Organizing images

[sagar]

Need some advice on how to organize images...may be if you can share how you manages all your images, that could be helpful

 

[Jamesmd]

I use Aperture , so all is organized in there , but not in its library , all files are referenced to folders yearmonth/date .

this way I can process with the program I prefer in each case and have track of all of them . once they are processed I save tiffs in an output folder for each case ( C1, LR , or whatever ) that are imported to Aperture too ( referenced ) , all printing , mailing etc etc is done then in Aperture .

Don't know if it helps , but it works well for me .

Cheers

 

[carstenw]

How many images? What kind of images? What is the budget? Please define "manage". What is your current setup? Are there any programs you wish to exclude? Explicitly include? What kind of a workflow do you currently have? What would you wish to change about this workflow? ...

 

[Dave_Anderson]

I had been organizing my photos using directory names, which was fine as most of my photography was used to illustrate steps in various projects... so a directory per project prefixed with a datecode(e.g. 20090312-ProjectName) worked well enough.

I did make use of keywords to a limited extent, using ThumbsPlus. I have started using LightRoom and it seems that with the heirarchical keywords and multiple ways you can view and sort photos plus do various PP, it seems way ahead of the pack to me. I'm still investigating alternatives for demosaic & NR, but since doing that outside of LR eats lots of HDD anyway I'm leaning more toward just doing the gross PP in LR then doing final NR/sharpening with a non-destructive CS4 plugin -- there are many very good NR plugins to experiment with.

I still have a lot of experimenting to do before I settle on a workflow, but LR seems to trounce the alternatives I've seen when it comes to organizing the images so I thought it worth the mention. Whether you like its RAW conversion depends a lot on which camera you have.

 

[carstenw]

LR right now is a good program. I have my hopes up that LR3 will be a great program. Much of the infrastructure is best-of-breed, and just NR, WB, sharpening and one or two other things needs improving. For well exposed and white balanced shots, it is already great.

 

[David K]

You might want to check this link...

http://dpbestflow.org/links/60

 

[LJL]

Here is a link to a fairly recent article also worth reading through. It takes that longer term approach, and makes the distinction among things we sometimes use interchangeably, though they are not.....archive, library, catalog, etc. This is supposedly part I of a several part article, with other sections to follow at some point.

http://www.digitalphotopro.com/soft...managing-your-photographic-legacy-part-i.html

LJ

 

[Dave_Anderson]

Thanks for the link LJ. I'll keep an eye out for the follow-on articles. I'm already organizing on disk the same way, and I just figured out how to get LR to build XMPs for all files from the catalog.

I'm currently pulling images from CF manually and doing a first cull -- I plan to add an external drive and copy the culled photos there. No big rush ATM, the data is currently on a RAID. I keep my exported photos in subdirectories under each date folder that contains the RAWS and I will probably just drag whole folders to the backup drive, XMP, exports and all. I am curious to see what more this author has to say, since he and I already seem to be generally on the same page.