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Organising your digital photographs?

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sandbender

sandbender

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Nov 29, 2004
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Having just spent a quite frustrating twenty odd hours rescuing my digital photographs from the clutches of Apple's Aperture 3 photo management program I am now looking at some of the alternatives, Lightroom? Picasa?

What do people use, or is anyone really that organised? Do folks just dump all there images into a bunch of folders on their PC and hope for the best? :)

Thanks for reading, any advice would be appreciated.

Edited to Add:

I have over one hundred gigabytes of digital images (ish).
 
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I am a dump and run kind of guy!

Well I date the folder(new folder for each trip\event\set) and have a word file with dates and locations in, when I get to 6GB of pics i burn to disc(x2) and file, then delete the stored pics,

this is because I lost a few:rolleyes: pics from our old comp when it died after ingesting an unexpected pint of Guinness:cool:
 
Dump and forget. Seriously I rarely look at them again once they get to my laptop. I only use my galaxy s2 (8MP camera which is pretty decent really for a phone) and I might look at the ones on that. Then every so often I clear them off the phone onto my laptop and it is like a black hole. I think I should do what you are and organize them but I'm lazy and can't remember where a lot of them were.

Also I have a good memory for places and events so TBH I use my memory for the images and the photos are just MBs of electronic noise. However I do like taking photos which is weird I know. For me it is the taking of photos and the doing of activities that is more important for me than the image produced. It is a long time since photography interested me. Not since my old Minolta S3000s 35mm film SLR died has photography interested me.

Having said that I find picassa is good. A lot of friends send me links to their albums of trips we've done. Cloud is the way I think with other back-up if the images are important to you. I also have a picassa account but have forgotten the password.
 
Back up; back up; back up. 3 sets (1 of which is remote/offsite). Most people only care when they've lost their only set of digital photos, then they wish they'd been bothered.
 
I dump them all in folders on a 1Tb external HD, eventually copying them to disc too when I get round to it.

I've lost some great piccies on PCs when Windows has gone pear shaped
 
Hi there
I dump my photos onto my PC in a folder and copy that to a hard drive so I've got 2 copies. I use a free programme called Infanview to edit, and select my photos which can be opened in Photoshop via Infranview for further editing.
I did try Adobe Bridge, but found it less user friendly than the freeware.

cheers
Gareth
 
Shewie said:
... I've lost some great piccies on PCs when Windows has gone pear shaped
Click to expand...

It might be too late now, but the pictures probably weren't lost because of Windows going pear shaped. Most Windows foul-ups don't result in damage to the file system serious enough to cause data loss, but you need to know how to recover. It's usually very easy, at worst mounting the disc on a Linux box will usually allow reading the filesystem directly. If it happens again let me know.

To answer the OP, my wife wrote a nifty little database app which not only catalogues the photos by subject/title/date/whatever it also pops up a random 'picture of the day' on our intranet. You can click on the image to take you to the series of photos from which the picture of the day is taken. So we see them all the time. There's even a 'show me another picture of the day' button for if it's a picture of some concrete or something. (There are lots of those, don't ask.) Sorry, Linux only. :)

As for backup, we have at least three copies of everything on machines in three different buildings (in two different countries). Over the years we've had several discs die, but never lost anything.
 
ged said:
It might be too late now, but the pictures probably weren't lost because of Windows going pear shaped. Most Windows foul-ups don't result in damage to the file system serious enough to cause data loss, but you need to know how to recover. It's usually very easy, at worst mounting the disc on a Linux box will usually allow reading the filesystem directly. If it happens again let me know.
Click to expand...

I was talking about my 2mp piccies on Win 95 machines mate, long before backup options went domestic and before I really knew what I was doing, all's good now though :)
 
Lots of good suggestions here, I will look into the various bits of software mentioned, thanks all.

I have used Picasa for work photos, the fact that it is free is quite attractive.

Putting my images into a hierarchy of folders and using a program like Lightroom or Picasa to browse and sort them seems like the way to go.

Although Apple's Aperture program can work this way, its default behaviour is to move and store your images within a single file, your 'Aperture Library'. Although it is possible to look inside that file to find your images an automated system for doing so would be hopelessly confused by the many versions and preview images stored in there too.

This would be fine if Aperture was your program of choice and you were happy using it. However having downloaded a free preview version of Aperture 3, I found that the program would constantly crash while attempting to upgrade my 'Library' to a format the newer program would use, did that corrupt any of the original images? Who knows, I have too many images to check.

What was more of a problem was that even though I had the original library file backed up I was now unable to reinstall the older version of the program!

Aperture 2 users beware!

:)
 
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Cool, i use something very similar, save the original raw files form the card and save by date, then have subfolders within for jpegs or whathave you.

I should make mare effort with key words! I can see the advantages!

Drew
 
I have Lightroom but don't use it for this.

Picassa is a bit like Windows 7 libraries in that it catalogues the location of the images and for this reason I don't use/like it.
I use FastStone Image viewer and put them on hard drive in /Home(or Work)/Year/Month/Subject file structure. It's then automatically backed up to seperate hard drive with no intervention from me.

This has worked well for several years for home and my photography business.
 
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