Organising Photos

DPinBucks

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Can I ask how you organise your photos? I'm looking for ideas, because no method I can think of seems ideal.

Background: I've started the long process of digitising 2,000+ slides & negatives from the
film era. Add this to my digital archives, and I'll have well over 5,000 pics to deal with.

Clearly, I don't need them all, especially most of the old stuff, but I'm going to end up with lots of sets of 1 or 2 pictures as mementos of past events (mostly people, I guess).

I currently organise simply by Windows Folders under date & "event", eg 2018-09 Barcelona, but I'm going to get too many with just one or two pictures in each.

So what do you do? How do you sort them? Do you use tags or other metadata to help? Do you use any 3rd party software? I hate the current Windows 10 system, but I do have Photoshop Organizer, which is a bit clunky to my mind. What about using shortcuts to allow multiple filing without multiple copies?

I've got to be ruthless about throwing away old stuff, too.

Ideas welcome; many thanks.

Mods: Please move to photography thread if you think it should be there.
 
Google Photos.

I just create local folder for stuff like holidays or large groups but otherwise everything in one folder.

Automatically uploaded to Google Photos. Again, in Photos, I add photos to albums for key stuff, but otherwise let Google's search handle everything.

Photos can belong to multiple albums which is nice which you cant do with Windows folders.

Google Photo uses voodoo magic to identify what the photos are so you can just type in , "food", or "beach", and it automatically finds photos containing those things.

Also does face recognition.
 
I do what I've been doing since 2001 when I started with a digital camera (and some 90k+ photos..)

folders of the year, then sub folders of the event / place and date..i.e.
2001
Berwick 25_06_2001
..
2002
Copenhagen 03-10_07_2002
..

works for me, the only pain is if I have a lot photos from a large SD card...but then only takes 1/2 hour to sort out :)
 
Photo management workflows. What works best is what works for you. I hate using folders on drives, the meta data is what makes photo organisation useful so that you find stuff back, be it location, people, type of events, what ever the criteria is.

So for me it’s key to load them in a DAM. I used to use Apple Aperture it was superb at not only non destructive raw editing but second to none at organisation. I tried Adobe Photoshop for a bit but don’t like the way they approach it at all. To many actions required to get what you want.

But since raw supper is now properly sorted, and as are plugins. I now use Apple Photos together with Affinity Photo and Pixelmater.

Whilst I create some virtual album structures the majority is automatic and tagged and searchable.
 
upload_2019-1-15_17-5-17.png


Some sub directories, but life's too short for labelling each pic and event. All backed up to M$ cloud.
 
I currently use Picassa 3 and then upload to Google Drive. However, Google have ditched support for it and I am being urged to use Google Photos. I did try using Google photos but I then ended up with duplicate albums as a lot of them had already been uploaded from Picassa.

I've tried Adobe Lightroom but I struggle with the interface and don't understand the way it works. I've tried a couple of times but as I don't really 'use' it, I then forget what I'm supposed to do.

So usually, I import my photos from my camera into Picassa and then create an event folder - Kids Birthday 2018, Florida 2018 etc and then have Picassa Batch rename the individual files Kids Birthday 2018 - 01 etc.
 
OK, thanks, guys.

It seems that what I'm already doing is as good as any. That is, like @reiteration and @ruffage I use folders for each year, and Event within that. The only problem is that it leaves lots of unclassifiable pictures hanging, as it were.

I'm going to experiment with 'People, Places and Things' as another catch-all, plus a ruthless culling. I really don't need 20-year-old shots of places I've visited since; nor do I need more than one, if even that, to remind me what people looked like then.

I'm also having another go at using Organizer to help me create tags. I tried writing my own program to edit metadata but decided life's too short to get it to work properly, and I can't find a decent freeware app which allows bulk updating. If you're aware of one, I'd be grateful if you'd point me at it.
 
We take around 13K photos a year. Organisation = a script which sorts into year/month - which is not great but does the job for zero effort. Backed up to multiple places on- and off-site.
 

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