Drowning in sea of digital photos/videos

NiftyDigits

ringo_24601 wrote: »

I use Google Picasa http://picasa.google.com/

My problem is that i've just got far too many images, i think it was 50k+ photos at the last count. In the 'early years' I put them together in folders by subjects (E.g. Weddings, holidays, parties) and then I started to move over to Year/Month/Day once I had kids

I can't put all the photos on my PC's hard disk as there isn't space, and i've found Picasa isn't amazingly portable HD friendly. It doesn't like my NAS either.

Worse still, I'd love to put them ALL by date, but a lot of the older stuff was never dated properly by my cameras. Also, there's 10 years of badly organised stuff from mobile phones to account for.

At the end of it, the best way to do it is manually going through all your photos, looking at them, trying to date them. Ideally using some tool to add meta-data that will let you re-reorganise them when it suits you.

Perhaps you can fit another internal drive or simply swap drives.

[Deleted User]

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Perhaps you can fit another internal drive or simply swap drives.

It's a laptop.. and my work laptop at that! I really need a dual NAS/external HD solution so I can keep a well organised backup.

I'm going to play around with Picasa tonight and see how easy it is to add tags to lots of images. It'd be great if it embedded them in the EXIF data, but I doubt it. I'll sit down with my ext-HD and re-organise a bunch of stuff then tag it.

My worry is that i'll tag stuff, then disconnect the HD, and next time I try to use it the tags are gone.

I've been good for the last few years, and i've put them all in YEAR/MONTH/DAY folders, with the day folders labelled with the event in the title. It doesn't help that i've had a digital camera in some form for 16 years now!

As for finding files according to date, that's part of the explorer search feature, has been for decades. Select created date from and to, hit search and hey presto.

That's wonderful if your camera had the right date/time set on it; which it often doesn't.. or if the date gets reset when you copy files around.

There is often good reason for software solutions. I especially like the face detection mode in Picasa, where it identifies and tags photos using Google's face detection algorithms.

Schools don't know jack about buying software or hardware - I still remember 14 year old me telling our deputy head he was making a terrible choice not buying IBM PCs (it was 1994) since no one would be using Acorn Archimedes computers within 2 years, let alone the cack software they ran. I know someone who makes a killing selling software to schools.

Strider590

ringo_24601 wrote: »

That's wonderful if your camera had the right date/time set on it; which it often doesn't.. or if the date gets reset when you copy files around.

It's easier to set a date on a camera than it is to fanny about later on, trying to organise files..... And on most (if not all) cameras, once the date/time is set, it never resets.

Don't copy files, cut & paste them (CTRL+X then CTRL+V) straight into their respective folders. THEN if you edit a file, create a new copy for editing (possibly in a sub folder called "edits"), never edit the original file (that's just plain stupid).

And with the above in mind, remember after cutting/removing all the files on a memory card, to always format the card in the camera before using it again.


My preferred method for organising files, is to use .bat scripting. That way I don't even have to think about it, I just go to my folders and my files are all there waiting

[Deleted User]

Great Strider, and how do you suggest I go about 'favouriting' photos, using only a folder-based system? I took about 100 photos last night, and about 30 of them are my favourite. I don't want to delete the other 70s (as I only delete photos that are completely irrelevant or blurred).

A folder system is limited. It's not terrible as you can use software post-hoc, but it's not a viable system for really browsing your photos with ease.

I have always thought I should write myself a script for copying photos from my SD to my external HD using the right folder structure but I've just never got around to it.

InsideInsurance

Strider590 wrote: »

What's wrong with a folder dated backwards so it appears in the correct order in windows.... Example: 20140523_Spain
or use subfolders too:
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Beach/
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Restuarant/
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Museum/

The problem is

a) If you go to "spain" for 2 weeks you are then ending up with 14 folders and circa 42 sub folders. How do you show all the photos easily without going through all 42 sub folders? How do you find the photos of the day you went paragliding on the beach without having to go through all 14 files?

b) A number of years later, with you frequently travelling to Spain, you want to find the photos of Barcelona Cathedral how do you know which of the 10 trips (each with multiple days and multiple sub folders) do you look at?

c) You want to do a photo album of your kids whilst on holiday during their early years. How do you know which countries they went to (rather than your business trips)? How do you remember from 3 years ago which nights they accompanied you to the restaurant and which nights they stayed with their grandparents?

Obviously you can do it all manually but it takes a lot more time than software that automatically tags 75% of this for you and can "instantly" pull out the results. Now you could create additional nesting and also duplicate images at a higher level but then you are taking up more and more space.

If you decide to clean up a few photos and you are duplicating them then you also have to ensure you put the revised version in all the folders it exists in. Again with a tagging/ properties approach you update it once and it shows up correctly in all the different "locations"/ views.

Strider590 wrote: »

As for tagging, keep that sh*t on Facebook. When I come back with an average 600 photos I don't have time to sit their putting tags on them all and what if you miss one? Becoming reliant on that nonsense is a great way to lose your files!

Tagging is certainly not just for facebook and obviously goes far beyond just face matching. Need to look at DMS systems to see how far its going these days.

So you have time to create 42 sub folders for your holiday and correctly work out which photos go into which folder (ie does the on the beach restaurant go into beach or restaurant?) but you dont have time to upload into a software tool that will automatically apply tags like date and location and allows you to bulk add tags like event. Tagging peoples faces can be done with reasonable accuracy by the systems though personally I rarely bother doing it.

My wife, who works in the creative space, certainly finds it useful to be able to tag photos of samples by what style it is, what the medium is, the date and location it was taken, season, artist, price

She sees a piece she really likes and can quickly see what other work she has seen by them and if the price is inline with their other work, trending up or down etc.

Move out of photos and into business documents and tagging becomes even more important and useful thing to do to avoid duplicating documents and the inevitable consistency issue.

Of cause some things wont be tagged correctly but the photo/ document is still there and can still be found by navigating the file system. Just as if in your dragging/dropping into subfolders you will inevitably occasionally put a photo in the wrong folder and have the same challenges in spotting its not where it should be and finding where it is.

Strider590

ringo_24601 wrote: »

Great Strider, and how do you suggest I go about 'favouriting' photos, using only a folder-based system? .

and

InsideInsurance wrote: »

The problem is

a) If you go to "spain" for 2 weeks you are then ending up with 14 folders and circa 42 sub folders. How do you show all the photos easily without going through all 42 sub folders? How do you find the photos of the day you went paragliding on the beach without having to go through all 14 files?

Well, what I do is I open the parent folder, I hit "search", I search for *.jpg, I then thumbnail the results to show me every file in every subfolder

I'm not going to answer every point you make, for as easily as I could, I just don't see the point in getting into an argument.

I tend to think my way around problems rather than relying on generalised/generic solutions that take away my full control of my files. It works for some, but not for me.

[Deleted User]

Somehow, i think Strider's Use Case is a bit different to everyone else's

Anyhoo, this thread has motivated me to move the last 6 weeks of photos from my big-ole 32gb SD card onto my external HD. I just got a fancy Toshiba FlashAir 16gb card so i'll empty that as well.

BTW - those WiFi SD cards are awsome

Strider590

^^ Keep two storage locations if you can. External drives are super cheap these days.

Windows recently decided that one of my external drives was corrupt and set about deleting data so that every file on it was 0KB in size, fortunately I had a backup.
The "corrupt" drive was actually perfectly ok, just windows had put a flag on it when it crashed a few days earlier, if I forget to disconnect the drive when starting windows, then checkdisc sees the flag and tries to delete everything again.

[Deleted User]

The NAS drive is warming up right now.

I learned my lesson about backup back in 1995 when I corrupted my homework stored on a 1.4mb floppy disk. Got a 100mb Zip drive.. ah, and to think a 128gb USB stick now costs less than that did.

InsideInsurance

Strider590 wrote: »

I tend to think my way around problems rather than relying on generalised/generic solutions that take away my full control of my files. It works for some, but not for me.

Yours is the generic solution, the photo cataloging software is the bespoke solution.

If you are talking £80,000 for software or using heavily nested folders resulting in duplicate images etc then evidently the folders is the way to go.

If you are talking a free or £50 piece of software that allows you create many views of your photos depending on your need/ desire rather than having to manually go through potentially thousands of thumbnails then my time is easily worth £50 to be able to achieve what I need to quicker/ more efficiently.