NEWSLETTER
INSPIRATION
DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKINGFocus on Photos – File Organization
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Hi everyone, Beckie here! This week I wanted to share with you some tips for organizing and managing your photos on your computer. Oh – and I encourage you to share YOUR favorite organization tips in the comments of this post!
Managing Photo Files
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Uploading files to your computer. Even if your camera will plug directly into your computer, using a memory card reader is a safer, more reliable way to transfer your photos. No more worrying about your camera battery, no more dragging the camera over to the computer. Just pop out the memory (and I always pop in a fresh one at the same time!) and plug it into the reader.
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Utilizing Software for the Transfer. I prefer to use the file import settings from my photo management software over my camera software (another reason I just pull out the memory card). Photoshop CS comes with Adobe Bridge, and PSE comes with the Elements Organizer – both of which have great import utilities. You can also use Adobe Lightroom for this purpose as well. All three will allow you to specify a default location and a default folder/file naming structure to use every time you upload. Here’s an example of the file upload utility from Bridge (the options are very similar with PSE Organizer):
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Photo Folder Structure. I take soooo many pictures at a time that I create a folder for every day (see the setting highlighted in purple above).
Delete the bad and tag the good!
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Delete the bad. Do yourself a HUGE favor and immediately delete the bad photos! You know, the ones with horrible expressions, horrible focus, etc. If you don’t get rid of them now, you’ll be looking through them for YEARS thinking “some day I need to take the time to delete these crappy shots” :).
Tag the Good. Ah, and here’s where it gets interesting…There are numerous software programs that support tagging, and there are even MORE suggested methods of structuring your tags.
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Software for Tagging. As Scrapbookers, you might have already seen or even used ACDSee. I do not use ACDSee for my photos – primarily because ACDSee doesn’t apply my color calibration profile. {Creating a calibration profile is a way to ensure that your monitor is displaying colors the way they would be printed. Most monitors present photos as being “cooler”, or more bluish, than what they really are}. Additionally, ACDSee has not proven itself to be as stable to me as other photo management tools. I have, however, used Adobe Light Room 2, Bridge, and Elements Organizer (with PSE 8) for tagging photos and all three work well. In fact, the Elements Organizer 8 has a pretty cool facial recognition feature and you can ask it to automatically tag faces for you!
Regardless of the software used, here is the method I use for tagging photos:
- If it’s worthy of a scrapbook page, I give it its own tag. The entire group gets an “EVENT”, or “LOCATION” tag. As a scrapbooker, I think about how I would want to document the event. If it is a birthday party at the park, I give it a birthday party tag. If its just another play day at the park, I give it a “park/playground” tag (that I use over and over). For example, I don’t scrapbook every trip to the park, but I do intend to scrap a page about the time we spent at the park this summer. So I tag them all under “Park/playground” so I can easily pick my favorite photos to scrap when I’m ready to create the page.
- PEOPLE tags…you can make yourself crazy trying to tag everyone in every photo. At this point, I only tag a person in a photo if the photo itself is good. I simply ask myself…”If I was creating a scrapbook page about ____, is this a photo I’d want to use?”. This is an awesome way to quickly and easily locate those really good multi-purpose portraits. Yesterday I took photos of the kids playing in a kiddie pool and tagged them as “kiddie pool”, and then I tagged one really great shot of my daughter by name:
- Viewing Photos by Tags. Its slightly different for each software, but for Bridge, you simply right-click on the tag name (in the purple box) and select “Find”. A search window opens up that lets you specify how wide of a search to perform (all folders or current folder only, for example). This is the key reason why I only tag really GOOD portraits of people with “people” tags. I can use my “Piper” tag to quickly find all of my favorite photos of my daughter the next time I’m ready to create a layout about her. Otherwise, I know I can find all of the other pictures of the kids playing in the pool by viewing the “Yard Pool” tag. This will bring up multiple sets of photos from different dates (we play in our little kiddie pool at least once a week!) but that’s fine – I’m eventually going to scrap ONE layout about all the time we spent in the pool this summer. The rest of the photos will likely only get used if they are really good portraits of the kids – worthy enough to have been tagged by name.
Create back-up copies of your Photos
I’ve accumulated nearly 10 years worth of digital photos already, and I’ve been using this system for organizing photos for the past 8 years. Please don’t put your precious family memories at risk by only storing them in one location! Hard drives WILL fail – its only a matter of when! So sticking to a backup process is the single most important thing to do!
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Your backup location should be a secondary computer or device with sufficient storage space to hold lots of photos. Now “lots” of photos will vary – newer cameras produce very large files, shooting RAW creates huge files! For several years I used a desktop PC with around 500GB storage space (we added a secondary hard drive to increase the storage capacity). About a year ago I upgraded to a NAS – network area storage device – that has two 1TB drives. They are “mirrored”, meaning I only use 1TB of space on the primary drive, and the NAS automatically copies the content over to the second drive as a backup. I have the ReadyNas Duo. A laptop that you travel with should NEVER be your backup!
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Establish a folder structure to allow you to easily backup your photos. I have used a year/month structure for years and find that it works well for me. My backup location has a 2010 folder, as well as one folder for each month of the year. I create them ahead of time all at once to make my backup process quicker later.
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Establish a backup routine and stick with it! During the first week of every month, I copy all of the photos from the previous month to my backup location. For example, the first week of August I copied the completed July folder up to the 2010 folder on my NAS. If other people depend on your photos (business clients, etc) – you might will need to copy them to your backup location more frequently.
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Burn copies for offsite storage. 1-2 times per year, we burn copies of our photos onto CD/DVDs and take them to my parents’ house. Since my NAS and my PC are always in my house, we would be at risk of losing everything in the event of some catastrophic event at our home. Having these backup discs is yet another level of protection.
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Scrapbook your photo CDs! Why not turn your backup into a part of your scrapbook? Burn a CD with photos from a major even like a family vacation, or photos from the summer months, or even just your favorite photos from the year and then integrate the disc into your scrapbook! Create a hybrid page and glue the disc protector onto your paper. Then the disc will slide in and out and will be there any time you need it!
Trying to access another computer or a NAS over the network will be slow, particularly if you utilize wireless access to your network. So I generally keep about a year’s worth of photos on my scrapbooking laptop at all times. I know that if I delete them, edit them, or even if something were to happen to my laptop, I’d still be OK because the original photos are all on my backup system.
The method I described is a “upload to working location and backup to storage location” method. If you prefer, you could also do the exact opposite: upload your photos to your back up storage location and only copy down to your working location periodically. Select the method that sounds best for you – but most importantly – STICK WITH IT!
Photo Edits
One final note on working with photo files…I don’t bother saving edited or cropped versions of my pictures after I’ve printed them. I only save the original, unedited version. Getting comfortable with this has saved me SO much time and stress, not to mention space on my hard drive and backup system! The only exception is photos that require a significant amount of work, that I’m not likely to be able to re-create again successfully. You’ll likely need to crop every photo specific to the print size you wish to produce later anyway, so you should ALWAYS keep the original file. This decision has freed me from the burden of saving multiple copies/versions of the same photo :)
I hope you found some useful tips in here today! I would love it if you shared YOUR favorite photo organization tips in the comments below, too!
Aug 19, 2010 @ 09:04:10
For backup I strongly recommend Carbonite or Mozy. They are remote online storage back up programs that run scheduled on your computer and keep your data in a secure location. If your computer crashes–you can just click a button and it will restore your entire computer exactly as you had it before. Much less cumbersome than copying tons of CDs/DVDs that can lose information over time.
Thanks for your tips…I also organize like Marya does.
Aug 19, 2010 @ 10:28:57
Thanks Heather! I have heard really great things about Carbonite and Mozy. Have you had to do a restore yet from either site? That’s the only question I had – i did see ONE comment (which does NOT mean there’s an issue, I know!) where someone had a hard time with the restore process. Which do you prefer? any pros/cons between the two for people interested in utilizing on-line storage?
thanks!
Aug 19, 2010 @ 11:11:51
Thanks! I was looking into Carbonite. I’ll check them out!
Aug 18, 2010 @ 23:17:06
I organize my photos much the same as mentioned, year, month, occasion. I just use Windows Explorer. To back up I upload to SmugMug and I burn to dvd. I also keep on EHD.
For my scrap supplies, I only use two sites now so I make sure I back those up, since I recently had an EHD crash and had get some of my Shabby Shoppe products re-downloaded.
To organize my scrap supplies I make sure I have a preview in each kit named preview. I can do a search in Windows for the word preview and they will all come up and I can see previews for everything. I haven’t gotten into tagging, I tried ACDSee out and didn’t like it. Tried another couple organizers didn’t like them either. I have PSE6 but don’t use it often.
This works for me. I take a couple thousand photo/year.
Thanks for the suggestions and discussion.
Aug 19, 2010 @ 10:26:55
oooh…for my scrap supplies, I’ve been copying the preview file from each kit to a special folder named “preview”. I never thought of using the windows search feature to find them instead! what a great tip! thanks for sharing, Susan!
I personally know 3 people who have had EHDs crash, so thanks for bringing that up…an EHD is at risk of mechanical failure (the spinning discs inside) as well as accidental damage. TWO people I know have had a dog knock an EHD off a table while it was in use!
Aug 19, 2010 @ 11:12:59
I use Explorer too. Great tip on the preview. It gets cumbersome looking in each folder for what you want. Thanks for the tip:)
Aug 18, 2010 @ 23:11:15
Thanks Beckie! You’ve definitely started me thinking seriously about this! Loved reading everybody’s comments too! :o)
Aug 18, 2010 @ 18:00:48
Thank you for sharing your system, Becky!
I will share mine – maybe it suits someone better.
As a professional photographer I deal with hundreds of pictures every day. Tags are great but not enough.
STRUCTURE is the key to order. Every photo file that gets into my computer gets immediately renamed in a certain way ( i have bridge template for that) – YYYY-MM-DD-EVENT(optional)-SEQUENCE_NUMBER (usually 4 or 3 digits)
Folder structure can be seen on pics below. Normally i have one folder for my own family pics for each month & separate folders for each client session or family trip, birthday and etc. For ex. 2010-08 – is general folder for family pics, 2010-08-VACATION – is for vacation pics (from 2 weeks of august), 2010-08-12-IZBUKA -pics taken on 12th of August for my client. So folder naming is pretty the same as photos. The pros are that all folders and pictures keep their order because of names.
I have 2 huge folders PHOTOS & SCRAPBOOKING – i will show you my photos folder
It looks like this http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32207PM.png
Aug 18, 2010 @ 18:01:18
There are YYYY folders. Inside them are YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-EVENT or YYYY-MM-DD-EVENT folders
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32738PM.png
inside each month or month-event folder are 3 separate folders – YYYY-MM-CAPTURES (for my raw files and film-scans or simply for original non-edited pics straight out of your camera), YYYY-MM-DEVELOPS (edited scans and tiffs from my raw files), YYYY-MM-WEBSITE – pics that i upload to web, blog & my site, small 900×600px jpeg files
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32842PM.png
Now everything is conveniently organized =) I’m pretty sure you remember your important dates and will never forget when is your DD or DS birthday. Now you can find that pics easily
That is pretty it!
PS My last advice is BACKUP!!!! At least once ( i do it twise)! And keep that backups in a separate place – hide it somewhere =) I keep mine at my parents house and my parents-in-law. That is important, really. Imagine you have a fire in your house (hope you never ever will) – i had one =( My computer & HDD were gone – but my pics are still with me
Have a nice day!
Marya
Aug 19, 2010 @ 10:23:09
Thanks Marya!! thank you so much for taking the time to share your process here! WOW – you are a living example of the importance of off-site backup. Thanks for sharing that experience. Losing your “stuff” would be devastating enough, i can’t imagine if you had lost your memories, too.
Aug 18, 2010 @ 16:56:16
I take several thousand photos a year and I also use the system of downloading to a date folder, yyyy mm dd. I highly, highly recommend going thru the photos at the time you download them and copy and paste the good ones or the “favorites” into a yearly favorites folder (eg 2010 Favorites). This is the folder that I scrap from. So when I scrap, I am only looking thru a fraction of the pictures that I take. 2000 Photos is a lot better than 15000! As far as edited photos, I will sometimes save them as jpgs with the same name, but generally I edit them at the time I scrap them and I have the flattened jpg in the scrapped page so unless it’s one of the cream of the crop pictures, I do not keep more extras around. I back up my Western Digital Passport 500G to 1TB external hard drive regularly, very regularly. I also make DVDs of the yearly Favorites and all my video clips too. AND I take more precautions by uploading to Shutterfly at High Quality Res for free backup. Then I can use those pics for printing or to go directly to my Shutterfly website, which is also free and awesome. :) I back up my high quality scrapbook pages to Shutterfly too. This all works really well for me, after some trial and error with other ideas. I have found it’s a good alternative or supplement to tagging.
Aug 19, 2010 @ 10:21:08
Thanks Sheila! I use my keyword tags from Bridge when I scrap, which serves the same purpose! I’m like you – I take TONS of pics! So I generally only go through the event tags to decide which “event” to scrap, or if I want to scrap something about the kids, I look through the “people” keyword tag. That’s my version of “favorites”!
I used to upload to shutterfly, too! only I got too lazy :( I should get back to that. thanks so much for sharing your process with us!
Aug 18, 2010 @ 12:58:44
Thank you for the great tips! I had started organizing and tagging all my digital scrapbooking graphics and my photos using Elements Organizer, but then I discovered Picasa 3 software from Google (which is free!), and I think that it is so much easier and faster! The great thing is that Picasa is smart enough to keep track of when you move, add, delete, or rename files or folders.
Aug 18, 2010 @ 14:11:50
I have heard people talk about Picasa (and speak very highly of it!) but I’ve never tried it myself. I think its laziness about learning a new program, LOL! I did briefly use Google Chrome (browser) but switched back to Mozilla because google chrome doesn’t (or didn’t at the time) apply the color calibration profile, either. I wonder if Picasa does? hmmm…
Also – its funny, but I tried using bridge for my scrapbook supplies and didn’t like it AT ALL. I definitely prefer the ACDSee interface for that (again, haven’t tried Picasa there either). Only problem was that ACDSee kept crashing any time I had Bridge open. SO now I just use windows to organize my scrap supplies.
Aug 18, 2010 @ 10:40:08
I was just discussing this with my husband! Since I’ve gotten into digital scrap, my files system is just become disorganized, and so far not the best backup. Do you suggest online backup at all? Thanks for the wonderful post – has really got me thinking. Instead of disks to family, we use a safety deposit box for important papers (i.e. birth certificates), dvds of photos, we even have taken pictures with info like serial numbers of certain items in our home in case of stolen, fire, damage, etc. We live in an area with a lot of forest fire potential (in fact this area almost burned down in 2002), so this is a major concern for me. Again, thanks!
Aug 18, 2010 @ 14:17:18
I’m really bad about backing up my scrap supplies. I truthfully just backup my finished layouts using the same procss as my photos – once a month. I only hold on to .psd files until I have a printed copy of the layout in my hands (in case I find an error on it), but then I delete all of the old .psd files.
I used to keep the .zip files for all my scrap supplies, but read that .zip files can corrupt over time and it’s not good to rely on them for archival purposes. The only kits I have backed up are my Shabby Shoppe products (which is ironic, because those are the only ones I could probably easily re-download, ha ha!). Everything else I just find that I don’t use multiple times. Many other kits I buy are so “themed” that they’re only good for one or two layouts anyhow.
I recently got a new laptop and didn’t copy any of my old supplies over except my Shabby Princess stuff and TWO of my favorite alphas from another place. It is actually very liberating not to have to look at those old kits anymore! :) SO I’m not the best person to give advice on archiving scrap supplies, LOL!
Aug 18, 2010 @ 08:47:48
Thank you for sharing your system, Becky!
I will share mine – maybe it suits someone better.
As a professional photographer I deal with hundreds of pictures every day. Tags are great but not enough.
STRUCTURE is the key to order. Every photo file that gets into my computer gets immediately renamed in a certain way ( i have bridge template for that) – YYYY-MM-DD-EVENT(optional)-SEQUENCE_NUMBER (usually 4 or 3 digits)
Folder structure can be seen on pics below. Normally i have one folder for my own family pics for each month & separate folders for each client session or family trip, birthday and etc. For ex. 2010-08 – is general folder for family pics, 2010-08-VACATION – is for vacation pics (from 2 weeks of august), 2010-08-12-IZBUKA -pics taken on 12th of August for my client. So folder naming is pretty the same as photos. The pros are that all folders and pictures keep their order because of names.
I have 2 huge folders PHOTOS & SCRAPBOOKING – i will show you my photos folder
It looks like this http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32207PM.png
There are YYYY folders. Inside them are YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-EVENT or YYYY-MM-DD-EVENT folders
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32738PM.png
inside each month or month-event folder are 3 separate folders – YYYY-MM-CAPTURES (for my raw files and film-scans or simply for original non-edited pics straight out of your camera), YYYY-MM-DEVELOPS (edited scans and tiffs from my raw files), YYYY-MM-WEBSITE – pics that i upload to web, blog & my site, small 900x600px jpeg files
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b46/ziganini/Livejournal/Screenshot2010-08-18at32842PM.png
Now everything is conveniently organized =) I’m pretty sure you remember your important dates and will never forget when is your DD or DS birthday. Now you can find that pics easily
That is pretty it!
PS My last advice is BACKUP!!!! At least once ( i do it twise)! And keep that backups in a separate place – hide it somewhere =) I keep mine at my parents house and my parents-in-law. That is important, really. Imagine you have a fire in your house (hope you never ever will) – i had one =( My computer & HDD were gone – but my pics are still with me
Have a nice day!
Marya