Comments on: Digital Storage for Your Images – Organization 101

By: Avril

Avril — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:25:18 +0000

Useful tips, but the author needs to proof read. Or possibly learn to spell and distinguish similar *sounding* words from one another. Differ, not defer. And Voila! is French for ‘there you have it’, while viola is a stringed instrument, very like a violin, but bigger.

It really bugs me when people who reckon they are good enough to write tutorials can’t actually do the writing bit properly. Call me pedantic if you wish – I won’t argue. I was educated when the word still meant *educated* – in an English grammar school. There is no magic to learning correct English – you just need to give a damn, and you should, because what is more important than communication if you want to succeed in anything that involves other human beings?

By: Hiccup42

Hiccup42 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:27:37 +0000

I usually take pictures of my friends and for want of an expensive organising programme, I store my photos by year month and day. Each separate event from a day is in its own folder (eg “12 Lunch” and “12 Flowers”) within the folder I name each photo with its number in order so I never lose the sequence of events and so that each in a fold has a different name. After the number i put the names of the people and/or any other important subject, eg “005 Baby Johnny watermelon”. This means that when ever I want a picture of someone I can just search my computer and they all come up. Its not totally foolproof (I have two friends called Kirsty, for example) or anything but it works for me most of the time :)

By: Sharon

Sharon — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:42:44 +0000

My stupid question: can I process AND store on an external drive?

I use Picasa right now. But I have so many images, they are bogging down my computer. Today I bought a Western Digital External Hard Drive (Drive E:). I copied my images onto it. Fine. But I couldn’t “see” them. So I downloaded a new copy of Picasa onto Drive E. Now I can see them. I think. I haven’t taken my originals off my C: drive yet. I want to switch to Photoshop Elements for post-processing. If I install Elements on C: but keep my photos stored on the External Drive . . . ARE THEY GOING TO BE ABLE TO FIND EACH OTHER?? I have myself so confused.

By: Niloy

Niloy — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:24:52 +0000

Wow, bret, thank you! I’ll have to give lightroom another *proper* tryout again! I didn’t know lightroom could do that!

By: Bret Perry

Bret Perry — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:45:16 +0000

Hopefully, most tagging programs today can store the keywords in the metadata files of photos, so that any program that reads metadata can access them.
Lightroom and Bridge (PC/Mac) and Graphic Converter (Mac) can do this in bulk, lots of photos at once if you like.
You can also use scripting to automate a lot of that, especially useful in Bridge since it is less robust at bulk tagging and renaming.
Lightroom can work with offline photos (moved or unavailable) and do everything except “Develop and Print High Quality” IF you have already made thumbnails before taking photos offline. It shows the location of the files in a “field” with the other metadata. Of course, for it to show a DVD or CD, you would need to have imported it into Lightroom from the DVD. So I copy my photos to a caefuly-named folder on my hard drive, import into Lightroom and work on them, then when I’m done, burn a DVD with the same folder name.
In the “old” days, before Lightroom, for DVDs and CDs, I use DiskTracker–super fast , but only finds by filename, not metadata’s keywords. (on a Mac, there are tons of shareware disk catalogers for PC, too,)

File and folders or tagging, for me, yes, both.

By: Linda

Linda — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:08:04 +0000

Photo Collector (www.collectorz.com) can index files that are “offline” (e.g. on DVD or external hard drive backup). The program saves a thumbnail of such images, and the location, so that you can locate the original file.

By: Thakur Dalip Singh

Thakur Dalip Singh — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:21:33 +0000

very useful discussion. what about IPTC information and tags which can be written in Photoshop and other top programs? Is it not possible to find from tags/key words given in IPTC info? I have not searched through them but I think they can alsao help.
Why noo body has mentioned Iview media Pro 3 which is top of the line for organising pictures?

By: IL

IL — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:41:25 +0000

Another one, for all you cannon users out there, ZoomBrowserEX.
Allows ratings, keywords, RAW processing, etc, and integrates with the other Canon software.
Not the best, I’m sure, as its just bundled with everything else, but if you aren’t for Lightroom, Aperture, etc, or if you spent all out on your camera and can’t afford other software yet this might work for the time being.

By: Mohamed Ghuloom

Mohamed Ghuloom — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:42:32 +0000

Indeed, very useful. I personally store my photos in folders like 2002, 2003, 2004…2008, and every year I add one more folder. Then I import the folder from my camera to 2008>Archive, and I rename it to for example: “Dad sleeping Archive”. Then i export them using Picasa to 2008 folder with usually 1024X768 settings ready for normal use & uploading to internet.

I also tag my photos using Picasa, but the thing is that Picasa is not that accurate when searching.

By: starevo

starevo — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:42:18 +0000

Im a photographer for a motorsports magzine. and I take alot of pics for the race. normally 3000pics per race. I’d like to use LIGHTROOM2 to manage my pics ,but there is a annoying problem , becouse when I modify the pics in LIGHTROOM instead of using PHOTOSHOP. the pics just edited in the software, not for the original photo. I just can export to get the edited photo , when I export for the copy of the photos ,its bother. because its very huge of it and I m worry about the space of my harddisk. so , could you tell me a way to solution this annoying problem thx alot!