File Management and Organization

wolfnature

Hello Everyone.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>First off, I will openly admit that I don’t have a real defined workflow, and am now in the process of determining that. The first thing I want to set is file management and organization. I know there are a number of different programs for handling that and wanted to find out some opinions. Currently my file management and organization is simply creating folders on the hard drive for each event.

<o:p></o:p>The main thing I am interested in is finding a program that will allow me to quickly look at each picture and tag them as I go. As an example, I do a lot of hockey photography for my son’s team. It is not uncommon for me to come home after a game with 200-300 pictures. In the interest of time management I would like to be able to go through them quickly and pull out the good ones. But the other thing I would like to be able to do is to tag each photo, or use a keyword, with the players name. Is there a program that would allow me to do that quickly as I view each picture?

<o:p></o:p>I apologize if this seems a bit basic, but I haven’t really used much of the photo software that is out there.

RobSylvan

You might try a 30 day trial of Lightroom 3 and see how that works for you. Here are some good getting started tutorials.

wolfnature

pathfinder wrote: »

Please do not use black fonts, is is very hard for your readers to read on the standard dark grey background....

I didn't do anything to change the fonts, so I didn't realize that I was using black. I have changed it to white.

Snowgirl

Or, if you use a MAC, Aperture 3 also has an excellent cataloging system. I came home from a dressage (horse) show this week-end with 1000+ images and had them all sorted, keyworded and rated in short order.

arodney

I’ll second the suggestion of checking out Lightroom.

wolfnature

Lightroom is certainly a program I intend to look at, as I have seen it mentioned a number of times on here. Admittedly, I haven't really looked at it yet, and don't know much about it, but I had thought it was just a photo editing program.

If I am using it to organize photos is there a way to select and then copy files that I have tagged? For example, if I go through and tag all the pictures with the different player names can I then select all the pictures of "Bob" and copy them into a new folder for seperate editing?

Thanks for the reccomendations. I plan to take a closer look at Lightroom soon.

divamum

Have you checked out Picasa? It isn't nearly as powerful an editor as LR or Aperture, but it is a decent program and for free, you can't really beat it.... I don't know if it will let you tag and then separate, but it does catalog very nicely. I still use it for some things even though I have LR and Photoshop.

digismile

wolfnature wrote: »

Lightroom is certainly a program I intend to look at, as I have seen it mentioned a number of times on here. Admittedly, I haven't really looked at it yet, and don't know much about it, but I had thought it was just a photo editing program.

If I am using it to organize photos is there a way to select and then copy files that I have tagged? For example, if I go through and tag all the pictures with the different player names can I then select all the pictures of "Bob" and copy them into a new folder for seperate editing?

Thanks for the reccomendations. I plan to take a closer look at Lightroom soon.

Yes, if that's what you really want to do.

However, Lightroom gives you the ability to work with "smart collections". They let you work with files as if they are a group within the same folder, but let you leave the original and copy in the original folders (essentially a "virtual" folder). The original and copy(ies) can be "stacked" together, so you see the versions as a group.

You might have several photos of "Bob" over several weeks, and you don't need to move them from their original locations to work with the entire "Bob" set.

Smart collections are one of the most powerful features of LR.

Definitely have a look.

BradfordBenn

From your description Lightroom sounds like a perfect fit. I have been using it since version 1 and have been very happy with it. I originally got it just for the cataloging and organization features as I already had Photoshop. Now I am spending far more time in Lightroom and the features in it work great to be a tool that saves me time, not a time sucker. To be able to come back and quickly review the images and also to do some group keywording as well as batch developing is a huge speed help. It does a really good job of allowing for group controls and individual controls, so you can work with a shoot or a shot.

MomaZunk

If you want to start out with a cheaper option than Lightroom, you might take a look at Photoshop Elements. It will do the cataloging and does simplified editing but at a cheaper price than Lightroom.

I am looking to test Lightroom shortly for the batch processing and interface with smugmug.

ThatCanonGuy

My method is REALLY basic, but it's also free.
I tag my photos in Windows Explorer(using Windows Vista), then sort them by tag and copy them to a separate folder for each tag. I'm sure Lightroom's easier, but then again it also costs a lot.

My method works for me (I shoot sports too:D) because once I have edited all my photos from the game, I COPY them to another folder, tag them with the player's name, and make a folder for each player. After each game, I dump the photos by tag into these folders. Now I have the photos sorted by game and by player

CatOne

ThatCanonGuy wrote: »

My method is REALLY basic, but it's also free.
I tag my photos in Windows Explorer(using Windows Vista), then sort them by tag and copy them to a separate folder for each tag. I'm sure Lightroom's easier, but then again it also costs a lot.

My method works for me (I shoot sports too:D) because once I have edited all my photos from the game, I COPY them to another folder, tag them with the player's name, and make a folder for each player. After each game, I dump the photos by tag into these folders. Now I have the photos sorted by game and by player

So you have TWO copies of each photo now? What if you want to add another sorting scheme… have THREE copies?

That's a messy system. To save $300… meh. My time's worth way more than the effort to organize and back up that way, especially when you're limited to two keywords per photo.

ablichter

I use IMatch since 2004. Its just to powerful to describe all its features here - you might give the trial a go.

ablichter

CatOne wrote: »

So you have TWO copies of each photo now? What if you want to add another sorting scheme… have THREE copies?

That's a messy system. To save $300… meh. My time's worth way more than the effort to organize and back up that way, especially when you're limited to two keywords per photo.

100% agree to CatOne.

Relying on speaking folder- and filenames has nothing to do with an intelligent filemanagement. Do people find your images by filenames in Google, Smugmug or Flickr? For sure not.
Better go away from those limited explorer or finder filemanagement and sort schemas f.e explorer offers.

What if you don't have to care about folder- and imagenames anymore and where the images are located?
Just being able to throw your image in one folder (well, for performance reason we don't want to have more than 10.000 files in one folder, but...), tag them by keywords or categories and being able to search for "player1" AND "player2" AND "2008" AND "beach".
Guess you won't be able to get some results with your way of doing so within seconds.

MarkR

wolfnature wrote: »

I didn't do anything to change the fonts, so I didn't realize that I was using black. I have changed it to white.

Those of us who use the "Whitewash" view for dgrin can't see white on white. Best to use what the forum defaults to. It will automagically correct based on gallery view.

ThatCanonGuy

ablichter wrote: »

100% agree to CatOne.

Relying on speaking folder- and filenames has nothing to do with an intelligent filemanagement. Do people find your images by filenames in Google, Smugmug or Flickr? For sure not.
Better go away from those limited explorer or finder filemanagement and sort schemas f.e explorer offers.

What if you don't have to care about folder- and imagenames anymore and where the images are located?
Just being able to throw your image in one folder (well, for performance reason we don't want to have more than 10.000 files in one folder, but...), tag them by keywords or categories and being able to search for "player1" AND "player2" AND "2008" AND "beach".
Guess you won't be able to get some results with your way of doing so within seconds.

Yes, I can't categorize them very well, just by player. Never used LR, how does the organization work? Do you give files keywords like "player1" and "2008" and then just search "player1" when you want all the photos of player1? I don't know just how much faster LR is for categorizing and finding images. If it's that much faster maybe I should just try it.

BradfordBenn

ThatCanonGuy wrote: »

Yes, I can't categorize them very well, just by player. Never used LR, how does the organization work? Do you give files keywords like "player1" and "2008" and then just search "player1" when you want all the photos of player1? I don't know just how much faster LR is for categorizing and finding images. If it's that much faster maybe I should just try it.

You have it. A file can have multiple keywords embedded in it, and it also has the date information in there already. So it is faster for categorizing many things. Using the "Paint Keywords" tool I literally go to the grid view, type in the keyword I want, click on the images I want to apply it to, enter next keyword, do the same... when I am in the zone I can get through about 400 pics in about 30 minutes - depending on the number of keywords and names I want to add etc. And since one file can have multiple keywords you could assign the same file multiple keywords, such as: Player Name, Player Number, Team. If you also file in the location you can get really cool stuff going. Also on import you can have some of the metadata (location and keywords) preloaded. So that you don't have to assign the tournament name to all the images for instance.

Lightroom is actually creating a database of all this information as well as writing it to the files, it can very quickly find the results for you. And the cool thing is that you can use tools like Smart Collections to have Lightroom do some of the queries for you already. So if you just want a quick collection for a certain player on a certain team you can set up a rule to always look for those and place them into that Smart Collection and it will update on the fly. I know that the people at the office when they need to find pictures of a project (photography is an avocation for me) and I can look through 40K images from the past 10 years in about 30 seconds through the keyword search features.

They have a free 30 day trial of Lightroom so it won't cost you anything to try it. I am hooked on it for a tool to catalog images and even do processing in - with such great tools as batch processing to apply the same develop settings to multiple images.

colourbox

wolfnature wrote: »

If I am using it to organize photos is there a way to select and then copy files that I have tagged? For example, if I go through and tag all the pictures with the different player names can I then select all the pictures of "Bob"

Lightroom gives you multiple ways to do this. Any of the following will result in you seeing only the photos tagged "Bob".

• Type "Bob" into Find
• Display the "Keyword List" and click "Bob"
• Use the Filter Bar, make Keyword the criterion, and click keyword Bob
• Create a Smart Collection with the "Bob" tag as the criterion

Of course each of those is useful in different ways depending on what you need at the time.

The same flexibility applies to applying keywords in the first place. Some people like to click around with the Painter tool, I like to type them in (Lightroom has auto-complete). I also to use the keyboard shortcuts for the last 9 Recent Keywords so if I just typed a keyword "Extremely Long Keyword", then if the next photo has the same in it I just hit two keys and it's applied.

wolfnature wrote: »

and copy them into a new folder for seperate editing?

Depending on why you're doing that, you might not have to copy them at all. You can have "virtual copies" that have different edits but are just shortcuts to the original and take up no additional disk space until you export. And you can have "collections" which are virtual folders full of shortcuts to originals so you can have multiple groupings with only a single set of real images. So if you want to make a collection of "All-Stars" you don't have to make copies of those players' images just to work with them as a set. These really cut down on the consumption of disk space.