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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Photo Organizing (1 Viewer)

Young Birder

Or WarThrush
I have decided to organize my photos offline, and wondered how other people organize theirs.

Organizing them has made me find I'm a bit behind with what species go where.

thanks
 
I would strongly recommend using software that keeps a catalogue of your photos. It should allow annotating your photos with your own keywords, and at least a modicum of organization among those keywords. That way you should be able to find all your photos of thrushes, say, or all pictures you have of plants in a particular country, or the like. If you have a lot of pictures already then getting them into such a system will be quite a bit of work, but adding new shots is not so bad.

Personally I only have experience with Lightroom, which is probably the most widely used software since it also allows quite a bit of basic editing. There certainly are other options availabke, such as ACDSee. These options cost money, but if you have a lot of photos it will be worth it. Adobe offers discounts for those in education. Also, it's not necessary to buy every new version.

I certainly wouldn't want to be without this kind of system now.

Andrea
 
Strongly agree with Andrea about using some type of software, and I am one person using ACDSee. With a good program, you can access as said all your photos of a species from different locations with just a single click of the mouse, even though you have the photos placed in folders by e.g., day or location.

If you think about trying to do the same using only folders, then you would need to either say "I can only access by species or by location, but not both" or you would need to have massive duplication of the images on your harddisk (same photo present in the species folder + copied to your location folder + copied to a folder with whatever other info you might want to search for).

ACDSee works with the photos as they exist on your HD -- some other programs necessitate import of the photo first and also necessitates export before an edited photo is available to other programs. I am not sure where lightroom is on that spectrum.

For all database programs, please make sure you back up that information, and also that you do not use windows tools to edit or delete photos, that will confuse the database program.

Niels
 
Take a look at Photo Supreme if you will not be doing any post processing. It is the best DAM out there. If post processing with a DAM, Capture One or Lightroom are good choices
 
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