Organizing digital photos and videos

[RWIndiana]

My current setup goes something like this: to find a picture from our camping trip from June of last year I would go to "(storage drive)/unedited pictures/archived/2008/2008-06". I keep the movies separate, so finding a movie from the same time would be more like "(drive)/home movies/2008/camping june", for example.

I guess I'm just always dissatisfied and looking for easier and better ways to organize. It's fairly simple, I suppose, but it still gets cumbersome with five different cameras to unload. I usually move pics to the "archived" directory as I process them and back them up on an external drive to keep in a fire safe.

So, questions:
1. Should I just keep the movies with the photos? The problem I see with that is when looking for a particular movie or set of movies, it might be a little harder to track down. With the current system, as you can see, I usually label the folder topically and put all the relevant movies into that folder. But then, that makes backups just a hair more involved.

2. Tagging, renaming, and all that good stuff is a pain. How should I do it? I sometimes use Picasa and sometimes simply rename certain photos that I want to be sure and remember. I would prefer that any solution I do use would work on Linux.

3. How do you all usually do your backups? Currently I only have one external hard drive and two computers with all the pictures and videos synchronized between them. I had been doing backups to optical media, which turned out to be physically inconvenient (space becomes and issue, as well as the old "floppy switching" syndrome, whatever that's called). Then started backing up to flash media and ran into some speed and economy issues. Unfortunately, online backup is not an option with our horrible satellite service.

I guess that's all for now! Just looking for ideas.

 

[ddrueding]

I stick each session's photos in a folder named "yyyy-mm-dd <subject>" Typically I don't do anything else to them. If I had videos, I'd stick them in the same place.

I use SyncToy to back up the whole thing (and my music, movies, etc) to another array elsewhere.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a solution that works for myself, but I'm not trying to store anything of personal significance (I doubt I have 50MB of personal photos) so much as being able to quicky locate the correct set of naked women.

A couple small hints: I make extensive use of symlinks so that there is always more than one path leading to the same information. For porn pictures this might include the studio (Hegre), the model (Luba), a category (Art Nudes) etc.

I also take a few moments to write some easily searchable plain text to keep in the directory with the media. This gives instructions for my scripts to create symlinks for me and a rough idea of content. The text eventually gets read into a database along with the file location.

Supposedly, Picasa is really really smart if you actually take the time to tag and make collections, and it integrates with other google services so if you have some pictures tagged as "Emily" and you start regularly gchatting with an "Emily", Google will eventually grab one of your Emily pictures to use as her chat icon.

 

[Tea]

Dave's method - "stick each session's photos in a folder named yyyy-mm-dd <subject>" isn't just the best method, it's the ONLY method. With any non-trivial number of photographs, if you are not filing by date, you are not filing at all. Place the movies where you like - with the stils or in a duplicate folder structure - but in a sub-folder with the stills would be my choice.

If you use any other method and you aren't going to catelogue EVERY picture promptly, accurately, in as many different ways as you can think of, and do that every time without fail, you are just stacking up a great big headache for yourself. Chaos with a capital K.

Also, get yourself a competent picture uploader/renamer, if you haven't got one already. Saves a lot of manual drudgery. Post if you don't know which one to get.

 

[ddrueding]

I have been tempted to get some kind of GPS tagger to use with my camera. Combining automatic mapping with the file's own creation date would be plenty, then I wouldn't have to do any sorting at all.

 

[LunarMist]

Lightroom?

 

[ddrueding]

IMO, Lightroom = lock-in. Since they run their own database, all the effort you put into organizing your files is worthless if you move to a different application. Ideal would be to store the information in an open way as metadata in the file itself. Secondary would be some kind of open database.

 

[Tea]

Dave is right on the money a second time. Lightroom = lock-in. It also equals glacial performance (hey, it's an Adobe product, what did you expect?) and lots of CPU-hogging "features" that are completely useless to you, plus a complete inability to handle a single file - every damn thing you do has to be from within Lightroom's own cumbersome, proprietary library files, and that's not all! You also get this great set of free steak knives!

Sorry, I lied about the steak knives. Lightroom doesn't have any steak knives. Lightroom would never give you steak knives because you might find a use for them outside of Adobe's Lightroom, and only heretics, child molesters, communists, and bad people ever go outside Lightroom. Oh, and Photoshop users, but that's pretty much the same thing these days.

 

[Handruin]

I'm using a variation on the dating structure. I went with a structure like this:

year
    month
        event name


2009
    Jan - 01
        photos of zelda being silly
    Feb - 02
        leaf falling from a tree
    Mar - 03
        friend's son's 1st birthday party

I didn't care for exact date and time being marked in the folder name, but if I did, it's in each picture's EXIF if I need to access that info.

Another tool to investigate (because I haven't yet) might be Bibble. It's likely to be similar to Lightroom where you'll be locked in, but it's supposed to be a highly scalable program of upwards of 30 cores (if you had such a thing).

 

[Handruin]

Just as a followup, I looked through Bibble some more, and it looks like they are aware of users who do not want their structure messed with so they offer the feature to dissable asset management.

Bibble 5 is the only photographic workflow application that makes the complete asset management system optional. If you already organize your images into folders on your computer, then working with Bibble 5 is simple. Just click the File System tab and click on the folder you want to work in. That's it. No need to import or worry about cataloging at all.