How to Organize Your Digital Photos
August 17th, 2007 · by David Bradley
How do you organize your digital photos? If you are like me you don’t, you simply accumulate gigabyte upon gigabyte of images you never get around to sorting or tagging, occasionally remember to back them up on to an external hard drive or CDs, or else leave them sitting on your computer doing nothing more than taking up space.
Admittedly, I use the Microsoft image wizard to download them via compact flash card reader (don’t use a slot in PCMCIA CF reader, they’re very slow compared to a dedicated USB 2 card reader) and when I do I usually give each batch a name based on date together with broad subject, e.g. holiday-italy-Aug-2006.jpg, wedding-Apr-2005.jpg, and let the wizard add sequential numbers.
But, genuine tags that work on a per photograph basis would be much better so that each distinct photo from that wedding batch gave the name of which guest is pictured, for instance. That would make searching for all the pictures of a particular friend or relative, or whatever, so much easier. I know Google Images are exploiting a classification game as part of their efforts to tag all the images on the web, but that wouldn’t help me unless I upload all 300 Gb of snaps to flickr, which is presumably not allowed.
So, at this juncture, I am looking for advice, rather than handing out tips. How do you organize your digital photos? Does costly Photoshop Album do it for you? What about free Picasa? Are there other free tools that can allow you to quickly tag photos in batches? Is there software yet available that can do some degree of recognition on your images, even if it is only based on color histogram? I would love to know. In the meantime, I’ve got another 3 Gb of photos from a recent trip to download and label…or maybe I’ll just leave them as trip-2007.jpg
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3 responses so far ↓
David Szpunar // Aug 19, 2007 at 4:12 am
I too organize my photos by not organizing them. I use Picasa to pull the pics off my xD card (usually using the built-in reader on my laptop, but a USB reader works fine on other computers). I save the album with a useful name, and maybe split it afterwards (easy) if I’ve taken different categories of pictures.
However, Picasa seems a bit clunky for tagging a lot of images (maybe it’s just my aversion to repetitiveness?), although it has some nice features. It doesn’t have any sort of auto-recognition, which would be very nice.
I occasionally use the album upload feature of Picasa to share some photos with family since it’s nice, fast, and easy to use, although the size and space are limited.
Flickr is an excellent place for image archival, as they allow unlimited uploads I believe for a pro account, which is rather inexpensive per year. That’s unlimited, full quality, as-fast-as-you-can-upload storage, including the original at full resolution. They used to have a 10MB per picture limit, although I seem to remember that jumping up a bit recently. They offer good tagging, and even geo-tagging, but no image editing (although there are free tools that will edit online from your Flickr account; I have some saved in del.icio.us if you’re interested, let me know…I haven’t had time to try them though). Alternately, SmugMug.com has a nice unlimited upload, pay-overage-based-on-download-bandwidth service that’s more album-oriented than Flickr (which is more social oriented). They had unlimited upload before Flickr but I think it’s a matter of preference and cost now.
Right now, I download my pics with Picasa, use SyncToy from Microsoft to make sure they’re also on my desktop as a backup, and my wife goes through them and uploads the best shots and at least titles them. That’s about as much organization as I have, because I’ve been known to take 1500 pictures in one weekend before, and it gets a bit time-consuming to touch each of those manually and add meta-data to all of them!
I’m curious to see if you get any tips that are better than what I do because I’d welcome a better solution as well.
DNA Networks // Aug 27, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I have all my pics stored in one folder and just create individual folders for each event, with event name and date. I also use Picasa.
I don’t take a ton of pictures like you though. 300 gigs!??!?! Wow!
David Bradley // Aug 29, 2007 at 9:00 am
Mr Networks, yes, that is similar to my approach, but when I import the images from my camera I also give them a tag-type name too, just to make identification and searching that little bit easier. A picture of a rose might be named flower-rose-082907.tif, for instance.
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