How to store photos (1 Viewer)

Hi All I'm not sure thus is the right forum to ask this but here goes, I am in a complete mess with my 1,000s of bird photos and wondered how anyone else organises their photos.I have a vague idea that I want to keep about 10-20 of each species and have bought a new hard drive for this purpose. How do you manage yours? do you just have a great list of folders or is there a better way. Cheers Kath

Lightroom is brilliant for storing cataloguing and organising photos

Or, if you want to save some money, the Photoshop Elements "Organizer" works well for me at a fraction of the cost of Lightroom.

Kath I tend to store mine in chronological order with date and location in the folder details then each year I create a new year folder. I'm not so interested in speciies order and it suits what I do with the images.
If you want to catalogue species I suggest you do it by family something like gnd Rspb website will offer a full family list.

As a recent Mac convert I use iCloud which allows me to very quickly upload and arrange. Additionally I have access on my iphone which is very handy should I require to quickly show somebody I maybe talking with a pic or series of pics. Very handy!

So for instance I upload a load of pics to iCloud, shut down my computer walk down the pub and then bingo all my pics happen to be available for me also on my iphone and then I can either show them on my mac, iphone, using a weblink or if I want them to be private inviting other apple users by name.

I was using Flikr but have latterly found iCloud to be much more beneficial if using a mac and iphone combo. Only thing is that Apple quite naturally are providing you with a cul-de-sac as you get much more benefit if everyone else is using at least an iphone!

...smart !

I keep all my images on a Sony playstation 3. It has a 300gb hard drive and stores images in chronological order, simple.

Nice - can play FIFA as well!

An alternative to Lightroom that makes much more sense to my way of thinking is ACDSee. It catalogs files where they already are, you don't have to first import. It is also cheaper.

Using that, I save images in chronological folders, and add categories (you can use keywords instead if that suits you) to register what the content is. When wanting to see all images of a given bird I have ever taken, just click that category (or search for that keyword).

The pro version has almost as much editing power as lightroom, the regular version is more restricted as editor but has full organizer ability.

Niels

OK for a completely different view point.
Yes create folders for each bird species.
How you decide to nest these is up to you.
Keyword your images as well.
Personally I use IPTC, the data is contained within the image not as a sidecar file.
Tying yourself into the Adobe way of doing things means you are tied into the Adobe way of doing things.
With IPTC you can use a variety of software to access your images.
If you name your images as something along the lines of
bird name / image date / image number
They will appear in chronological order in your folders and can never have a duplicate.
You can add location and any thing else you wish as well.
All done automagically at import of the images of your cam card.
This sounds complex really it is easy when you find a piece of software that works with your mind.
DAM, Digital Image Management is a minefield, everyone has different thoughts.
Just be aware of tying yourself into non open source systems.
Adobe has realised that they have a mature product and upgrades are no longer a cash cow.
Have a look at what they have done to Photoshop etc as a new way of making money ...
If your serious about getting order into what can quickly become chaos have a good Google at DAM and travel on from there.
We were all where you are now, some work it out others throw their hands in the air and end up in a bigger mess

katholdbird said:

Hi All I'm not sure thus is the right forum to ask this but here goes, I am in a complete mess with my 1,000s of bird photos and wondered how anyone else organises their photos.I have a vague idea that I want to keep about 10-20 of each species and have bought a new hard drive for this purpose. How do you manage yours? do you just have a great list of folders or is there a better way. Cheers Kath

Click to expand...

Hi Kath,
seems like we should meet up again and sort this problem out properly.

I've all sorts of photos (and video) which I file in folders by yyyy/mm/dd-camera-subject. I have Lightroom, but tend to use flickr more, both for backup and indexing.

njlarsen: "An alternative to Lightroom that makes much more sense to my way of thinking is ACDSee. It catalogs files where they already are, you don't have to first import. It is also cheaper."
Lightroom's system of cataloging always seemed a bit of a pain to me. Thanks Niels, I might give ACDSee a try - I'm not bothered about the editing capabilities.

Dave.