How do you manage your photos?

[rick020200]

This is a request to anyone out there who's managed to figure out the basics of photo management in the post-gigabyte-card-size era. How do you manage your photos? Specifically what software do you use to manage them?

Here's what we struggle with: including cell phones, we have 6 digital cameras in our household. At some events, all four of us are shooting. We also have four computers in the house--3 laptops and 1 desktop.

Storing all the photos is not really a problem--we've got an NSLU2 device with two drives attached (for redundancy), and all of the computers map a drive to the public share on this device. We call this "The S: Drive (TM)". When we download pics off a camera, the photos almost immediately get moved to The S: Drive (TM). The Photos folder is then separated by year, and for the most part, the pics are then stored in a folder with the date as a name, usually with some additional description. For example, the model train pictures we took at the library are stored in the "2010-01-02 Trains @ Library" folder. 99% of the time, the files are named the same as the folder with a sequential identifier attached.

What we want is to be able to a) easily browse the folders with thumbnails, and b) tag/categorize photos with searchable key words. And the tag/category database must be shared by all computers, ideally on The S: Drive (TM). It would be nice if the thumbnails were shared, but that really isn't a requirement.

It sounds simple right?

We tried ACDSee. Unfortunately, its database stored the thumbnails and the tags/categories in the same place, and once you've cataloged more than about 1000 files (we've got more than 800 so far this year alone!) the database across the network becomes incredibly slow for every single operation. It seems that ACDSee's database needs to read/write the whole darn thing every time a single file is touched. And don't get me started on the rest of the bugs in the photo manager. Tears have been shed in our household over those bugs.

Windows supports storing thumbnails in the thumbs.db file, but it seems like nearly every time it is accessed, the thumbnails have to be refreshed. My guess is that the format of the thumbs.db file changed between XP (2 computers) and Windows 7 (2 computers) so just about every time we browse a folder using Windows Exploder, it has to re-read the thumbnails. And that doesn't solve the tag/category problem.

I looked briefly at Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it too was very slow when I told it to store its database files on the network. I've looked at XnView and IrfanView but didn't find a centralized tag/category database concept, though their cached thumbnails were very fast.

I'd be willing to pay a not-too-exorbitant price for this to work. FOSS would be awesome, but I'm will to compensate someone who's created a solution that will work for our family.

What have you gotten to work?

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

[OsmosisStudios]

Folders. lots of folders.

Ive never gotten used to any kind of software to organize my photos: theyve all seemed too complicated. I organize everything manually.

[SilverBullet07]

What about Adobe LightRoom? Have you looked into it? They have a 30 free trail that you could try.

[rick020200]

Originally Posted by SilverBullet07

What about Adobe LightRoom? Have you looked into it? They have a 30 free trail that you could try.

No, I haven't tried Lightroom. I wasn't aware that it had management capabilities, but that doesn't really surprise me. At full retail, I think $300 might be a bit more than I can manage right now (hello $2k engine replacement in my car this week). But I'll definitely keep it in mind.

[Raoul Isidro]

I never use any software to organize because you get "locked in" with the software.
I just use the OS of the current machine, PC or Mac.
Because I use many cameras of different makes, I start by making folders of them.
Something like Cn_5D2, Nk_D700, Cn_50D, and Nk_D300s....
I never change the numbering sequence.
I file by historical date.
Cheers!

[kirbinster]

Lightroom is definitely the way to go, that is one of its primary functions in addition to post processing. It creates a directory for each import, but then has a database that is searchable by exif data along with keywords you enter. Give it a try.

[wulf]

How about buying a Flickr Pro account and uploading all your photos. Use that for tagging and easy searching (you can keep some or all of your picture private if you want) and as an offsite backup. Locally you can rely on a sensible set of folders and use Windows Explorer in thumbnails mode. If you are finding that the thumbnails take too long to build, you could use software like Image Magick to create thumbnail versions of and browse those most of the time (some scripting required - pretty easy in Linux and probably do-able in Windows).

Wulf

[Algernonep]

Please... Read the "DAM Book" by Peter Krogh...

[jli]

Originally Posted by Raoul Isidro

I never use any software to organize because you get "locked in" with the software.
I just use the OS of the current machine, PC or Mac.
Because I use many cameras of different makes, I start by making folders of them.
Something like Cn_5D2, Nk_D700, Cn_50D, and Nk_D300s....
I never change the numbering sequence.
I file by historical date.
Cheers!

I use Linux and F-Spot. It's decent. There's tagging, and it's relatively fast. I import files from dated directories (YYYYMM) (it doesn't copy files when importing), and it writes tags directly to each file's metadata, so there's not much lock-in.

It could definitely be smoother for somewhat serious photographers, though. It has a few post production functions, but they're extremely simple, so you have to go to an external tool like Gimp and/or Ufraw. I saw a very short demo of someone's PP routine with Lightroom and I'm pretty jealous - makes me want a Mac! :P

[life tints]

I recently moved from "lots of folders" to Light Room. It is awesome and worth the time you have to spend for tagging and classification.