How do you organize your pictures?

[skank]

How do you guys organize your pictures?

Its a total mess up here....

Do you go sort them using folders

Or do you use tags?

Or both?

What with single shots... so no part of for ex a vacation

Im about to take a step to xbmc too

[PeterB]

My photos are organised in folders.  Everytime I copy from memory card to unRAID server, I create a new folder with that day's date.  If there was any particular event or occasion, then that gets its own folder/date.  So. something like "120729 Surigao visit".

 

However, this all becomes relatively irrelevant because I use digiKam to categorise/sort all my photos, and this doesn't rely on any order in the physical storage.

[Helmonder]

Same here... On every import the foto's get in a directory marked with a date, I add significant items in that folder to the text also..

 

So:

 

12-05-2012 - Holiday spain

02-06-2012 - Work

 

Every foto made between 13-5 and 2-6 will be in the second dir..

 

Its not ideal but works for me. I have tried other tools but I really cannot be bothered with the constant tagging and action.

 

[klunde]

In order to get easier menues I've selected to also create one folder for each year.

 

So my Pictures is like this:

 

2012

  |-- 201201 Event name

  |-- 201202 Event name

2011

  |-- 201103 Event name

  |-- 201103 Event name

  |-- 201104 Event name

 

 

[Influencer]

I over complicate my organization. I separate pictures into numerous categories, then again into sub-categories

 

I have a folder named "family" and in each a folder for each member of my immediate family. These hold one off photos that I don't have many of, for example I took a picture of my daughter when she was playing with the water hose and somehow got it stuck up her pants leg, water was gushing from the waist band making her look like a living fountain. The look of confusion was priceless!

 

I then have a folder for special occassions, which has sub-folders for vacations, family get togethers. Etc. These are dated as well as a short description.

 

Like I said, over complicated, but it makes it easy to find a specific picture without having to remember the timeframe. Took me ages to organize it this way, but is pretty simple if I stay on top of it. I usually clear the memory card every few weeks and sort them, takes about 10-15 minutes. May seem troublesome but its my families memories so I don't mind.

 

Should have seen me when I was digitizing my parents photo collection. Scanned, fixed and organized over 10,000 pictures. I can honestly say my mother has horrible organization. There were literally boxes full of loose photos from over the years! I had 3 scanners set to max dpi, I could fit 3-4 pictures on a scanner at a time. Once they were all scanned in I created a macro batch in Photoshop to detect the separate images and crop + rotate, then fixed rotation on any it got wrong(surprisingly few) and set about organizing them.

[sacretagent]

MMMM 

 

Naked / Not naked

 

   

[PeterB]

MMMM 

 

Naked / Not naked

 

   

 

Ah ... should the police be informed about your collection?

 

... or are they photos of you - in which case, thanks for the warning - I have no desire to see you with your togs off!

[aptalca]

I had much trouble with this in the past as my wife likes to keep some of the pictures on the camera after the transfer (So she can show them to people on the camera screen)

 

So having them in separate folders was the wrong way as I ended up with gigs of duplicate pics (same picture in multiple folders)

 

So I set up digiKam with a mysql library hosted on unraid. All of the pictures are in the same folder (no more duplicates because we do not rename the files and I don't get mad at my wife for hoarding pictures on her sd card anymore). I plug the sd card into any laptop every once in a while and copy all the files over onto the "Pictures" share and select skip duplicates.

 

I set up digiKam clients on all the computers around the house, so we can tag the pictures however we like (we do by person and by event). You can easily query and get all the pics from a specific vacation, or all the pics that have both me and my wife, etc. It's pretty neat.

[aptalca]

 

Should have seen me when I was digitizing my parents photo collection. Scanned, fixed and organized over 10,000 pictures. I can honestly say my mother has horrible organization. There were literally boxes full of loose photos from over the years! I had 3 scanners set to max dpi, I could fit 3-4 pictures on a scanner at a time. Once they were all scanned in I created a macro batch in Photoshop to detect the separate images and crop + rotate, then fixed rotation on any it got wrong(surprisingly few) and set about organizing them.

 

That is cool.

 

I started a similar project, but was doing it on a single old (slow) scanner, one by one, and cropping manually. I gave up after about a hundred pics :-)

 

I am not well-versed in Photoshop

[marcusone]

Take them to Costco or similar and have them scan.

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

[Helmonder]

I had much trouble with this in the past as my wife likes to keep some of the pictures on the camera after the transfer (So she can show them to people on the camera screen)

 

So having them in separate folders was the wrong way as I ended up with gigs of duplicate pics (same picture in multiple folders)

 

So I set up digiKam with a mysql library hosted on unraid. All of the pictures are in the same folder (no more duplicates because we do not rename the files and I don't get mad at my wife for hoarding pictures on her sd card anymore). I plug the sd card into any laptop every once in a while and copy all the files over onto the "Pictures" share and select skip duplicates.

 

I set up digiKam clients on all the computers around the house, so we can tag the pictures however we like (we do by person and by event). You can easily query and get all the pics from a specific vacation, or all the pics that have both me and my wife, etc. It's pretty neat.

 

This sounds nice... How easy is it to get it to work of unraid ?  Is it a server side appliation or a database on unraid with clients ?

[PeterB]

digiKam is an open source application to run on your desktop computer (Linux, Mac or Win). See here.

 

It claims that the database cannot be on a remote filesystem.  However, I run it on Ubuntu and have no problems with the photo store and the SQLite database existing on my unRAID server (accessed as /net/tower/mnt/user/Photos).  I guess that the point here is that the way Linux accesses remote filesystems makes them look like local directories.  Whether the same could be done on Mac/Win, I'm not sure.

[chickensoup]

I don't have a lot of photos on my unRAID server but I do have a LOT of wallpapers, I've found the best way to sort those is by resolution:

 

Wallpapers

-- 800x600

-- 1024x768

-- 1280x720

-- 1280x1024

-- 1680x1050

-- 1920x1080

-- Obscure & Larger

 

.. etc.

[skank]

mmm looking to do this with xbmc player and the picturesDB addon

[PeterB]

mmm looking to do this with xbmc player and the picturesDB addon

 

Before you get too far committed with that, do take a look at digiKam - I think you might be surprised at how much it can do for you (including photo editing/touch-up), and how well it does it.

[skank]

mmm looking to do this with xbmc player and the picturesDB addon

 

Before you get too far committed with that, do take a look at digiKam - I think you might be surprised at how much it can do for you (including photo editing/touch-up), and how well it does it.

 

can it be linked with xbmc?

[Influencer]

 

Should have seen me when I was digitizing my parents photo collection. Scanned, fixed and organized over 10,000 pictures. I can honestly say my mother has horrible organization. There were literally boxes full of loose photos from over the years! I had 3 scanners set to max dpi, I could fit 3-4 pictures on a scanner at a time. Once they were all scanned in I created a macro batch in Photoshop to detect the separate images and crop + rotate, then fixed rotation on any it got wrong(surprisingly few) and set about organizing them.

 

That is cool.

 

I started a similar project, but was doing it on a single old (slow) scanner, one by one, and cropping manually. I gave up after about a hundred pics :-)

 

I am not well-versed in Photoshop

 

I can look to see if I still have the batch script on one of the PCs, if I do I can send it to you. Really all you need for it to work is white space around the photo. It saves the individual images to a sub-directory and keeps the scanned images so if it messes one up you can find it and manually crop it. This was really only a problem for me with older grainy black & whites, still if I had to estimate I had to manually crop a few hundred give or take out of the 10,000 +.

 

I did it the lazy way, moved the scanners around my recliner and scanned them to the pc over WiFi, after awhile I didn't really think about it, just anytime I sat to watch a movie or show I scanned pictures at the same time. I'm glad its done because there were alot of valuable pictures(valuable to us). I even found pictures she didn't know she had of family members I had never met or seen!

[aptalca]

I had much trouble with this in the past as my wife likes to keep some of the pictures on the camera after the transfer (So she can show them to people on the camera screen)

 

So having them in separate folders was the wrong way as I ended up with gigs of duplicate pics (same picture in multiple folders)

 

So I set up digiKam with a mysql library hosted on unraid. All of the pictures are in the same folder (no more duplicates because we do not rename the files and I don't get mad at my wife for hoarding pictures on her sd card anymore). I plug the sd card into any laptop every once in a while and copy all the files over onto the "Pictures" share and select skip duplicates.

 

I set up digiKam clients on all the computers around the house, so we can tag the pictures however we like (we do by person and by event). You can easily query and get all the pics from a specific vacation, or all the pics that have both me and my wife, etc. It's pretty neat.

 

This sounds nice... How easy is it to get it to work of unraid ?  Is it a server side appliation or a database on unraid with clients ?

 

Oh it's very easy. It's just a client that uses a mysql database. I already had mysql set up on unraid for xbmc. I installed digiKam on the clients and entered the database user and password. I believe it created the database itself the first time (not entirely sure, it's been a while).

 

It stores all the tags along with the thumbnails on the mysql db. Every time you start digiKam on a client, it takes some time to initially load the thumbnails. It takes longer on wifi and also depends on the number of pictures, but once they are loaded, it is fairly quick.

 

Tagging is very easy too, you can set custom keyboard shortcuts for tags, and select multiple files and tag all at once, etc.

 

It also has built-in face recognition for auto tagging but I haven't really used it.

[aptalca]

 

Should have seen me when I was digitizing my parents photo collection. Scanned, fixed and organized over 10,000 pictures. I can honestly say my mother has horrible organization. There were literally boxes full of loose photos from over the years! I had 3 scanners set to max dpi, I could fit 3-4 pictures on a scanner at a time. Once they were all scanned in I created a macro batch in Photoshop to detect the separate images and crop + rotate, then fixed rotation on any it got wrong(surprisingly few) and set about organizing them.

 

That is cool.

 

I started a similar project, but was doing it on a single old (slow) scanner, one by one, and cropping manually. I gave up after about a hundred pics :-)

 

I am not well-versed in Photoshop

 

I can look to see if I still have the batch script on one of the PCs, if I do I can send it to you. Really all you need for it to work is white space around the photo. It saves the individual images to a sub-directory and keeps the scanned images so if it messes one up you can find it and manually crop it. This was really only a problem for me with older grainy black & whites, still if I had to estimate I had to manually crop a few hundred give or take out of the 10,000 +.

 

I did it the lazy way, moved the scanners around my recliner and scanned them to the pc over WiFi, after awhile I didn't really think about it, just anytime I sat to watch a movie or show I scanned pictures at the same time. I'm glad its done because there were alot of valuable pictures(valuable to us). I even found pictures she didn't know she had of family members I had never met or seen!

 

That would be great if you could send it.

 

The way I was doing it was:

1) Put one pic in scanner

2) Do a preview scan

3) Select the cropping area

4) Do a full scan

Rinse & repeat 

[nickcardwell]

Files are renamed to exif date and time using windows prog batch renamer

 

Then put in to categories like family , holiday ,home etc

 

 

 

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2

[tr0910]

Has anyone stressed digikam with 500,000 pictures in a catalog.  Unraid is our master repository of studio images, and we have no overall catalog for the images.  Currently we use a folder management system with year, month, and shoot name like others have mentioned.  Since this is client portrait based, its not too big a problem, but an overall catalog would be nice.

 

This is the biggest use of our unraid server.  We have no Linux machines except for the unraid server.  How well does digikam play with Windows?

 

Background

We presently have 12TB of raw and jpg images from our studio and this is growing at a rate of 5TB per year, mainly from several Canon 5D Mk II cameras.  Photoshop and Lightroom will handle all the editing for the foreseeable future so we don't need digikam for editing.

 

Our current workflow uses 6 - Windows 7/64bit workstations using Lightroom and Photoshop on local striped drives for speed, but daily backups to unraid over gigabit network for all machines.  Windows workstations only have the last few months worth of images on them. 

 

[Helmonder]

I tried it and it keeps consistently crashing on my windows machine while scanning my picture library ..

[tr0910]

Ugh, should have known that it wouldn't be that easy.

 

I would only want to use it for the cataloging feature, never for editing images.