Cataloging photographs
 

I went to a talk at my local camera club on Digital workflow using Elements this week and the speaker was discussing how he managed his photographs. I think the key points he made were that

• Name all photographs YYYYMMDD-name
• Use Lightroom for the cataloging (better than Bridge)
• Provide meaningful and consistent key words

My method is to create a folder of shots such as Holiday 2008, drop them all in there and use Picassa to view them. As I aim to start taking more photographs in the future I thought now might be a good time to start with a 'proper' system.

I have CS2 that includes Bridge and wonder what others do.

Searching the forum the only relevant thread I can find is on backing up images

Any thoughts and experiences greatly appreciated. Suggestions might cover

• keyword usage - how many, how deep (art or paintings,sculpture for example)
• Storing of raw and processed files
• Interim or staging areas

Having had no response to a subject which I thought was quite interesting to many photographers, I will ask a supplementary question.

If using Bridge how do you label a photograph. I see two possibilities, file info and label. Label just provides a set of colours so I assume the idea is to colour code photographs, sport yellow, landscape red etc.
File info provides options for key words which I suppose is the way to go.

Any help appreciated

I use bridge and do a batch rename with Text, Date Time- date created dd/mm/yy, sequence number. in that order.

I have a temporary folder which I use to upload to bridge, once I have finished sorting, editing, trashing I then batch rename.

I have folders on my spare drive, ranging from birds, misc, plants lots of categories with year folder in each section. I then copy the photos into the various areas for that year.

I use lightroom for almost my entire workflow. When importing, I file by date, which creates separate dated files, and back up the files to a separate location at the same time. (There is an option box for this). I then key word each image.
My key wording system has evolved with use, which is very easy in LR. You can add new sub-categories to a key word, or move an existing key word into another as a subcategory. By using several key words to describe an image, it is easy to give your searches flexibility. (Eg 'flight' may be applied to birds insects and planes in the air, but if I want a picture of a flying bee, then I search for 'flight' and 'insect>bee' together)
I use the colour labels as a marker for how much work I have done on an image. So if it's coded red, then I have done a satisfactory print, yellow means I havent got the final print yet but all the major adjustments are done etc. Star ratings are self-explanatory - I use them to help with the initial sorting into keepers and bins. Following import, I review all the images, star rate them and then sort them according to rating. It is then very simple to select the duds and delete as a batch.
The one thing I might need to start doing now though is batch renaming. Until this summer, my camera was generating unique file names, but I have now clocked it, so I am getting some duplicate file names amongst the keepers. This isnt a problem so far as they are all in their dated files, but if I happen to export two with the same name from LR (which keeps them in their original location) to another application I could end up with confusion.

I upload all my pictures from a particular session into a general "dumping ground" folder. I sort through these and delete the obvious dross. I then look through them a lot more critically and delete the less obvious dross; I may do a third pass to filter more rubbish. When I'm happy that I'm down to the last few images worth keeping, I'll create an appropriately titled folder/sub-folder under "My Pictures" and move the remnants into there. A good filing system does not have a "miscellaneous" section. I have some folders with only one or two images in. Be detailed in your folder naming system and you'll be able to find things again. I don't bother renaming files at all, or tagging with keywords, I simply rely on a detailed folder naming structure. This works for me, your mileage may vary.

Duncan

I've not found a decent cataloging program. Whilst they all seem to record the crap details that is of no interest asa/shutter, focal length, etc, none of them can answer simple queries like "Find all the photos of beetles in Northamptonshire", well perhaps they can but the UI to input the required tagging data is hopelessly cumbersome, and they all mostly fall down unless you have the entire collection available. IOW they won't work if you've off loaded the data to DVD or an external HD.

The compromise I have is to have a file naming (location date - nnn) and folder scheme

year

month

location - date

final

that allows me to manually locate the file, I then upload a downsized 1024-1200 px version to flickr. Then I do the tagging and searching in flickr. Of course it means that I've got to keep a paid account on flickr but its the best solution I've found so far.

EDIT: Also you can't have enough tags. You need to be able to add extra ones at any time, and you'll want to be able to add general and specific ones, you need to be able batch tag across photos in several locations. Most programs fall down on tagging. In one program for example you couldn't take a folder photos and add the tag 'northamptonshire' and then select a subgroup of the photos and add 'diptera' without it removing the previously added 'northamptonshire' tag. Another program wouldn't let you add the tags 'northamptonshire' and 'diptera' at the same time you ended up with the tag 'northamptonshire diptera' or 'northamponshire, diptera' and as consequence it wouldn't find either.

You'll notice in the last paragraph I misspelled 'northamptonshire'. It is very easy to do that and sometimes you won't notice for several weeks. So its useful to be able to obtain a list of your tags spot the mistakes and correct them globally.

A cataloging program (IMatch) http://www.photools.com/. That I have been using for many years is the best I have seen. It is very flexably and has a very good user forum. Where you can get help and ideas on how to set up your catalog accourding to what you want.

Lightroom will do all the above and much more, I don't think you could find a better catalogue program anywhere. Even if you don't need the rest of the program (which is also outstanding in v2) Lightroom is a superb database and it doesn't take very long to import and sort your pictures.

Your query above would be simple, I don't need to type "find all photos of beetles in Northamptonshire" but simply type in "Northamptonshire, beetles".

I take many thousands of pictures of cyclists in different events throughout the year and I can honestly say it takes me seconds to find any image. Plus it can be set up so that images written to CD/DVD's (and external hard drives!) can also be catalogued, a feature I also use along with auto backing up my images when importing them.

Lightroom is indeed a very good program. But when it comes to cataloging your images a lot depends on your individually needs. That is why I use two programs (LR ver2 and IMatch). I don't know of one program that fits all the needs of every one.