software help - sorting 17,000 pictures

c670809

Let me first say, thank you for your help.

I've been taking pictures for a few years and now have about 17,000 pictures to deal with. I have them somewhat organized into folders but there are MANY pictures that are not needed. I will often take 20 pictures to get one I love. Through years of lazyness I now have a huge challange in front of me.

I want to narrow the pictures down to only the good ones before I upload them to smugmug. Many of them are of my daughter so just archiving them is not in the plans. I want her grandparents to be able to see them at anytime.

I've tried Picasa and Lightroom. I like them but there are things that seem to hold me back with each of them. I have not tried Picasa in about 1 year so maybe those things have changed.

If this were your project, how would you do it and what programs would you use.

Thanks again,
Matt

CatOne

I'd use Lightroom or Aperture for this. They do cataloging, sorting, picking, and a fair amount of editing.

Dave Clee

I have approx 9000 photos, mostly RAW and Lightroom does a real nice job of sorting them. I find it pretty easy to go thru 200 - 400 photos in a sitting and weed out the ones that can be deleted. From there its real easy to assign keywords and put them in collection folders...

17000 photos is alot but definitely possible. The one thing I did notice about LR is that it did not run very nice on my old P4 with a gig of RAM. But once I upgraded to a dual core box it seems to run real good.

Cheers

Dave

claudermilk

Again I'm asking this question: What OS are you running?

What you need for this task is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) application. I do not classify any of the previously mentioned apps in that category. Yep, they have some lightweight catalog functions, but IMHO you need a proper purpose-built app to do it right.

steveewells

My wife and i have over 300K photos on three cameras and we're using acdsee and Brease downloader pro for download.

few things we do:

1)All photos are downloaded into a folder we call camera images. The downloader appeands the shoot date/time on the folder name and we also append the camera model number to each file (example: 5dimg_1234 or 20dimg_1234) to prevent file name conflicts when we shoot two cameras the same day.

2) we then copy the files to our shared file folder (wife's computer is designated file server) into folder that make sense. (\headshots, \portraits, etc) and then the name of the person (ex: \headshots\wells, mary). we have several sub folders under that for the photoshop files, etc

3) we keep usb drives as offline backup. The reason for offline backup was that i was hacked 3-4 years back and the guy formatted all my hard drives. Had i used online backups, he would have crashed those as well. I'm not trusting the CD/DVD backup strat but that is another post.

acdsee is really nice in that it has a great quick search feature. If i type "mary" it searches all files, folders, and image tags with "mary" in it in 1-3 seconds and that is for 1/4 million images. love it.

---Steve

ziggy53

Picasa works great as an organizational tool for JPGs. It is not so good for RAW, but it can be used as part of a RAW workflow.

I use it for final straightening and cropping prior to deliverables, even with paying work.

c670809

claudermilk wrote:

Again I'm asking this question: What OS are you running?

What you need for this task is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) application. I do not classify any of the previously mentioned apps in that category. Yep, they have some lightweight catalog functions, but IMHO you need a proper purpose-built app to do it right.

OS= either XP or Vista.

Thanks for your help. I'm googleing Digital Asset Management now. I welcome your thoughts.
Matt

claudermilk

c670809 wrote:

OS= either XP or Vista.

Thanks for your help. I'm googleing Digital Asset Management now. I welcome your thoughts.
Matt

In that case I wholeheeartedly recommend IMatch. Run a search here for that & my username, you'll get a bunch of reading that should say it all--at least from my perspective.