Am I Out of Control? Are you?

[kbradley88]

Lately, I've been frazzled by the number of pictures on my hard drive and the hard time I'm having keeping them sorted, weeded out, etc.

What do you pros do to stay organized? Without Picasa 3, I think I'd go insane! It's still daunting, though. Just so easy to take shot after shot..

How many pictures do you have? Here's my count, and I'd like to know where I stand compared to other to see if I need a 12-step program:



If you right click on your pictures folder, in my case, my My Pictures folder and click properties, it will tell you the number of pics you have..

Where's my aspirin....

[Seltzer]

You are doing better than me. At least you have all of yours in one folder, on one computer!
I do my best sorting as I load them on to the computer or right after. Otherwise I forget and my lazy self takes over to me pretty much never getting back to that until they are taking over other parts of the computer and I have to herd them all back together.

[SandeeWig]

I used to be very vigilant in organizing my photos. I had a specific folder for everything, Christmas 03, Christmas 04, trip-june 06, grandmas bday-05, cat1, cat2, cat3, artshots, self portraits, hubby, etc. That's when I manually moved photos off my camera onto the computer. It was easy to keep organized.

Then I got a new camera...and it has this nifty little program that will automatically download everything onto your computer. Excellent! I said to myself, I choose for everything to be downloaded into an "unsorted" folder so I know what I need to organize. Well...

I don't know how many photos I have (not at home at the moment, so can't check, definitely in the thousands), BUT! I can tell you I have nearly two years worth of images, organized in date folders, inside the "unsorted" folder.

Now the "organizing project" looms over me like a dark thundering cloud becoming ever more ominous with each camera dump.

[prince]

I am light years away from ya'll. But right now I have started arranging them in different folders by their type. Separate folders for RAW files, Non-RAW files (mainly for jpg photos), Post processing (work in progress, psd files), Finished files (all pp'd and final versions), HDRIs..

I try to keep them organized immediately. I find time to get them on the computer and organize them immediately. Or else am in a rut like Seltzer.. my lazy self is too empowering

[vandergus]

I delete pictures liberally...and still have more pictures than I want. If you keep everything, the truly special pictures get lost in a sea of mediocre pictures that weren't quite bad enough to get rid of. In my opinion, if a picture doesn't elicit some sort of emotion from me, it's just as bad as a shot that's completely blurred or out of focus. To often we delete the latter when I think we should just get rid of both. If you have ten shots of your dog in ten slightly different poses, pick the best one and delete the rest.

So I'd say go through your pictures and pick out all the really good stuff (and of course the crummy but entirely necessary shot of your kid's/grandkid's/dog's first birthday), and get rid of all the rest, or at least store it in a separate location. You'll feel so much better.

[kbradley88]

Now that sounds reasonable.. So now where to start when I have over 22,000 pics.. This should be fun..

[prince]

Originally Posted by vandergus

To often we delete the latter when I think we should just get rid of both. If you have ten shots of your dog in ten slightly different poses, pick the best one and delete the rest.

I so much do that I need to be brave enough to say "this needs to be deleted.. hit the god damn shift+delete or send them to file shredder"

Will put into practice immediately.

Thanks for the enlightenment Vandergus

[waffles]

I've got just over 50 gigs and have 2 volleyball games and a cross country meet this weekend. That won't help at all...

People keep things for different reasons. I've kept a lot of sports pictures that I felt were crap but other people liked, and they ended up getting printed in the paper. Everything else I can understand culling more, but with the sports stuff there have been a few times were my saving everything really helped us out.

And I have a 160 gig hard drive to keep them all on, so it's not like I'm running out of space.

[Nicole]

If nothing else, try getting organised with future pictures I have a lot of shots sitting here, there, and everywhere. At least they're organised into folders by date, but they still need keywording. Which is why as soon as I get my keywords organised in Lightroom I'll import the older photos in there (there are currently about 6,000 in my library, but a lot of folders aren't included because they're on an external drive). And occasionally I'll do a weed out of photos that just aren't worth keeping, but for the most part I don't do a whole lot of deleting right away.

[candleman]

i've tried to use the eements6 "Organiser" but its just so gosh-darn slow and annoying. because as soon as you delete a pic off the HD it stil shows in the Organiser. uuurg.!

i might give the keywording thing a go.. sounds like hard work.
i just use the liberal deletion method, and storge by date