Vacation organisation

[Tzetsin]

Ok, so I just returned from a 10 day drip to vancouver city. I started with 2 days with my extended family in Jasper national park, then ditched them and my wife and I spent 4 days getting to Vancouver (its only 15 hours, but we stopped at all the sites) and then I spent 3 days downtown vancouver.

The entire time I had my 2 cameras strapped to my ass and i've got a bazillion pictures. (2 32gb cards PER DAY) Now i have the very unplesent / pleasent task of going through them all. I've got such a huge mix of photographic style shots that i'm not really sure how to organise them. I've got portraits, mountains, waterfalls, rainbows, cityscapes, urban shots, sprawling vistas and detail shots... (i'm sure i missed a few there)

I've got so damn many shots that I dont know what to do with them even... How do you guys organise this stuff? and more importantly... how do you find the time lol?

Is there a program out there that will catalog my images and make "sudo" folders that I could put a single image into without copying it?

For example, lets say I took a picture of a humming bird. I want to have it in the folder with all my bird shots. But it was also a part of a set, so i want it in the set, but it also had some flowers in it, so i want it in with all the flowers....

God its going to take forever to go through all these... I still havn't gone through the shots i took at the fair, my other trip to Edson or of the races from weeks an weeks ago...

[Nicole]

Lightroom, keywords, and smart folders sound like just the thing. But I should say that adding keywords can be totally tedious. It pays off in the end, it's just really not fun.

[Tzetsin]

does that mean that i have to add all my photos to lightroom? wont that cripple the program? just the photo file that i've got on the pc right now has 36830 files in it. I've got another disk with almost as many shots. Can Lightroom handle this many files after I've edited most of em?

[Izzy]

Originally Posted by Tzetsin

does that mean that i have to add all my photos to lightroom? wont that cripple the program?

I have about 80K in last years catalog and it is stable so I dont foresee you having any issues. Not sure if there is a top count or catalog file size in LR.