General photo management

[*Babs]

How do folks manage ALL their photos?! (I.E not just "proper" photos, but snaps and family pics too)

I've had a major reorganisation and labelling session [/nerd] and I have loads of CDs and DVDs of photo backups (called imaginatively things like "Photo backup 1" ... "Photo backup" ... "Photo backup [random date]" ... and so on).

Most of these are in my pre-tog days and are general family snaps and so on.

Is it worth spending the time and organising them using something like Picasa to tag faces, places, dates, etc. Or am I better keeping them all on media like I have.

I just feel it's all a bit disorganised at the moment. Any thoughts??

 

[SimonUK]

I stopped using Lightroom and other stuff, just because alot of the time, i pull picutres off my camera, that are randoms bits or stuff and i was just playing with. I just create a new folder for the Subject. Like i have a Folder Name'd Street-and Subfolders that are by place eg-'Caversham', 'Reading', 'Oxford', 'Goring'. Etc.

If it were me i'd just make a folder for say-Christmas's, and Birthdays and stuff like that. Then Subfolder for the Event eg.- Matt's 1st Birthday, or Christmas at Pauls 09'

Hopefully that makes some sense and helps!

 

[neil_g]

to be honest i got a bit lazy since i started using lightroom..

these days i just have a personal and work folder on my NAS and then everything goes in there in a folder titled content - date

it then gets copied to a USB hard drive and taken offsite.

it also gets burned to Blu-Ray and taken offsite.

call me paranoid..

 

[maninsuitcase]

I spent about 4-5 hours last month pulling all my old photos (going back to 2003 when I got my 1st digi) out of iPhoto and into Lightroom as I got fed up of having a workplace for DSLR stuff and then everything in iPhoto as well.

Just seemed stupid having a lot of cross over where the new SLR stuff was exported as jpg only to be imported into iPhoto. Once I am happy I didn't miss anything I'll delete my iPhoto catalogue and reclaim about 9GB of space. Net gain will be about 4-5GB as iPhoto creates lots of copies when you do even simple stuff like rotate an image.

 

[happy haggis]

I suppose it depends on how important the photos are to you. Are you likely to want to find specific images at some time in the future? If you are then it may be worth taking time out on wet and miserable days to catalogue them. Gradually chip away at it, one DVD/CD at a time.

 

[casts_by_fly]

When I imported my library from iphoto to aperture I roughly characterized the photos into projects. Since everything was sorted by date during the import, it made it easy. I went through and tagged a few faces, then told it to auto apply faces a few times for any important people. It has learned well enough now. Going forward I will tag new pictures, and every so often run an auto faces so that it can use what it has learned to go backwards into the old photos. Occasionally it brings up some new ones.

For family 'snaps' i treat anything new just like everything else. It is imported into a project and the files left raw. Anything junk is deleted, anything with potential is worked up a bit and rated/tagged/filed into a specials type folder. The rest are left in the project to be kept as snapshots. I guess if I really needed some space I could conver all of the snapshots from Raw to JPEG and save 90% of the space.

Thanks,
Rick

 

[Ian W]

I spent about 4-5 hours last month pulling all my old photos (going back to 2003 when I got my 1st digi) out of iPhoto and into Lightroom as I got fed up of having a workplace for DSLR stuff and then everything in iPhoto as well.

Just seemed stupid having a lot of cross over where the new SLR stuff was exported as jpg only to be imported into iPhoto. Once I am happy I didn't miss anything I'll delete my iPhoto catalogue and reclaim about 9GB of space. Net gain will be about 4-5GB as iPhoto creates lots of copies when you do even simple stuff like rotate an image.

I really need to do this! Have all my photos (and edits) in iPhoto but also use PSE and Bridge. I don't have Lightroom, however could I use Bridge to organise instead of iPhoto?

If so, what's the best way to go about it?

Sorry for the hijack OP

 

[Craikeybaby]

Everything goes into Lightroom (separate catalogues for work and personal stuff). Before I got Lightroom all of my photos (mainly snaps) were organised in a file structure so I've just left them like that.

Ian W - Yes, you could use Bridge instead of iPhoto for organising your images, it's just down to personal preference.

 

[zigzag]

I organise into folders but dont bother with tags/labels etc, but then Ive got a good memory and can usually remember where/when an image was taken so dont need the tags to find it.

Oh and back up everything a few times, better safe than sorry, storage is cheap.

 

[milspec78]

I too organise into folders, they sit in 2 main folders basically new and old. Periodically move chunks from the new to old folder. Means i have all the most recent stuff to hand and can find stuff fast! Oh and 2 backups, 1 offsite.