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Best way to keep a photo list on the computer?? (1 Viewer)

crazyfingers

crazyfingers

Well-known member
I'm sorry if this has been thrashed over many times in the past. I spent some time looking around the forum and didn't see a thread specifically on this.

I would like to keep a list/database/running document with photos of each species of bird (and other wildlife) I have a photo of.

I'm wondering what works best for people.

I could use MS Powerpoint and have a slide per critter.
I could use Excel or Word
I wonder if there is some freeware out there designed for this?

What I'd like to capture is.

Best photo of the species (male/female)
Date/location
Link to the original photo on my hard drive
A copy of the photo in the document
Other comments

I expect that I'll want to update the best example somewhat regularly when I get a much nicer photo then the older one.

I don't see doing tremendous organization in terms of taxonomy.

Basic organization I see would be:
Songbirds
Birds of prey
Water birds
etc..
Then mamals
Reptiles

Mainly I want something that is fun to actually look and add too but will not become a 100 megabytes file too long from now.

Do people have thoughts on what works best for them for keeping their best examples of photos in a document?
 
How do you process your pictures? Does that programme not have a 'Collection' feature where you can add pictures without moving their original location?
 
McMadd said:
How do you process your pictures? Does that programme not have a 'Collection' feature where you can add pictures without moving their original location?
Click to expand...

I think maybe I wasn't clear. I have all my jpg's in folders chronologically. I keep wildlife folders separate from all the other pictures but they are chronological wihs is how I like it. But I'd like one document or file where I can put the one or two good photos of every species I have a photograph of organized so that I can reference them. It would be similar to a life list but a list with photos in one place. I have started such a document in PowerPoint. One page for each different critter. But so far with about 100 pages for 100 different critters (robin, Jay, junko, etc... one page each, it's pushing 60MB in side.

I was just wondering if someone has found a better way to keep a "Photo life list" though with more than just a bunch of files in a folder.
 
I'd also create pages for birds that I have not yet identified and then the unlabeled page would goad me into figuring it out. That happens with all the different ocean-going ducks and warblers. So many. And looking at it I would remember them finally too.
 
I have my photo life list on Flickr.....you can create sets or collections to show different groups of photos...I have a different set for each bird family. You can add comments for each photo or for each set and it will be available to you wherever you are in the world. You can also have the settings public or private.
 
Dave 2x said:
I have my photo life list on Flickr.....you can create sets or collections to show different groups of photos...I have a different set for each bird family. You can add comments for each photo or for each set and it will be available to you wherever you are in the world. You can also have the settings public or private.
Click to expand...

I have considered using a cloud-based approach but decided against it because when we go on vacation to our place in Maine, where I tend to get some of my best photos, our house there has no internet other than my phone. Rustic sort of place.
 
I was hoping that there might be some birder freeware that would load thumbs of photos from the hard drive, allowing me to link and click on the full res version, but let me make notations and such....
 
You could go with something like a MS application, but it would probably crash sooner or later, I don't think they are intended for that size file.

You could go with a photo organizing program for doing the kind of thing you have mentioned above. Use of ACDSee organizer and the built in categories would allow that. More specifically, do one category of each section you want (as you stated above) and within each, add a sub-category per species. A different category would be "best one", a third group of categories would be location. A search for a species name and "best one" together would give you the one photo you want -- without "best one" you would get all photos of that species. Date and time would be automatically reported by the program. One further advantage is that the same program could keep track of the pictures of your kids or grandkids or whatever else is important to you.

A third option is to use a bird observation program that also allows you to link to images on your HD: Mine does not allow photos so I don't know how to organize that, and especially not how to limit to the best photo. I therefore does not think this is as good an option for you.

Niels

PS no this option is not a free-ware option. Right now ACDSee 16 is US$56 and the previous version is US$20: http://www.acdsee.com/
 
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Have you looked into specific birding software that allows you to attach your best photos to that bird? I use Bird Journal but I know there are a multitude of birding software programs ....jim
 
I do something similar to what you propose via my Flickr account where my bird photos are organized into sets with info on date, location etc etc in the captions to the individual shots. I arrange everything taxonomically, but one is free to adopt any order one pleases. Flickr sets come with note fields which I use to create a table of contents for each set.

Re storage, I keep a copy of everything uploaded to Flickr in a folder on on my hard drive, arranged alphabetically.

I don't know if this would work for you or not, but it does for me. To check it out, click the Flickr link in my signature block. If you then click "more" under the column of set thumbnails on the right you'll bring up the whole arrangement.
 
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I do NOT recommended trying to embed lots of photos in a document like PowerPoint or MS Word. That will cause big problems.

You could try creating a document in plain HTML - that's effectively what I do, since I post my photos to my own website. But it's still a bit of a pain to update; one of these days I'll get around to rewriting my website so I can drag and drop things, rather like the way "sets" work on Flickr. Other photo-management software (Picasa, for example) has similar concepts where you can create "albums".

But fundamentally, you don't need a document at all. Use folders on your computer instead. Say, one folder called "raptors", another called "waders", etc. (One for "unidentified" too, of course.) In the raptor folder you'd create a link ("shortcut" in Windows-speak) to your chosen photo of a bald eagle*. Name the link "bald eagle". The link points back to the original photo, preserving context and chronology. Any additional notes you need can be added to the metadata of the link ("properties" in Windows-speak: there's a "Comment" field you can edit).

Now you can browse through your links folder with your computer's built-in photo viewer, which is even better than scrolling through a Powerpoint document.

You can move the chronological folders and all the shortcuts will automatically update with the new locations.


*Find your bald eagle photo in its chronological folder, right-click, choose "create Shortcut". Drag the shortcut to its new home in the "raptors" folder.


Note that online solutions are useful in that they constitute off-site backup. Consider getting your own website and using it just for photo storage.
 
I have been using MS PowerPoint with no problems so far. I'm up to about 100 species with 2-4 photos per page. When I was half-way into it the file was 84MB but I found a setting to have it automatically reduce the pixel density and removes the excess where I cropped in the document. Even though I've increased that number of species/pages by 100% since then it's now around 40mb.

I think I'm OK for now. I am really struggling to find any species in my files not added already. New adds will now mainly be future photographs from this point forward. If I need to I can split off the Mammal/Reptiles/sea creatures, etc.. into a separate file.

ETA: At the moment it's reducing pixels to about 200dpi good enough for printing. But I doubt that I will ever actually print this thing. It would use all my ink and then some. So I could reduce the pixels to screen viewing quality only if I reach the point where I feel another size reduction is needed.
 
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One of the things I have seen with photos in microsoft office documents is that they get re-compacted sometimes (maybe only when that page they reside on gets edited) and therefore deteriorate in quality over time. You therefore need to have the original file stored somewhere.

If the above is actually not true, then someone needs to explain the deterioration in quality that occur over time.

Niels
 
njlarsen said:
One of the things I have seen with photos in microsoft office documents is that they get re-compacted sometimes (maybe only when that page they reside on gets edited) and therefore deteriorate in quality over time. You therefore need to have the original file stored somewhere.

If the above is actually not true, then someone needs to explain the deterioration in quality that occur over time.

Niels
Click to expand...

Interesting. I hope that doesn't happen. If it does I have the originals still in the original spot. I paste a copy in to PPT and then next to it I past a click-able shortcut to the original photo on the drive. So I can always easily find and open the untouched original.

The hard part has been finding the best examples or only examples of the different species. If I have to redo it at least the hard part is not lost.
 
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Since there are only 2 birds I've seen and not photographed, the life list I already have is sufficient (just need to subtract 2).

As the list itself I use a website called Eremaea which I submit bird surveys and sightings to and it automatically makes a life list for me.
 
I have all my photos cataloged in Adobe Lightroom and love it. I tagged them with species name, geo tagged, and rated them. You can find Lightroom compatible lists of all bird species in the net.

This way, I can easily find e. g. all shots of a certain species and a given rating. Also uploading to Flickr is easy.

Lightroom is not freeware but reasonable prized and well worth its money. If you want to buy, Version 5 will be available soon.

Regards,
Johannes
 
I also have Adobe Lightroom. I think that will do what you want. But it is not free. Like Nartreb said, you don't really need any program at all. Just a bunch of folders, one for each family of birds and you can sub-divide that with other folders inside. That would keep your photos well organized. (for Silverwolf. just curious, which two birds did you see but were unable to get a photo?)
 
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