Just like organizing your kitchen cabinets, bookshelf or desk, knowing where things are only helps you be more effective when truly you need to use the thing you’re trying to find. In this Workflow Wednesday, we’ll talk about image organization basics. There are three core components to your photo organization system : physical location, file naming and metadata. The first component is physical location, that is physical location on disk. If you have trouble answering the question : “Where are all of your photos?”, then you will want to pay close attention. We’ll talk about simple steps to keep your physical location in order. Next, the name of your images will become increasingly important as you amass thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of images over the years. Creating and understanding a file naming scheme – and sticking with it – will help you down the road. Finally, we’ll talk about metadata and how it is the final critical piece of the organization puzzle.

Physical File Location

Knowing where your files live is a critical first step in organizing them.

Knowing where your images are is the first step in organizing them. First, if your images are not on a single hard drive, you may consider putting them there. Not because we’re suggesting you put all your images at risk of a single point of failure – we assume you have a backup of these images elsewhere, and that you may also consider a multitude of hard drive redudancy options not discussed in this Workflow Wednesday – but because when you’re trying to organize something, and it doesn’t matter what, having everything in one place makes working with it that much easier. Photos are no exception.

Strive for simplicity : Try to keep it to no more than 3 directory levels

1. Make a “Photos” top level directory

If there is one simple rule of file location, it’s make sure there is a root or top level directory, then work your way down. We tend to like “Photos” and if you’re on a Windows system, you can certainly use the “My Photos” folder under “My Documents”. If, however, you are using an external hard drive, “Photos” works just fine.


2. Make the next directory level by year

Over the years, we have realized that it is rare that important life events are filed in our brains without year information. We’re remarkably good at remembering the year we bought our first house, the year we first traveled overseas or the year we graduated high school or college. The next level under “Photos”, might then be year – 2008, for example.


3. Make a third directory level, but only if you must, and re-consider it twice

If you have a third level, organize it by something important to you : “Life”, “Kids”, “Other” – but keep it simple, since you may have a tendency to go overboard and have too many categories. You may want to keep it as simple as “Jan-Mar” or “Q1″ or “Winter” … this way you can keep your third level directories simple, yet effective. Your first goal should just be to relieve some of the load of the directory above, but not too much. In other words, you’re taking work away from the purpose of your cataloging software if you’ve got more than say 5 or 6 subdirectories at the third level. This third level should be large grained, simple, yet effective.

Once you’ve gone through step 1 and 2, and reconsidered step 3, you should have a structure that is simple, immediately recognizable and easy to stick with.

Here are some example structures :

Sample #1

Sample #2

Sample #3

Sample #4

Sample #5

You can decide what you like best. Remember too, that many software packages alphabetize your folders for you – so you might include a numeric value in front of a textual name if it will not alphabetize correctly. The goal is to be able to open the directory and immediately understand the contents quickly.

Now that we have the first step done, it’s time to get to the second step – file renaming.

File Renaming

Strive for completeness, but only include what’s necessary.

Many years ago, when we started taking digital photos, we never imagined how difficult it would be to come up with a lasting naming system. After talking with a number of people, both pro and amateur, it became obvious everyone does it their own way. Some photographers never rename their images. If you are diligent about putting your images in the proper physical location – this may be entirely fine. What’s not obvious is when the photo was taken – particularly if the image metadata is not immediately accessible. So coming up with some alternate file renaming scheme has value.

In the spirit of completeness and simplicity, you may want to keep the original filename as at least part of the filename. Some cameras do actually store the original date of the image as the filename. If this is the case, you may not need to do much else to rename the file. The only problem there is when you get a camera in the future that doesn’t name the files that way, you’ll have to adjust your scheme. To avoid this, you may want to make your own scheme up altogether.

We like a scheme that includes the original name of the file as it came out of the camera, as well as the date the photo was taken ( regardless of whether the camera named it that way originally ) as well as the camera model. It is amazing how much information, date and camera model alone can tell you about the image. We know of more elaborate schemes, that include unique text-based names with loads of words in the name of the photo – but this just takes too much time to do and long-term maintenance will be a nightmare. Your names will get long and sorting order will make no sense. Leave that kind of tagging for metadata and your cataloging tool! Here are some sample filenames you might consider as templates :

19990101_DCSN0003_CanonDC210
20040503_IMG_2000_Canon10D
20070108_IMG_0332_CanonA700

You can immediately tell from the filename the date the image was taken, the original file name and the camera make and model. This system is nice also because if you follow the basic workflow, you will burn an original copy of your image as soon as you move it to your computer – presumably before it has been renamed. That means that the disc will have filenames like DSCN0003.JPG or IMG_2000.JPG. Since you will label that original disc with at least the date and perhaps the camera make, you’ll be able to quickly and easily go back to the absolute original image using this simple naming scheme, since the three most important pieces of information – date image was taken, original filename and camera make are embedded in the filename! Of course, you may burn the renamed images first before editing them, and that would make life even easier.

You can revise the scheme here to your own liking – just remember to keep it simple and make sure it can endure the years!

Since there are a few tools to actually do the renaming, for example, Photoshop Elements allows you to rename your images upon import/acquisition, we’ll have another post that discusses some other options should PSE not adequately allow you to use the scheme you want. Unfortunately the scheme mentioned above is not possible in the latest version of PSE, but don’t fret, there is another very good, very robust and FREE tool that will provide you a very good renaming solution.

Metadata

Effective organization lives and dies with your metadata.

Metadata is photographic information embedded into the digital photo that can be retrieved (and revised) later by another program (and even your camera). Every time you click the shutter, the camera stores vital information automatically to the image in it’s metadata. This metadata contains useful information like the time the photo was taken, the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, flash power – even GPS location information for cameras with GPS built in. There is a wealth of important information stored within the image metadata, and it is therefore a critical final piece of the organization puzzle. The complete details of image metadata are part of a more detailed post to come, but what you will need to remember is now that all good cataloging tools will provide you the capability to store image tags and keywords directly into the metadata of the image itself. In fact, it’d be a good idea to make sure you have a cataloging program that definitely stores your catalog keywords and tags back into the file. That way, if at any moment you want to change programs all of your tags and keywords stay with your images and not with your catalog. Anything otherwise will render all the work of tagging your images useless!

With metadata keywords, you can start the fun work of classifying your images more precisely. You can store information such as the person or people in the photo, the location the photograph was taken. Important keywords of relevance to the photograph like “birthday” or “reunion”. We’re not yet ready to talk about the keyword schemes you can employ in your own catalog, but know that this is where the details of your image cataloging live (or die).

That’s probably enough today to fill your mind in one session! But we will be revisiting some aspects of this WW – especially and specifically the metadata section, where we will begin to understand keyword schemes necessary to actually help us tag and subsequently find our photos more easily and naturally.

Enjoy and happy clicking! Continue Reading

There are many ways to capture an image, but only a few ways to get your photos from your camera to your computer. This WW session will go over those methods and make sure that you can understand which way is best for you. At the end of this session we’ll show the pros and cons of each method, but for now, we’ll introduce a few of the common image acquisition methods

Since the primary goal of taking photos is to do something with them, you need to have them on a computer or at the very least on a CD or DVD.

The basic methods of acquiring images are in the diagram below, and we will discuss each of them in the following paragraphs.

Acquiring Images Without A (Your) Computer

We aren’t going to spend a lot of time on this method, since it probably isn’t the most fun way to get your digital images, but it is possible to get your images from your camera to your computer without ever plugging the camera or memory card into at least YOUR computer. We’re not talking about giving your camera or memory card to a friend and saying “here, can you get these images off of this, please”. We’re talking about going to a local photo center, like your local drug store (Walgreens) or general store (Target, Walmart) or local camera store (Wolf, Ritz). Most of these full service photo centers have a digital kiosk, and at that kiosk you can insert your camera’s memory card into it. The kiosk machine will read your card and ask you what you want to do with the images. At some point, you can ask (or tell) the machine to save all of your images to CD or DVD. If you choose that option, you will probably wait a few minutes, and perhaps up to an hour or two depending on how whether they burn your CD/DVD on the spot or whether it is queued up with all the other image orders they have. Regardless, within a short period of time and WITHOUT a computer, you have just acquired all of your images to a semi-permanent medium. What you do with your images at that point is up to you.

Acquiring Images Through The Camera

One of the most popular methods for acquiring images is through the camera directly connected to the computer. The most common way this is achieved is through the USB cable that likely came with your camera, and this is probably the method you first used to get your first digital images from your camera. This method is easy and hassle-free and you can use the same cable on more than one computer if you need to, for example get images onto your laptop when you’re on vacation or out of town. The transmission speeds from the camera to the computer are generally quite fast, but this will vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer, and of course, the memory card speed and size will play a large role. Using this method, your camera will look like another device or drive to your computer, which will allow you to interact with the images on the camera as if there were on a local hard drive, CD or DVD. On Windows XP and Vista you will be able to browse your images directly from the camera while its still connected to the computer. To do this on Windows, you just open a file explorer, find your camera in the device tree that you see all of your other devices (hard drives, CDs and DVDs), click on your camera and you’ll then be able to navigate to your images and interact with them like any other file on your computer.

As an aside, this method is increasingly being replaced or substituted by wireless connections. Some cameras, for instance the Nikon P3, will connect to your computer over a wireless Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. No cables are required, leaving you worry- and cable-free yet wireless transmission speeds may still lag slightly begin wired transfers.

Acquiring Images Through The Memory Card

Another popular method of acquiring images is through an external or internal memory card reader. With this method, you will just remove the memory card from the camera, insert the card into the reader, and again, the card will appear on your computer as if it were a hard drive, CD or DVD. If you have a laptop or more recent Desktop computer, there is a good change it will have slots that accept a varied of memory cards, the most popular of which are SD, XD, MMC and Memory Stick (Sony). You might find this method to be as convenient as the connecting the camera directly, and in some cases it may be faster than the direct connection. If you have more than one memory card to obtain images from, you can leave one card in your camera and put the other card in your reader and acquire the images simultaneously, dramatically reducing the transfer time for two or more cards.

If you buy an external reader, it will most likely be connected via the USB port on your computer. There are some external readers that are based on the Firewire standard, which is commonly used for hi-speed digital video transfers and is similar to USB but faster. Such Firewire readers, however, are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

What’s Happening To My Images When I Connect My Computer

For a lot of us, when we purchased our first digital camera, we followed all the instructions by installing the manufacturer’s programs and drivers for connecting our cameras. In general, this isn’t a bad thing to do, but sometimes the software uses defaults that do unexpected things. One such thing is downloading images from the camera onto your computer without you necessarily agreeing to this. What then happens, is that every time you connect your computer, that program is registered as the default program to download your images to. This, of course, can have all sorts of unwanted side effects. First, the program that may be grabbing your images, may be a program you have never seen or used before, nor intend to use in the future. Sometimes, these applications are “bundled” with the manufacturer’s driver’s and you may not even know the name of the application, let alone what it was intended to do. Second, if you don’t know where your images are being downloaded to, then you may be in for a wild goose chase to try and find those vacation images you are dying to review on the big screen.

If you are one of the many camera users that have a “rogue” program taking over your images, there are some fairly easy ways to disable such programs – and perhaps uninstall them altogether. See this screencast on how to deal with just this issue.

My Camera Is Connected, Now What?

There are a lot of things that culminate to the final task at hand : acquiring your images from your camera. We’ll be discussing in detail the techniques which will be used to catalog your images – including renaming them, tagging them and adding any addition metadata that you may find useful and relevant.

For now, however, we care about one task and one task only : copying your images from your camera to your computer. One the the fastest ways to do this is (after having plugged your camera or memory card into your computer), to manually copy your images from the camera to a designated location on in your personal folders or desktop. This can usually be done by simply dragging and dropping the images from your camera to the folder you want to contain your images.

This is enough to get us started. In the next session, we’ll begin to discuss acquiring images automatically into Photoshop Elements 6.0 as well as some additional workflow steps you can follow to rename, backup and your images and begin the initial cataloging workflow.