I am doing a Entemoligy profile of the Blackdown Common here in Devon and need
someone to advise me on a photo storage facility for the species ,sub species and colour
variations l record. I am not IT experienced but a species can have many variations and they
in turn again can split into types with storage of photos of those needed at the end.
I hope someone understands and can advise a relatively simple system.
Thank you.
Are you looking for online storage or organising photos on your PC?
In either case, there are a couple of basic approaches I can think of (which could be combined).
The first is to arrange the photos in a hierarchy of folders. This would be easy to do on your PC with something like Faststone Image Viewer (which is free).
Using a simple hierarchy will of course only work if for your purposes the photos can be be split up into progressively finer subdivisions, like you have described.
An alternative is to keep all the photos in a single folder and use keywords. You would give each photo a keyword for species, sub species etc. You can then search on the keywords to find what you need for any particular purpose. This sort of approach is good if the photos don't fit into a simple hierarchy. I can see keywords being fine for species and sub species, but I imagine you might have trouble thinking up names for each colour variation and then for the subdivisions of each colour variation.
At this stage your requirements sound more like a hierarchy to me. If that is the case there is one thing you need to be aware of. You would be using an arrangement like this
species 1
sub species 1a
colour variation 1
variation 1 with 2 spots
variation 1 with 3 spots
variation 1 with green splodge
colour variation 2
colour variation 3
sub species 1b
colour variation 1
colour variation 2
species 2
sub species 2a
etc
Will all the photos be going into the "terminal nodes"? (shown below with **)
Or will you want to put some photos further up? (shown below with <<)
species 1 <<
sub species 1a <<
colour variation 1 <<
variation 1 with 2 spots **
variation 1 with 3 spots **
variation 1 with green splodge **
colour variation 2 **
colour variation 3 **
sub species 1b <<
colour variation 1 **
colour variation 2 <<
variation 2 with missing blue circle <<
variation 2 with missing blue circle found in muddy conditions**
species 2 <<
sub species 2a **
etc
If you need to put some photos in the further up nodes (<<) as well as having others in the terminal nodes (**) you obviously need to use something that lets you do this. For example, I don't think Flickr will let you do this.
It also needs to be easy to move photos between nodes and create new nodes beneath an existing one so as to split it up into variation, sub-variations etc.
If the photos fit mostly into a hierarchy but there are some exceptions or special cases or attributes that don't fit into the hierarchy you might use a hierarchy but add keywords to the exceptions.
What will make any of this easier for you may depend on exactly what it is you may need to do, and how much flexibility you will need to cope with classifications you haven't thought of yet.
