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Organizing your Photos (1 Viewer)

An alternate way of organising them is into sub-folder by species name rather than by date. Non-birds are arranged by topic.

Date taken is in the exif and searchable. I find it much quicker to find a bird I'm looking for that way. Locations are keyworded if I ever want to find what's been taken in a particular location.

Either way it's much easier to locate photos when they're organised.
 
IanF said:
An alternate way of organising them is into sub-folder by species name rather than by date. Non-birds are arranged by topic.

Date taken is in the exif and searchable. I find it much quicker to find a bird I'm looking for that way. Locations are keyworded if I ever want to find what's been taken in a particular location.

Either way it's much easier to locate photos when they're organised.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Whatever works for you, the important thing is to set up a system.

Yours wouldn't work for me as I have a lot of species, most with only a couple of images. I use keywording to find them and also a distinctive naming convention for my processed files. For birds, Master files are by Banders code ie. RTHA27.TIFF or RTHA27.PSD, while web files are by common name ie. Red_Tailed_Hawk27.JPG

Cheers, Harold
 
i used to tag keywords and save exif so that later i can search through my lightroom to exif keywords and i can find them any point of time i want.
 
All I do is, after I have sorted and named them in bridge in a temp directory. I move them to a main folder called Birds and within that folder have folders named A to Z cutting out letters that are not used. Once this is set up I have folders within them with the year, the current year is in the root of that folder.
I have no problems doing a search for a particular bird I don't bother with keywords.
 

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Each month I send all my pics over to a sep hard drive.One folder is named Birds 2009 .Within that folder are sep folders,A-G,H-R etc,sub folders for each sep species.So if I want a particular species,I just open the sub folder,named say Redshanks which is located within the H-R sub folder.All e-pics(ones used for BF etc) and Web pics(website pics ) are doupble saved,on the hard drive and on a flash tak pen. The website pics and e-pics are printed off on a thumbnail sheet.As I put the photos each day into a folder
with the date,if I want to trace the original of one of the e-pics,I just check the date on the print out,and then look in the subfolder,for the species taken on that particular date.
 
For JPEGS, my preferred method of sorting files is to import using Zoombrowser automatically using Year -> YearMonthDay (folder -> Filename). Then I use the name tags function in Picasa to quickly assign keywords to the files (only because its free and easy). As the keywords are contained in the file itself there is no need to rename files or worry about sorting out directories etc .. and the files can be searched subsequently in Photoshop or any other software that searches the IPTC Keywords. It does require some thought beforehand as to what keywords are used. Searches are carried out in seconds.

Backups between disks are performed using Allwaysync.

I am trying to see if keywords can be assigned to RAW files themselves which would be great. I'm playing around with ExifToolGUI to see if the metadata for RAW files can be modified to allow keyword searches. Any advice on how Canon RAW CR2 files can be assigned keywords directly would be appreciated. Perhaps Lightroom does this - it would be a reason for buying it as I am otherwise happy with Canon's DPP.

Sorry for long post.

Deco
 
Its interesting to see the various systems different people use.

deco said:
Any advice on how Canon RAW CR2 files can be assigned keywords directly would be appreciated. Perhaps Lightroom does this - it would be a reason for buying it as I am otherwise happy with Canon's DPP.

Deco
Click to expand...

Yes both Lightroom and Bridge from Photoshop allow you to keyword RAW files. Lightroom in fact gives you an interface when you are loading a fresh set of files to set whatever keywords you want for the group if you wish to.
 
deco said:
Any advice on how Canon RAW CR2 files can be assigned keywords directly would be appreciated. Perhaps Lightroom does this - it would be a reason for buying it as I am otherwise happy with Canon's DPP.
Deco
Click to expand...

Why not checking the good job done by Mark Wilson here? :t: B :)
 
Thanks gmax & Harold; I've now read up on both now. Both seem to work very well. Lightroom seems to make a point of not touching the metadata of the RAW file itself and instead creates a 'sidecar' metadata file which it sunsequntly uses as an index & Mark Wilson's software is a plug-in for Lightroom.

The one disadvantage with this approach, as far as I can see, is that you are restricted to that software - and hopefully subsequent releases, if you want to retain your keyword 'library'. There doesn't seem to be a standardised structure to RAW files that allows the metadata of the RAW file itself to be modified with keywords.... or have I got it wrong.

Comments etc welcome
 
I just have an ongoing list of birds by subfolders. To each their own but it makes it easy for me to quickly use Adobe or Zoombrowser to find what bird I want and as far as date goes, I try to label / save each bird photo that is good enough to go into a sub folder with the name, where found and date. There is not reason you need to have a short title for each saved bird. Again, works for me and...I use EXCEL and not other official birding programs as my database for I don't prefer all of the information or layout of someone else's....using EXCEL I can create my own and even colorize it! ... :)
 
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