are cataloguing for the first time, just import your files into lightroom. It has a facility to copy to a different location. You can save them in different folders by date as well.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[W T Lloyd]

I definitely recommend Lightroom, as the others have.

But don't start building a catalog with Lightroom 3....Adobe doesn't guarantee such a catalog can be used in the final shipping version, the betas are only for trial usage and not to be integrated into your workflow.

Lightroom 2.x is being offered at a discount, for example, Amazon has it for $239 (list is $299) or you might qualify to purchase it at Academic Superstore?

In any case, import EVERYTHING into Lightroom. You can set Lightroom to automatically create directories by date. Once you've got everything in Lightroom, only move files around, in and out of directories, using Lightroom.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

I use LRII ver 2.6 and find it a reasonable way to manage the volume of images. I use two separate 500gig external drives that attach to the MacBook. One is a mirror of the other. LR will automatically create a backup while importing - very nice.

[Indranil Sircar]

I have adopted the system Artie has been using and described in his Digital Basics. I use BreezeBrowser pro 1.9.5 and Download pro for managing and accessing the images.

[John Chardine]

Unfortunately, Mr. Breeze has seen fit not to produce a version of his apparently excellent DAM software for the Mac, despite the large market share Macs have in the photo world, and the fact that Macs and Windows machines now use the same processor which makes development on both platforms a "breeze"!

[Corey Deards]

Wow. Thank you for all the well thought out and insightful replies! Lots to think about. I may wait to really dive into this until LR3 is officially out??? I don't really want to buy LR2 now and have to upgrade shortly. At least I can start wrapping my head around this and be prepared. Thanks again!

[Reza Gorji]

I have about 70,000 images. I use LR. I name the files subject-date.ext. It has worked for me.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I don't change the file names. I sort them in folders, sorted by camera, then 100EOS1D, 101EOS1D and so forth. Within these folders, I have subfolders with location and date. This way I can also keep track of the actuations. When I process an image, I keep the four digit file number as part of the file name and leave the EXIF intact, and have no trouble finding the original RAW file this way.