Beginner Organising and savinf photos

[mayonline197211]

Hi,

Please you could help me with a photo organization query? I have 16000 photos and hundreds of short videos that I need to keep safe and tag. I want my tags to be saved to the photo itself so they are not dependent on a specific software or website. When I say tags, what I really mean is keywords, captions and a star rating. I am not too interested in what shutter speed or aperture I used.

I've been using Photoshop Elements for some time, but I find this slow and cumbersome and it crashes a lot.

The first choice I think I need to make is, do I store photos locally, or upload them to something like Flickr? There are pros and cons to online storage as far as I can see. It’s great that I wouldn't need to back up my photos to an external hard drive and that I could give my wife access to my account so she could see them on her laptop. However, I would imagine that Flickr and other similar sites use proprietary tags that couldn't be transferred (?) and the online method is likely to be slow when flicking through photos.

The other choice is to store my photos locally and use something like Picasa. This will however mean that I need to back my photo’s up to an external drive and sharing the photos with my wife would be more difficult (?). However, I could choose some software that allowed me to use tags that were software/platform independent and flicking through photos would be much quicker as they didn't need to downloaded each time I clicked on one.

May be there is a hybrid of the above two ideas? So I need some help please from you experts please as to the best solution for me?

Goals

• Move to better software/online storage for organizing shots than Photoshop Elements
• Ensure files are safe/backed up (either online or locally to external disc)
• Ensure I can change software/platform whenever I like with my tags still being intact
• Photos should be easily shareable, with the wife and also on Facebook

Also, with respect to tagging my photos (keywords, captions and a star ratings, NOT aperture/exposure etc) am I right in thinking the tags are saved to exif or IPTC?

As you can probably tell, I am a novice at all this and I’d really appreciate some help. What do you do?

Thank You
Paul

 

[JohnX]

When you talk about sharing I presume you'll both be in the same place at the same time? Home?

What about a NAS, with twin hdd's configured in RAID? Access it anywhere via your home network (with DDNS even away from home) plus the RAID will act as added security to ensure the photos don't get lost with a hdd crash. Only thing missing is off-site backup, but plenty of 'cloud' based services for that.

 

[abdoujaparov]

I use Adobe Lightroom to organise and tag my photos. Then I use a plugin to export them to Flickr - and Flickr honors the tags stored in the image file and shows them as its own clickable tags. This has the benefit (over uploading to Flickr, then tagging them) of allowing me to also export the images to other services (Google+ and Facebook, for example)

You could treat the Flickr uploads as your main image repository, or as a backup and also keep them on a local drive for local viewing.

 

[carlosb]

Personally I use Lightroom, find it perfect for organising pictures and allows you to separate your collections to how they're organised in actual folders, for example for a particular set I'll create a few sub-albums called unselected, selected, etc where I put all the pictures, the best ones I like and then can create different albums if there are enough topics (like a holiday). The only thing is it won't do the backup for you, so you still need to do that, either online with something like Crashplan or offline on an external drive.

If you use LR then you may want to make it store the metadata in XMP files rather than just the catalog, those are vendor independent.

Adobe does let you use its plug-ins for exporting directly to places like Flickr but I prefer to export the pictures and do the upload separately, after all I try to upload only the very best...