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Post by Deleted on Aug 6, 2013 12:33:55 GMT
Organizing digital photos seems like it would be so easy, but it is so tedious. Actually, it is the 10% of photos that drives me up the wall. If I am going on a trip or to some sort of event, I'll take a lot of photos totally in context, and they are just fine. But usually before I start, there are already a few photos on the memory card -- food, a picture taken out my window, an odd sight I came across -- and even mixed in with the main set of photos, there might be a manhole cover, a bee on a flower, a reflection, some interesting graffiti... It is a real pain to go back through all of the files later and try to sort things out.
Is anybody out there super well organized and willing to share an easy and fast technique?
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Post by mossie on Aug 6, 2013 14:33:31 GMT
Kerouac, you have asked a question the answer to which I have sought for years.
Let us hope there is someone out there who knows.
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Post by htmb on Aug 6, 2013 15:26:42 GMT
Here are just some random musings about what i do:
For me, it's all about files folders, labels/names, and sorting by date. So, my trip to France 2008 file, which doesn't included all that many photos, is labeled as such and all photos are in that file folder.
My trip this summer covered three cities. I took five memory cards and used one for each city. The cards were large capacity, but I was concerned about losing my camera with all my photos. Each card was formatted before the trip, and photos from each city are now stored into one file apiece, with the name, and date of the city: London2013, etc.
I also have an "assorted" file where I drag misc photos and a "sunsets" file. That type of thing. I should probably create a "bad attempts at photographing bees" file, but i keep deleting those pictures.
Certainly something that's really kept me organized lately are my file folders in Flickr. Each set of photos I upload is put into a thematic group. Basically, photos in each thread I've posted have been grouped so I have files such as: Paynes Prairie, Spain & Portugal, Ichetucknee Tubing, Cedar Key. If I were to go back to Cedar Key in the fall of 2013 I would probably create a "Cedar Key fall 2013" file.
The problem comes into play when you want to put smaller groupings together.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 7, 2013 7:29:03 GMT
I don't think there is one. The key is consistency and finding something simple to repeat, so that you can get into the habit of doing it regularly.
I don't know what system you use, but I always use Windows Explorer to manage file moving and storage rather than the camera-based software. That way WE shows me the date and time the picture was taken (or last modified - it might help to save the cropped/finished images under a variant title), which helps to identify those odd shots you mention.
Then, it's just a matter of moving the files into whatever structure of folders seems meaningful and sustainable to you (so, e.g., I might have "London" or "Family" as a top-level folder, and then within that individual folders for specific events or localities). Usually, I'll set that up for something specific within a day or two of taking the photos - if I'm travelling, I'll do it every evening on my netbook, transferring the best to Flickr as I go (which is as close as I come to labelling what's in any single photo) and everything to my desktop PC when I get home.
That way, there's always a back-up somewhere, even if I don't clear the camera memory card (s) that often.
Even then, don't forget to back them up to an external hard drive or something similar; that saved me once when I found that somehow I'd corrupted a large batch of largely family photographs (probably by pulling a pen drive out of the socket too fast). I could see that the files contained data, but the internal file markers that enable programs to read a file as an image had gone. For the best part of a year, I occasionally puzzled over whether there was a technical solution, consulting technical experts at work and so on, until I remembered that my external hard drive automatically stored successive versions of files - so all I had to do was track down an earlier version of the corrupted files and over-write that back on top of the corrupted versions. Duh.
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