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August 31, 2005

Organize Your Images

So now that you are shooting, and making backup copies of your photos for safe storage, how can you find that shot you took last year of Aunt Bettie at the farm.  Some people simply rename the image to reflect it's content, (Aunt Bettie at the farm.jpg).  This approach is both time consuming (having to rename every file) and will make finding the file more difficult (What did I name that file?). Other people like to put each individual subject in it's own folder. They may have a folder for Pics from the Farm and another folder for Aunt Bettie.  But which folder should the picture I mentioned earlier go.  The best way to get around this is to leverage today's software features. There are many pieces of software out there that have database and search capabilities. With them, you can assign  multiple tags, or keywords to an image, allowing the image to become part of several collections.  So, this image can now be tagged with both Aunt Bettie, and Pics from the Farm.  If you do a search in the software for Aunt Bettie, you can now find all images that share that tag. That same image will also show up in a search for Pics from the Farm.  This is also the premise that Flickr uses to display similiar shots from multiple people.

That takes care of how to find the image, how do you organize them.  The way that I do it is to organize my files by date. I use the date the photo was taken and place them in a folder for that date.  Is this the best way? It's the best way for me because I can then add tags to my photos to further identify them. I also find it makes backing them up easier as I don't have to search multiple folders for new files, I just backup those that I have created since my last backup. I know other people who have different systems that work well for them, so you will have to find what works best for you. You can also try a search for How I organize my digital photos and read what other people do.

Some products that offer tagging abilities along with a multitude of other features : Picasa (free), Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 or Adobe Album 2 (there is a free starter edition that will work fine for cataloguing your photos), ACDsee, ThumbsPlus, iPhoto.  For most of the products, you simply select one (or multiple images) and then assign the tags. Each product will be a little bit different, so check the help file.

Posted on August 31, 2005 03:06 PM | Permalink

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