If you've had a digital camera for any length of time, by now you have thousands--maybe even tens of thousands--of digital pictures of anything and everything. And if you're like most people you've cheerfully imported them into photo management software of some sort. Maybe it's something like NikonView that came with your camera or maybe it's the copy of Photoshop Elements that came pre-installed on your hard drive. Perhaps it's Picasa. If you're on a Mac it's almost certainly iPhoto. Or maybe you're a pro, or just really into digital photography, and you hopped on one of the Adobe Lightroom betas or shelled out some cash for something like ACDSee, iView, or Aperture.Whatever you're doing it's probably time to stop. Photo gallery and management software is a wonderful way to arrange and display pictures you want to use for something. Most of of the time, the "something" is printing, displaying on screen as a slideshow or screensaver, or uploading to a photo sharing service like Flickr. For most people, that describes a very small fraction of the pictures they take. The rest just sit around in the photo library collecting dust and causing trouble, mostly in the form of slowdowns. Your library has to load all those thumbnails every time you open it, whether you ever look at the pictures or not. When you add new photos, the software has to scan the pictures, add the appropriate information to its database, create thumbnails, probably copy the images to its own directory, and sometimes even convert the images to its native format. And again, it has to do that even if you never even look at the image.
That takes time. Often it takes a lot of time, and for nine tenths of digital photos, it's wasted time.
On the other hand, you don't really want to just delete all those other pictures. The sheer quantity is part of the fun of digital photography, right? And you never know when some of those truly horrible shots might come in handy. Maybe that horrible shot of your uncle making that silly face will turn out to be the only picture of him anyone can find for a scrapbook later. Maybe you'll want something in the background of a blurry shot of a friend for reference later. Who knows? But since storage is cheap these days, there's no reason to delete all that stuff, even if you don't want it clogging up your workflow.
Fortunately, your Operating System comes with some of the best organization software ever created built right in: the filesystem. Using it to your advantage will help you kepp a smoother, cleaner, and ultimately faster archive of your digital photos.
Step 1: Every time you go to download pictures from your camera, create a folder in your "My Pictures" or "Photos" folder with a meaningful label. Some people simply use the date the pictures were taken or downloaded. I personally like a descriptive title like "My 30th Birthday Party." The important thing is to be consistent.
Step 2: Create some other folders with descriptive names of categories you want to organize your photos into. Maybe you want to have all the pictures of your pets handy in a folder called "Pets". Whatever the important or useful categories for you are, make folders for them. If you want, you can subdivide. Maybe you want all the pictures of a particular pets in "Pets/Cats/Beatrix" and "Pets/Cats/Richard." Go wild.
Step 3: Create links (Shortcuts on Windows) from the pictures in your main date or event download folders to whichever category folders you think they belong in. A given picture can be linked in as many places as you want.
Step 4: Go through your photos and decide which ones you may actually want to print, share, or use for a slideshow. Just click through to the folder you want to look and use your Operating System's preview feature. Both OS X and Windows show thumbnails of picture files in icon view, and larger previews in ist view, like in the screencap below.
Step 5: Import just the pictures your interested in into your photo software. Most programs make this easy by installing a "send to" or "edit with" entry in the right-click menu.
Now you have easy access to all your pictures grouped in any arbitrary way you want. And because you've used the filesystem and not your photo software, you haven't lost time indexing and creating scalable thumbnails of everything. And because the number of pictures and links in a given folder should be relatively small (in filesystem terms) you should be able to navigate to any picture you want almost instantaneously. Even if you create some large folders that take several seconds to open, you still won't have to wait for your photo application to start and your photo library to load every time you need something.
If you've been at all selective about the images you choose to put in your photo software, you will have significantly increased the performance of library, too. That will make dealing with the percentage of photos you actually want to edit and work with in some way faster, stabler, easier, and just generally more pleasant.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
1-10-2007 @ 3:49PM
Lux said...
I don't understand your post. Picasa does all that automatically: all the pictures in my many folders appear already organized following the folder structure, plus I can add labels (tags, keywords) to any picture. Step 1 is good advice, something I always do: create new folders for each camera to drive download. Step 2 also makes sense, but only if you don't use a labeling system like Picasa, that creates virtual folders based on tags. Step 3 is beyond my experience, and I actually don't know how to make a shorcut from a photo within another folder. Could you explain this? Would the photo be visible being only a shortcut? Apparently there's basic Windows features I still do not command. Step 4 is confusing. I can change my mind many times about what photo needs editing or I want to share somewhere else online. I would only open that photo from a photo editor software in the precise moment I would use it. So I don't understand your point number 5 either. I take thousands of photos, so this post has attracted my attention, but leaves me with more questions than answers.
Thanks.
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1-10-2007 @ 5:13PM
Selvam said...
Very good Post. Even I have realised that how cumbersome a photo organiser can be. I especially liked your idea of creating shortcuts to organise the pictures under different headings.
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1-10-2007 @ 5:38PM
Tony said...
This system would break if you ever need to move your library to a new hard drive (like when you run out of space) or if you switch to a new OS. Windows uses absolute paths for shortcuts. Moving your library from one drive to another would break every single shortcut instantly. And if you ever switch OS's, you're out of luck as well. You're best bet is to find a organizer that writes keywords and captions directly to the image file's IPTC data so it always stays with the file. Then if you switch systems, drives, or even organizers, the information can be easily imported again.
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1-10-2007 @ 6:01PM
Jay said...
Tony,
Archiving is a story for a different day, but there are certainly ways to migrate directories that preserve symlinks, even on Windows (actually in most cases it isn't necessary, the NTFS DLTS will catch most cases without the user even noticing).
You could use an organizer that modifies IPTC or EXIF, it's true. But that defeats the purpose of moving infrequently-used files out of the oprganizer. It also means asking your organizer to either modify the original files or duplicate everything. One is unacceptably (for me anyway) dangerous and the other is wasteful. Space is cheap, but it's not *that* cheap.
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1-11-2007 @ 2:07AM
Tariq said...
Along these lines Mark Johnson has a good podcast on Digital Workflow - http://www.radiantvista.com/archive/podcast/7/
He talks about how to organise your folders when importing images.
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1-11-2007 @ 3:33AM
Andreas Bovens said...
I recently started organizing my pictures like this:
- one folder for each year, without subfolders
- every folder is tied to an online SVN repository, so I'm sure everything is always backed up. This setup also allows me to manage my pictures from different computers.
- I use iTag and PixVue for tagging my photos (IPTC/EXIF)
- I use Picasa for browsing, grouping and esp. instant search.
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1-11-2007 @ 3:36AM
Andreas Bovens said...
I recently started organizing my pictures like this:
- one folder for each year, without subfolders
- every folder is tied to an online SVN repository, so I'm sure everything is always backed up. This setup also allows me to manage my pictures from different computers.
- I use iTag and PixVue for tagging my photos (IPTC/EXIF)
- I use Picasa for browsing, grouping and esp. instant search.
Reply
1-11-2007 @ 3:52AM
James Cole said...
I mostly agree with El Guapo. Performance reasons for organising via the filesystem are specious - initial load aside, Picasa is super-fast and hassle free.
The best reason to organise your filesystem is application independence - viewing pictures easily without Picasa installed. I have the following directory structure that works without effort and slides in nicely with Picasa:
-Photos
|-pre 1998
|-1998
|-1999
|-...
|-2007
|-2007.01.01 - New years party
|-2007.01.06 - Goodbye decorations
And each year is an album in Picasa.
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1-11-2007 @ 6:47AM
El Guapo said...
This is kind of crazy. I'm supposed to go through my "tens of thousands" (your words) pictures and organize them using file system shortcuts? Woah... sorry man, that's crazy. Whats more bizarre is your comment that "all that takes time... it's wasted time" and yet your proposed solution is the most colossal waste of time imaginable.
I also share the concern that file system shortcuts are incredibly fragile and would not even consider using them as this poor-mans tagging system.
Picasa does a fantastic job of organizing everything and it is FAST. I have never noticed any slowdown whatsoever, and I even have my pics on a network share so that multiple PCs can view them (all of them running Picasa).
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1-11-2007 @ 8:34AM
Jay said...
I guess I underestimated the number of people who use Picasa. I assumed everyone else hated it as much as I do. Its index first, ask questions later appraoch is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned. There are pictures I don't want in the organizer, thank you, and I should have the option of which pictures to add, not which ones folders to take out after they've already been added.
I also think the editing tools are sub-par and don't see much added value as a file-system based viewer. As this post demonstrates, the OS came with one of those built-in...
Maybe it's time for a set of photo organizer reviews.
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1-11-2007 @ 8:35AM
Jay said...
Guappo:
Reorganizing would certainly be a pain. this is a way to move forward.
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1-11-2007 @ 11:05AM
Schwinn said...
The problem with folder-tree organization is that it only allows you to select one category for each picture. For me, at least, this is very limiting. Instead, I use Adobe PSE, since it allows me to assign multiple tags to each image. That way, if you have a group picture, for example, you can tag it with each person in the photo. So, when you go into PSE, you can then select a person's tag, and the group picture will still show up. With your folder-system, you may never find that picture, since it's in some obscure folder from an event you hardly remember.
This benefit is particularly useful in your example of the "horrible shot of your uncle" you described above, or even the "person in the background". Sure, this method requires you to do the footwork ahead of time... but if you start early, it's not too bad, and leaves you with a pretty detailed list of tags to get all your photos organized.
Incidentally, in PSE you can also select multiple tags at the same time, so you can find pictures of your "uncle" AND "mom" in the same image. You can also change the AND to an OR to find them that way. I believe there is a NOT capability too. It's rather powerful, as you can see. Try doing that with folder trees.
Folder organization is just too weak and limited in this way. Granted, if PSE ever "died" in some way, then you might be stuck with a bunch of pictures you can't identify clearly... but it works right now, and that's all I care about at the moment.
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1-11-2007 @ 11:21AM
Tony said...
Jay,
In response to your comment that using IPTC tags is too dangerous, I agree, tagging the originals is a bad idea. That's why most professional photographers make (at least) two copies of their originals immediately upon uploading them from their cameras: one on the hard drive and one on a burned DVD. The DVD copy never gets touched. Keywording the hard drive copy is no longer too dangerous after that.
As for removing infrequently looked at pictures from your organizer...why bother. By keywording (or labeling as Picasa calls it) you can easily filter out the images you don't want to see. Picasa does fall a little short here because you can only filter by one label at a time (at least the last time I used it that was the case). Other organizers let you search using mutiple keywords so you can drill down to the images you need very quickly (like Gmail does for your email). Your system wouldn't allow you to do that. And if your organizer isn't capable of searching through thousands of labels/keywords quickly, get a new one...that's an organizer's primary responsibility and good ones do it well.
You're also right that Windows will update shortcuts if you move the original files. But what if you store your photos on a network share and want to access them from different computers. Your share paths would have to be the same on all computers for the shortcuts to work. That's not a big problem if all your OS's are the same, but in a mixed environment, it'd be difficult. Keywording your photos in IPTC data gets around this problem as well.
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1-11-2007 @ 12:04PM
Jay said...
"Incidentally, in PSE you can also select multiple tags at the same time, so you can find pictures of your "uncle" AND "mom" in the same image. You can also change the AND to an OR to find them that way. I believe there is a NOT capability too. It's rather powerful, as you can see. Try doing that with folder trees."
The issue here isn't "power" in a limited usage. It's application independence and speed (and also archivibility). Most photo organizers do the job just fine on hardware most people don't have. PSE handles thousands of photos for me on a 3.02GHz P4 with 1GB RAM. Move that over to the 2.0G P4 with 256MB RAM sitting next to it--a more typical machine for most people--open up some other apps like email, a web browser, and maybe Photoshop CS2 (hey, it's an older machine) and PSE starts slowing noticeably around 500 4MP images and hanging for extended periods around 1500. Picassa does slightly better, but not enough better to make me think using it to organize *all* my images is a good idea.
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1-11-2007 @ 1:04PM
Schwinn said...
"The issue here isn't "power" in a limited usage. It's application independence and speed (and also archivibility). Most photo organizers do the job just fine on hardware most people don't have. PSE handles thousands of photos for me on a 3.02GHz P4 with 1GB RAM. Move that over to the 2.0G P4 with 256MB RAM sitting next to it--a more typical machine for most people--open up some other apps like email, a web browser, and maybe Photoshop CS2 (hey, it's an older machine) and PSE starts slowing noticeably around 500 4MP images and hanging for extended periods around 1500. Picassa does slightly better, but not enough better to make me think using it to organize *all* my images is a good idea."
If you're still running XP on 256MB, you need to buy more RAM. XP is terrible for one application on 256MB, much less multiple apps.
As for speed, I was using PSE on a 512MB RAM machine, with 1.3G Athlon (and Norton AV, which is notorously bad with efficiency from what people say) with no issues. Oh, and I have 1.8GB of photos - about 2000, as I recall. It runs fine, and has no hangups.
Point is - the 2GHz 256MB machine you reference is sub-par for most things... fix that problem, and most of the other "operational" issues go away. I know that many cheap-boxes shipped this way... but that's not a good excuse. If you're gonna buy a $100 piece of software (PSE 5.0 today) then you can spend some on RAM which will help EVERYTHING run better. Don't blame the app for a sub-par computer.
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1-11-2007 @ 3:24PM
lookatmewhenimtalkingtoyou said...
I download my pictures into a folder that begins with the date (yyyymmdd) followed by something descriptive. I try to be consistent with the descriptive words I use. If I take pictures of lighthouses a lot, I will use the same term... lighthouses (and try not to use lighthouse another time).
Then, I use Breeze Browser to batch rename my pictures to include the name of the folder at the beginning followed by the image serial number. It does this very well.
Once this is done, nothing is stopping you from tagging images that you like. I typically copy my favorites into another folder for use with my screen saver.
This method has served me well over the years because based on how I name the files, Fotki.com preserves the folder date and image serial number. This makes it easy to find on my NAS.
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1-11-2007 @ 9:01PM
Troy said...
I found a piece of software that will crunch thru a bunch of photos and sort based on EXIF info. The software is called RoboFolder, published at picajet.com. Sadly, it is currently choking on my 45,108 photos I need to archive. UGH! Any other software out there create an auto-sorted directory tree based on EXIF data?
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1-12-2007 @ 10:13AM
Dave said...
Wow, so much commenting on this topic. Here's my 2 cents...
I've tried Picasa several times, only to uninstall it soon after. I hated it, it was slow, and seemed like a pain to get started with. I am nearing 80 GB worth of digital images (4 years worth) and have come down to filing it much like most blogs do now...
I have a RAID or mirrored hard drive with yearly folders (2007, 2006, etc.); followed by monthly folders (01, 02, 03 using the zero as a place holder); and then each date with photos gets a folder.
So in Windows my path might look like D:\Photos\2007\01\11\. I also use Flickr extensively to upload my "best" or "favorite" photos and tag them there for later reference according to date on my system. Plus, say I want to find a particular photo from Flickr on my system... well Flickr preserves the EXIF data and the original file name. One I have that a quick search of the local hard drive and my photo it found.
I've been doing it this way for at least 2 years and it's not failed me yet.
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1-13-2007 @ 8:38AM
Bill Minton said...
Picasa blows compared to ACDSee. If you don't believe that, bring it up and attempt to do and/or searches based on your labels. Do multiple imports and watch your tag list begin showing duplicates of the same tag. Try burning your pictures to CD/DVD and let me know if that even works. There are so many flaws in it, it's only usable for the most basic of it's features.
I've got over 11,000 photos in ACDSee and it's still fast. Nearly any function you can imagine is built into the application. You can even export your database data to a standard XML format so you aren't locked into ACDSee forever.
I've leveraged ACDSee's export feature on a couple of occasions. I created a script to convert ACDSee categories to Picasa labels so my Mother could leverage the tagging work I'd done. Barring a (of course) Picasa import issue, it works ok. Unfortunately, you have to do it from scratch everytime or you end up with duplicated labels each time.
I've also written a script to use ACDSee's exported database data to create hardlinks (stay away from shortcuts, look up what hardlinks do) to mirror the category structure so other applications (XBox Media Center, etc.) can leverage the tagging work as well.
Regarding my general photo managing steps, I pull them from the camera, create an RAR based on the originals, then size the the photos down a little to 1280 (w or h). Everything is in a folder structure of yyyy\mm\yyyy_mm_dd.
Picasa is ok for the newbies, but people with more photos or needs will end up looking elsewhere. It's just not ready for prime time yet.
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1-15-2007 @ 3:34PM
James said...
This is actually something that I have taken a lot of time researching. I probably haven't tried every thumbnail organizing software out there but I have one I really like for Windows and nothing yet for the Mac.
The big problem I face is that so much of the image organizing software out there ignores your folder system and creates a flat database where all items (and sometimes that means ALL items--even things outside of what you'd care about, like images for odd pieces of software you happen to have installed) are organized by date.
I do employ a kind of date structure in organizing my pictures, but it is often the case that a shoot that starts on Monday ends early Tuesday morning. I don't want those images separated. I put them all into a folder with Monday's date (since that is when the shoot began). The folder will also contain (after the date) some comment about the shoot (perhaps a location, a person, or something else to remind me what I did on that date). For instance:
20070114_DiscoveryPark
I keep all of the image files named as the camera named them.
If I am going to manipulate an image it gets copied elsewhere. The name does not change so I am always able to return to the original if necessary. (Sometimes I do add to the manipulated file name so img2028.jpg might become img2028_850.jpg or some similar modification).
All three of the major pieces of software, Adobe's Bridge, Google's Picassa, and Apple's iPhoto, do this horrible thing. I have too many pictures to want to waste my time correcting their thinking about my organization (one camera shot more than 24,000 pictures last year).
In Windows I use Thumbsplus. It costs a little but it does what I tell it and does not presume to know better than me how I want to organize my photography:
http://www.cerious.com/download.shtml
I have not yet explored the world of tags, but that will come later. More importantly the above folder system does not require that I actually do anything except off-load the pictures from the camera into a folder. Tagging is "work" and if I'm going to "work" I'd rather get out and shoot some more.
The other thing that bothers me about so many of the image organizers is the way they do their slideshows. Thumbsplus will run a slideshow with or without sub-folders and linearly or in random order. Other slideshows will either offer random or sub-folders--not both. I'm sure this is due to the flat-folder assumption (no subs), but the ones that do support subs and don't do random is a curiosity.
James
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