How do you organize your photos?

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spinifer
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How do you organize your photos?

Post by spinifer »

A year out from my hard drive crash, which wiped out all my photos, I am starting to amass a new set. I want to establish a system of organization and file naming to keep track of everything before I accumulate too many to implement a change. I am intersted in seeing how others name and organize their photos before I accumulate too many. Please share.


Here is the system I have established so far but am still playing around with:

Each picture is named with the following format:

:arrow: Breif Specific Locale_Town_County State_Date_GPS_Database Record #_Original photo #

So a file name would look something like this:

:arrow: Lums Pond SP_Bear_New Castle Co. DE_19 Jun 2010_ N39.56194_W75.71681_48403HERP_14159.JPG

I then have taxon folders to organize the photos into. The above file would be stored here:

:arrow: My Pictures/Frogs/Lithobates clamitans melanota

The trick is to keep all the data associated with the photo while keeping the file name from getting too long.
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justinm
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by justinm »

I put them in folders with dates and locations. I can usually id the animal from that point.
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brick911
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by brick911 »

Wow. I just mix them into a Herping 2010 folder, and put a new folder for every date. I should get more organized.
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Don Becker
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Don Becker »

Each date has a folder, the individual files are named based on date and time, GPS and other metadata is stored in the EXIF/IPTC data of the photo (but not in my online versions).
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spinifer
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by spinifer »

When a photo is uploaded to the database, is the original filename preserved or lost?
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Don Becker
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Don Becker »

spinifer wrote:When a photo is uploaded to the database, is the original filename preserved or lost?
Lost.
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spinifer
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by spinifer »

Good to know. No need to update my file names before I upload then, which is what I was doing.
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chrish
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by chrish »

I use the keywording capabilities of Adobe Lightroom to keep my photos organized.
I keep them in folders based on place and date (so I have a folder called "Yucatan Peninsula 2010-05"). I have those grouped by locality (so that folder is under my Mexico folder). When I import the photo into lightroom I add a keyword to each photo automatically which puts my copyright year and name and the place name in each photo's data.

I then keyword each photo in lightroom with the name of the critter (I have a hierarchical LR keyword list of all the world's Reptiles, Amphibians, north American Birds + all bird families, and mammal families with a few species). So if I photographed a Terciopelo on my trip, I type "Bothrops asper" in the keyword box. I can then find that photo by searching for any of the following terms:
Bothrops asper
Bothrops
Viperidae
Serpentes
Squamata
Reptilia
or Yucatan Peninsula

If I wanted to see all my photos of any Viperid, I could search for that in LR and it would bring up that photo and all the other viperid photos.

I back up my photos and my LR keyword list frequently!
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Fieldnotes
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Fieldnotes »

Example of how my picture-folders are organized:

My Albums
Herpetology
Reptiles
Snakes
Crotalus
Crotalus oreganus
C. o. helleri


Use the same technique to insert amphibians or any other taxon.
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herpseeker1978
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by herpseeker1978 »

I just organize by year, month and date. nothing exciting

Josh
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justinm
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by justinm »

Chris are you adding a Copyright watermark from Lightroom? I use 2.something... I have loved it so far and I'm eagerly awaiting 3 as 2 was so much better than 1. If you're adding your copyright to the photo can you tell me how you're doing it?
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Don Becker
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Don Becker »

Justin, if you end up using my crappy gallery software, it will add copyrights automatically.
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Brian Hubbs
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Brian Hubbs »

My files are named, ie.-Kingsnakes, or Cal kings, or rattlesnakes and i dump the pics into the files with the following info (example-W Diamondback):

WDB-AZ-Maricopa-Tempe-6-30-10.jpg

that gives me the name, state, county, place and date. If I enter it into the database, the title then reads-

X-WDB-AZ-Maricopa-Tempe-6-30-10.jpg

If the pic is digital, I don't include the date because that's already in the photo.
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jonathan
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by jonathan »

I do it basically like Justin - I have folders for each location, and subfolders for each date within that location. I don't name the files within the subfolders, but it's pretty easy to find what I'm looking for from there. If I don't remember the exact date I saw something I can always do a search using naherp - that's an advantage of having all my records in the database.
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Brian Hubbs
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Brian Hubbs »

I think it's time for an update of the Historical contest leaders Jonathan... :lol:
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spinifer
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by spinifer »

Brian Hubbs wrote:I think it's time for an update of the Historical contest leaders Jonathan... :lol:
You have been entering pic frames from video, does that mean you are scraping the bottom of your bucket on historic data to enter?
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Brian Hubbs
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by Brian Hubbs »

Yeah, but I have a lot of slides and digi that I still haven't entered because they weren't county records or new species, but I also have a lot more video too... :lol: It's amazing how many herps you can videotape over 12 years. Sorry, gotta go now...one of my tapes got stuck in the camera and I need a professional to extract it. Off to Best Buy... :roll:
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chrish
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Re: How do you organize your photos?

Post by chrish »

justinm wrote:Chris are you adding a Copyright watermark from Lightroom? I use 2.something... I have loved it so far and I'm eagerly awaiting 3 as 2 was so much better than 1. If you're adding your copyright to the photo can you tell me how you're doing it?
Justin,

Most of my photos have the copyright added automatically by LR. I do this by checking the "Add Copyright Watermark" box under Metadata when I export the files.
When you check this it takes whatever text you have in the Metadata under the Copyright box. You actually have to include the © character in the copyright text if you want it included.

There are several approaches to this:

1. If you don't care about the date/year, just select all your photos in the Organizer and add your copyright message to all of them simultaneously with no year. If you want to add the year, you will have to select a year's worth of photos at a time.
2. A simpler strategy to use in the future is to create metadata presets for your imports. So I have a series of metadata presets named "Copyright 2010", "Copyright 2009", "Copyright 2008", etc. When I import photos, I choose the correct one and it puts "© Chris Harrison 2010" in the copyright metadata category for each photo. Then when I export, it puts it on there for me.

As for upgrading, LR 3 is out AFAIK right now. I haven't decided what the benefit of upgrading will be, but I will probably do it in the near future anyway.

Chris
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