Organising tips

Hi chaps - I just wanted to ask this community what their approaches are to organising their pictures.

For me, physical storage is'nt a problem, I just think I need a far better way to arrange everything. At the moment I pile my pictures together, still keeping them in their relevant date stamped folder. But reffering back to them is starting to become a chore and difficult to navigate through quickly.

Previously this has'nt been so much of a problem as I did'nt take as many pictures as I do nowadays, but after almost one year of having a DSLR, the amount of pics I have taken has shot up exponentially.

I need a wee bit of advice....

So far, I just put them in folders with names that describe the place or subject.

There are fancy organisation programs - that no doubt others will recommend shortly.....

What's organisation?

I keep images on CD/DVD and labelled as appropriate. It's a bugger finding relevant shots, but at least their there somewhere, safe.

Bob
have a read on this thread, there were some great tips when I asked more or less the same question a few months ago link

Fab, thanks Amin.

Thanks guys, I'm going to use Picasa. Seems easy enough.

Bob,

I also use Picasa, however I already found I'd be happy having some additional functionalities. I even thought about creating my own album application, but I still have no time for it

Picasa is a bit sluggish for one. Then it's not that easy to title / tag a mass of pictures. It does not support unicode - sometimes international descriptions won't work.

Then there's no way to treat multiple pictures as one. What I mean is - imagine I have the original picture in RAW, then jpg, then P&P version 1 and 2. They should have the same description / tags etc - but you cannot do that, you have to describe / tag each one individually.

One of the best applications I found was KPhotoAlbum (Linux), but it's not integrated in any way with Picasa (Web), so I couldn't auto-upload / synchronise my albums.

I have to get old, retire and then finally write my own album app

Thanks for that Michal; I'll bear that in mind. I've not actually used it yet, and are unfamiliar with it's features. To be fair, based on your advice I can see myself wanting something more too.

Did you mean to say Linux rather than Liux? It's not Linux only is it?(just want to see if it will work on my Windows 7 machine).

Sorry Bob, it was a typo; yes I meant Linux

The problem is that there's no MS Windows version; there are some ways to run it on Windows, but I never tried.

For now I mainly use Picasa; I save my all pictures in 3 folder trees: RAW, Unprocessed, Processed, one subfolder per date, then I describe them in Picasa (or gThumb, which I also use as a quick viewer in Linux). The good thing is that Picasa stores descriptions in EXIF tags (or it seems so), so they are available for other apps as well. For now I do not tag my pictures in Picasa, although I'm tempted by Picasa's face recognition feature. Picasa also allows grouping pictures in albums, synchronise them with web (automatically resizing to a predefined size), burning CDs with presentation. Not too bad for a freebie. But as I said, I'd like to have some more features.

Why cannot I have at least 48-hour day? I need more time!

Thanks for clarrifying that Michal. I'll have a bash with Picasa and see how it goes.

I use Elements 6 which has an excellent organiser with tagging etc, can also do various creations and direct email of images. Has also got a editor facility(trimmed down version of photoshop), worth a look. Trial version available for download (maybe V7).

The Organizer included in Photoshop Elements 6 works just fine for me. Adding tags and keywords makes searching simple and easy. You can also search by metadata.