Organizing photos...

[maxfox426]

So, I'm only on Day 4 of the 365 Project, and I'm already in way over my head.

It's no surprise to me that I am bad at photo organization. I've known for a long time that I am completely ineffective in that department, but now that I am several thousand photos in... the thought of going back and sorting what I have terrifies me. LOL!

So I guess the real question is this... How do YOU sort/organize/select the photos you keep?

[Fran101]

Iphoto is really good at that kind of thing.
It separates pictures into events by the date they were taken, and then the events are all put in chronological order
I usually just name the event things like "my birthday 2011" and such

So it pretty much does it for you lol

Other than that, I am hopeless lol my photobucket is a disaster

[maxfox426]

Originally Posted by Fran101

Iphoto is really good at that kind of thing.
It separates pictures into events by the date they were taken, and then the events are all put in chronological order
I usually just name the event things like "my birthday 2011" and such

So it pretty much does it for you lol

Other than that, I am hopeless lol my photobucket is a disaster

I use Aperture (aka: the expensive version of iPhoto. LOL!). I can sort into projects and albums, add keywords, and sort by date.

The PROBLEM, however, is that it makes it wayyyyy too easy for me to keep EVERYTHING... and then I'm overrun, overwhelmed, and most of my images are the same shot taken a dozen times. :/

So I guess the issue isn't so much about organizing as it is sorting/selecting/weeding things out...

...

... or maybe I have no idea what I need. LOL! All I know is that I'm stressing about the sheer quantity of photos I have, and my system is erratic at best. I really don't know how to find what I have, or how to separate what is important from the junk. Or how to handle photos that may cross over between more than one project.

I'm not even sure I'm making sense...


ETA:
PS: My Photobucket is also a disaster. I sort things out in the stupidest ways and then I can never find them again. Sometimes I oversort them (ie: sub-categories for EVERY DAY of a trip) or sometimes I undersort (ie: an album titled "Dog" that is just a jumbled mess of my dog, friends' dogs, dogs I've done petsitting for... etc.)

[~Jessie~]

I use Adobe Lightroom to organize all of my photos. It makes things REALLY easy for me!

[CaliTerp07]

I just have a folder for every date I upload things. "20120105" would be today. Then I'll add a couple words describing it. I don't take 100 photos of the same thing though. A trip to the lake will result in 20-30 photos of the whole day, so it's a manageable number.

[Beanie]

What I do is before I dump all my photos from the camera's card to my hard drive is go through and delete photos that are blurry, pick the best photo when I've shot multiple times to make sure I get the shot I want, that sort of thing. So the crappy photos never even make it to my hard drive.
Beyond that I put everything in folders by year, which can be really overwhelming. I also have just pretty much started naming photos that I've edited by date... once I started doing the 365 Project with Payton it just made more sense that way. It works fine when I'm on my computer looking at everything as a thumbnail in Explorer, but it doesn't work very well when I'm just looking at the FTP page on my website. =P Then again, it wasn't very helpful when I just had "auggie025.jpg" either LOL. So I guess it's not much different.

[maxfox426]

I have Aperture for my photos, which DOES make it very easy to sort and organize... the problem is that I have no consistent system! LOL! And a lot of things cross over, so I get myself all mixed up then, too.

[stardogs]

When DH set up our home server and I started transferring stuff over I realized i had close to 25,000 (yes twenty five THOUSAND) photos on my computer already. o.O

I've decided not to stress about going back and organizing those, but from here on out this is what I do:

- take zillions of pics on camera
- upload to computer in a folder with a year_month_day formatted title
- Look at said folder in Picasa
- immediately delete all sub-par pics (blurry or mis-fires mostly)
- go through remaining pics and edit as needed
- delete any photos not salvagable after editing (color balance is off, no way to crop nicely, etc.)

VOILA! Photos sorted by date with all crappy ones removed!

[Taqroy]

My system goes like this.

- Take lots of pics. LOTS of pics because my dogs don't stay still very well.
- Transfer all pictures off the memory card to my computer (example folder name: MuAndMurphy12-20-2011 or TipperDogPark01-05-2012)
- Delete all the crappy/blurry pics.
- Copy all the remaining pictures to the server.
- Edit the pictures I want to post or print and save a copy of them in the EditedPicturesFolder > MuAndMurphy12-20-2011
- If I'm going to upload pictures I do it now, otherwise I'm done.

My Flickr is sorted by the same system. I put all new photos into their own set (with the original folder name) and I make sure to tag the dog photos with their name. Then I sort all the tags into any other sets they need to go into later (I have sets called AllMuAllTheTime, AllMurphyAllTheTime, and AllTipperAllTheTime so I can easily find pictures of a specific dog).

[maxfox426]

Originally Posted by Taqroy

My system goes like this.

- Take lots of pics. LOTS of pics because my dogs don't stay still very well.
- Transfer all pictures off the memory card to my computer (example folder name: MuAndMurphy12-20-2011 or TipperDogPark01-05-2012)
- Delete all the crappy/blurry pics.
- Copy all the remaining pictures to the server.
- Edit the pictures I want to post or print and save a copy of them in the EditedPicturesFolder > MuAndMurphy12-20-2011
- If I'm going to upload pictures I do it now, otherwise I'm done.

My Flickr is sorted by the same system. I put all new photos into their own set (with the original folder name) and I make sure to tag the dog photos with their name. Then I sort all the tags into any other sets they need to go into later (I have sets called AllMuAllTheTime, AllMurphyAllTheTime, and AllTipperAllTheTime so I can easily find pictures of a specific dog).

This is basically what I try to do... apparently I'm just bad at it. LOL!!! I still end up with 10 of the same shot because "they are all pretty good, which is the best one??!?!?11" Perhaps that should be my New Year's Resolution to work on...

Thank you all for the input! I'm glad to know that I'm at least on the right track.