Indexing

grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
edited April 9, 2013 in Digital Darkroom
I am not sure this belongs here, but can't figure out any other place to put it.

How do you find a photo that you've taken on your computer? What type of indexing etc do you use?

Or are you just better at remembering what pictures you have taken? Or (which is hard to imagine) do you just have less photos than I do. (I have over 250,000 on my computer but some are duplicates from when my hard drive was replaced and I copied stuff from two different computers)

When I go to the Photo Association game, sometimes I can think of an association right away and know exactly where the photo is. But sometimes I can't figure out where I put the photo that I remember, and sometimes I think I have a photo that works, but have no idea when I took it or where I took it so I don't even know a general area to look.

Right now the pictures are organized by date taken. Dates for color photos between 1940 and 2013 because I am having my slides and my parents slides digitized. (My color photos only go back to 1958) There are also some black and white family photos going back farther than that, but most of them are corralled in a separate folder.
“"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”

Comments

  • mercphotomercphoto Registered Users Posts: 4,550 Major grins
    edited April 4, 2013
    Are you using Lightroom or Aperture? If not, time to start. :) Keywording and rating helps a lot with the type of task you are trying to do.

    And buy this book:
    http://www.amazon.com/DAM-Book-Digital-Management-Photographers/dp/0596523572/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365090458&sr=1-1&keywords=the+dam+book
    Bill Jurasz - Mercury Photography - Cedar Park, TX
    A former sports shooter
    Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
    My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
  • RichardRichard Administrators, Vanilla Admin Posts: 19,893 moderator
    edited April 4, 2013
    The only practical way to index a large volume of pics is to use a computer database. Lightroom and Aperture are popular choices here, though there are many others. The key to getting it to work is to assign keywords as a part of your normal processing workflow. Date, location (if your camera supplies GPS info), and camera information can be extracted automatically when you import the pics. Then, it is a simple matter to query on a combination of search terms, something like "all sculpture pics taken in Paris, 2005,' and select the one you want from the thumbnails the program shows.

    The bad news is that it's going to be a lot of work to enter keywords for such a large collection. Most programs will allow you to apply keywords to all of the pics in a given folder, so you don't have to do it one pic at a time. You can also do it little by little. Once you have imported a pic into the database, you should only change its directory location by using the database program, which needs to keep track of where things are stored.
  • grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
    edited April 4, 2013
    Thank you for the information. It sounds like indexing is going to be more trouble than just remembering and looking.

    I am not using any kind of indexing program at present.

    In the OLD days, my mother and I numbered each slide (more or less in the order taken) and wrote the numbers down in a book (most of which I stilll have) and then indexed into categories (sunset, river etc). Each category was assigned a number and each category had an 3x5 index card with al the slide numbers that were appropriate to that category on it. The category numbers were entered in the log book opposite each slide. The books had three columns - slide number in left hand column, description in the middle (which was also written on the slide along with the number of the slide), and categories in the right hand column. The picture was also rated for quality (E, VG, G, F, P).

    This was a lot of work, and after my dad died, this system fell into abeyance. My parents only got up to about 10,000 and there were some boxes of slides taken before my dad died that aren't numbered and listed and are only loosely organized and some that my mother took after he died on trips that don't even have that. I also didn't do much of this after about 1973 (which was when my dad died).

    On my mother's birthday one year (probably 1997 or thereabouts), we took a hotel room in Annapolis and took a projector and the slides down to the hotel room and my mother and my sister and I went through the slides and threw out the ones that were Poor or Fair and the duplicates (many photos of sunsets).

    The slides were kept in Baja boxes, and as I've had them digitized, I'm selling off the boxes. I have five for sale now on eBay if anyone wants any of them ($8.99 each with free mailing). I've given away boxes of slides - I just gave away a big box (one of those big metal boxes that hold about 600 slides) of mother's trip to India in the 80's and I still have and want to get ride of the box of slides that has the trip to Moscow c 1972. I have no intention of going to India or Moscow so I don't need to have those pictures digitized. (I've taken all the pictures of my parents out before I give them away.) After my dad died my mother took thousands of slides of iris (she was a judge and had an iris named for her), and I've sent boxes and boxes of those to the American Iris Society including one of those big metal boxes of slides I took of iris.

    My digital photos and those I've had digitized are in folders and sub-folders by date. Folder for year, sub-folder for quarter (Winter, Spring, Summer Fall) each subfolder by month, and each month by date. I label the sub sub sub folders with a title that tells me where I was or what I was doing on that date. The problem with the digitized ones is that I still have to match them up with the numbers in the books. I think before I go and buy an indexing program, I'd better figure out what I have.

    Basically I don't need to know the information on the exif data - I can find things already by date taken and if I jog my memory I can find the place taken. And if it is family members I have a location for them. I want to have things like - photo of a market, photo of stairs, etc.
    “"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
  • grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
    edited April 6, 2013
    I just went looking for a print that I have had digitized - I KNEW I had the photo. But since I haven't completely organized the prints I have had scanned, it took me an hour to find it.

    And of course if I did not remember the photo, I would not have looked.

    I am selling stuff on eBay, and I was selling a Key West Hand Print shirt that my son wore - I knew I had a photo of him wearing it, and I did.

    77101_10200502460957735_1989888272_a.jpg
    “"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
  • ziggy53ziggy53 Super Moderators Posts: 23,765 moderator
    edited April 6, 2013
    grandmaR wrote: »
    ... How do you find a photo that you've taken on your computer? What type of indexing etc do you use?

    ... (I have over 250,000 on my computer but some are duplicates from when my hard drive was replaced and I copied stuff from two different computers)

    When I go to the Photo Association game, sometimes I can think of an association right away and know exactly where the photo is. But sometimes I can't figure out where I put the photo that I remember, and sometimes I think I have a photo that works, but have no idea when I took it or where I took it so I don't even know a general area to look.

    Right now the pictures are organized by date taken. Dates for color photos between 1940 and 2013 because I am having my slides and my parents slides digitized. (My color photos only go back to 1958) There are also some black and white family photos going back farther than that, but most of them are corralled in a separate folder.
    grandmaR wrote: »
    ... I am not using any kind of indexing program at present.

    ... My digital photos and those I've had digitized are in folders and sub-folders by date. Folder for year, sub-folder for quarter (Winter, Spring, Summer Fall) each subfolder by month, and each month by date. I label the sub sub sub folders with a title that tells me where I was or what I was doing on that date. The problem with the digitized ones is that I still have to match them up with the numbers in the books. I think before I go and buy an indexing program, I'd better figure out what I have.

    ... I want to have things like - photo of a market, photo of stairs, etc.
    grandmaR wrote: »
    I just went looking for a print that I have had digitized - I KNEW I had the photo. But since I haven't completely organized the prints I have had scanned, it took me an hour to find it.

    And of course if I did not remember the photo, I would not have looked.

    I am selling stuff on eBay, and I was selling a Key West Hand Print shirt that my son wore - I knew I had a photo of him wearing it, and I did.

    77101_10200502460957735_1989888272_a.jpg

    Like others have mentioned, I think that you need a Digital Asset Management program (D.A.M.).

    If you run Windows OS or Mac OS then you might try Picasa, which is a very simple and free DAM software. Picasa makes it easy to add text to the Caption field in the IPTC information, which you could use for "tags" in a search.

    You can also turn on the "Tags" window to add text tags, which are also searchable.

    Later versions of Picasa also have an ability to sort image files with visible/recognizable faces, and the above image file would probably work for that feature. Basically, that would allow you to turn off those images without visible faces from the visible Library thumbnail images. (It just shows less thumbnails for you to visually sort through, when it's appropriate to do so.)

    A workable strategy would be to use Picasa to view each directory/subdirectory, adding text to either the Caption or Tag fields when you see a major scene change. That would give you things to search for without too much duplication. Then, when you search, it would place you into pertinent zones of each directory/subdirectory. You would select the closest visual match, then get back to the Library mode (by clicking on the "Back to View All" button) which would show "all" the images of that directory/subdirectory, where you could finally select the best image for your purposes.

    It's easier to do than to describe. (I just verified that it works in my own galleries of images, across many hard drives too.)

    One caveat is that Picasa is really designed for JPG image files. Other file types may or may not display correctly.


    If you're looking for a more versatile commercial software, Canto Cumulus is one that I researched for a previous employer and it looked pretty fine, but we did not purchase it and I have no experience.
    ziggy53
    Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
  • grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
    edited April 6, 2013
    I don't have many files other than jpeg. I have been using Picasa for some time, but I don't like the new versions of Picasa so I have had to disable the upgrade feature. I particularly dislike the circles thing that they now have on the internet. I sometimes add captions. But I hadn't thought of using it for indexing in the way you describe with tags. That's a good idea. I think I could do that without having to learn a whole new system.


    I find the face recognition more a bother than a help and stopped using it. If I know who the people are, I don't need it, and if I don't know, it is annoying. I put the photos primarily of people in the family into folders with their name on them, and I don't have that much trouble finding them.


    The problem with the above photo was that I had not categorized it in Picasa. I had it in a file of over 2200 images, and I had only sorted 800 or 900 of them into categories. (I got three boxes of files back at the end of November 2012 with about 2000 photos in each and promptly in Jan 2013, I went on a month long trip where I took an additional 4000 photos -keeping in mind at least half of these are for cemetery documentation so they aren't handled like the regular vacation snaps so they don't really 'count' but I still have to sort and post them).

    Anyway if I had sorted that file completely, I would have had that photo with the other photos of my son where I could have found it.

    In the old days (back before digital) I was using what was initially called Seattle Film Works to process my film, and then when I got digital, I was uploading my photos to what had turned into Photoworks. Unfortunately, they went out of business and turned their files over to Snapfish. There are some photos on Snapfish that I have lost off my computer due to switching computers and having a hard drive crash etc. I'd really like to be able to download those files to my computer without having to do it one at a time, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it.

    THanks again for your help
    “"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
  • ziggy53ziggy53 Super Moderators Posts: 23,765 moderator
    edited April 6, 2013
    grandmaR wrote: »
    ... I'd really like to be able to download those files to my computer without having to do it one at a time, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it.

    THanks again for your help

    http://support.snapfish.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/86/~/downloading-more-than-10-photos
    ziggy53
    Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
  • grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
    edited April 6, 2013
    Thank you --- I realize that it isn't snapfish (which I did use in the past) but shutterfly and shutterfly has no such option (that I could find). I went ahead and ordered some CDs from them because they promise that they will be high quality photos and copying them one at a time isn't. At the time the going out of business happened, I was organizing old slides and uploading them into albums to Photoworks. So I ordered those photos.

    I've also ordered 2004 - I was on a cruise in 2004 and ran out of space on a CD and accidentally deleted some original photos and I think (hope) it was 2004.

    I find Shutterfly incredibly unfriendly to use. But I didn't like Snapfish either. I was happy with Photoworks.
    “"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
  • NewsyNewsy Registered Users Posts: 605 Major grins
    edited April 9, 2013
    I think it starts with how you save them to your computer drive. I use a cascading folder structure based on the date.

    year
    -- month
    ---- day
    camera

    2013
    -- 03
    ---- 19
    A700
    SX220HS
    Phone
    ---- 23
    A700
    --04
    ---- 08


    The zeros in the month and day i.e. 08, keeps the folders lined up by date when you sort by name.

    ACDSee Pro also has a good rank/keyword/color code database function. Finds images fast using keywords. Excellent viewer and it handles RAW files plus it is fully color managed. But like any database you must back it up and you must use ACDSee to move or delete images otherwise the database gets out of sorts. It supports drag & drop.

    .
  • grandmaRgrandmaR Registered Users Posts: 1,942 Major grins
    edited April 9, 2013
    Newsy wrote: »
    I think it starts with how you save them to your computer drive. I use a date folder.

    year
    -- month
    ---- day
    camera

    2013
    -- 03
    ---- 19
    A700
    SX220HS
    Phone
    ---- 23
    A700

    .

    ACDSee Pro also has a good rank/keyword/color code database function. Finds images fast using keywords. Excellent viewer and it handles RAW files plus it is fully color managed. But like any database you must back it up and you must use ACDSee to move or delete images otherwise the database gets out of sorts. It supports drag & drop.

    I use a similar format for folders except that I don't bother with camera. I don't have a camera phone and if my husband and I are taking photos at the same time, I just try to set the date and time on each camera to match so that the photos can be put in order by time. The cameras number differently so I can tell who took what.

    2013
    ..01-03 Winter
    ...01 Jan tip
    .... 01-Leonardtown to Lumberton
    .....02-03 to Dania
    .....04 Embarkation
    .....05-06 Sea Days
    .....07 St. Thomas
    01-Moravian
    02- Jewish
    03- Moravian
    04- gates
    05 - Danish
    06 - Coki
    07 - Smith Bay
    08 - Hoffman
    (those are all cemeteries)

    In the old days, I numbered the slides, and I'm trying to match the photos up with the slide numbers, because they were all scanned at approximately the same time and not in any order. So that I can tell what the heck they are I have to match them up and renumber them to indicate who took them and when and where. But it is tedious.
    “"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
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