Photo storage/organising on your PC

[Aragorn]

Armed with a lovely new camera (early Christmas pressie to myself), and the daunting prospect of wanting to sort through the 1000s of photos on the computer, I'm just wondering what methods people have come up with for storing and organizing their digital photos?
Does anyone recommend any particular software for catagorising their pics?

 

[gidon]

Aragorn

I've found the best way to sort your photos is to create folders on your hard drive for each event (and sub folders beneath these). And be as descriptive as you can be - ie "Aragorn's 20th birthday party etc etc". I create these all under a "Not Archived" main folder. I then back them up to DVD or CD and move the whole Not Archived folder to an "Archived 1" folder etc and start again.

This then becomes independant of the software you use. So you can choose whatever you like and use multiple program's if you want. Also with the more sophisticated progs they can use your folder names for keyword search's and sorting your photos.

I then use Thumbsplus for sorting, viewing and printing my photos and find it very good and incredibly versatile. But there are loads of progs around.

Quite a nice free one is Picasa(now owned by Google). If you choose to print your photos it's handy if the software does this too ... and well.

Enjoy - and make sure you have some hard drive spave ready - I've been taking digital photos for over 4 years now and have some 12,000 photos on my computer taking up getting on for 10GB!

Cheers

Gidon

 

[Steve Maskery]

HI Aragorn,
Yes it can be a nightmare can't it?
My own structure is that I have a folder under My Documents called Wood Projects, and a folder under that for each job. In that folder will be the AutoCad drawing, the write-up article, and another folder called Pics. In Pics are all the pictures (who'd have guessed it?) and a document listing the pictures and what they show.

My Documents
--- Wood Projects
--- --- Dining Table
--- --- --- Pics

I use the inbuilt XP stuff and the prog that came with my Fuji camera to view and manage the pictures. I also have a naming convention for the pictures themselves (the camera calls them DSC001 etc). I call them "01 Leg Blank", "02 CUtting Mortices", etc. This does two things. It makes them easy to sort alphabetically (although one of the Windows options is to Sort By Date and Time), and by using the WIndows Power Tools, I can copy the directory listing to the clipboard, paste it into a word document, covert it to a Table then sort alphabetically. If I don't have the 01, 02 prefixes, then even if they are displayed in date order in the folder, when the listing is copied to the clipboard they come out alphabetically, rather than in date order. The numeric prefixes force correct listing. It also means that if I have taken several shots of the same subject (perhaps taken at different settings) they can have the same name but with different prefixes, eg "27 Completed Chair", "28 Completed Chair".
I definitely recommend the use of the Power Tools, they are available from the MS website. You really need the Win95 ones as well as the XP ones, as some of the older ones have been dropped for some strange reason.
Hope this gives you one or two ideas.
Cheers
Steve

 

[trevtheturner]

I'm looking forward to seeing the pics of Aragorn's 20th birthday party, etc., etc........... :roll:

Cheers,

Trev.

 

[Philly]

Hi All
I use a free program called XNView to keep an eye on my pics. Its a small download, so give it a go. (Tucows has it)
regards
Philly

 

[Adam]

Hi All
I use a free program called XNView to keep an eye on my pics. Its a small download, so give it a go. (Tucows has it)
regards
Philly

Best one I've comes across is the google photo software. It's downloadable from here:

blah blah.....Ever since Google acquired the rights to Picasa, they have put a large effort into featuring the photo software company on their own pages, much like advertisements. When the search engine first featured a link for the digital photo utility, traffic to Picasa increased by 6000%.

Now Google has begun including an ad-style Picasa banner on the result pages for their image search engine. The software is essentially a photo album that allows users to catalog, edit, and share digital images that are stored on their computers.

Picasa is a free download and an image of the ad appears below. Thanks to rustybrick for noticing Google's addition.

http://www.picasa.com/picasa/

Adam

PS: I use a data code in all my directories, along with a description e.g.

15-16-03_Making_Oak_Table
21-11-04_Mums_Birthday_Bash

etc

I find that way you can search for something like a word based on the description, or often some dates (like birthdays) you can get easily by knowing the month, or day that the photos were taken.

 

[Alf]

I'm looking forward to seeing the pics of Aragorn's 20th birthday party, etc., etc........... :roll:

Did they have photography way back then...?

Cheers, Alf

Who suddenly feels very disorganised picture-wise.

 

[Aragorn]

Thanks very much for your ideas. I think I'll have a look at Picasa first since it's free.
Gidon - I like your system particularly: very well organised!

My 20th, eh? Yeah, we had photography back then, thanks Alf! :lol: Black and white of course! That, and very poor lighting, are perhaps the only way I can look half decent on camera.

Perhaps half decent is a bit of an over-statement.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Aragorn

late seeing this.

For my job I have about 2GB of photos and other images stored on my laptop and desktop PC. I set up my own structure with Windows Explorer and then use ACDSEE to organise groups and to view them. Been using this program for years and highly recommend it. Basiclaly you get a very neat viewer application that shows images of almost every kind and if you double click in the image, then it opens up the ACDSEE browser. Try the demo

 

[Neil]

Another ACDSee user here - thoroughly recommended

NeilCFD

 

[Midnight]

My 20th, eh? Yeah, we had photography back then, thanks Alf! Black and white of course!

ummmmmm.... I hate t say yer wrong... but yon's a silhouette...

<duckin