Organizing Digital Photos?

[MidKnight]

I would like to hear differant ways everyone uses to organize there digital photos on either harddrive or CD.

Im trying to work out the best method to organize photos to place on CD. Now of the many ways i'm trying to decide what would be best is like

1) most are placed under a dated folder when they where taken (then events are placed under a named folder of that event "christmas 2002" etc

2) maybe a way similar to the above but as DVD format. seeing as i have a DVD burner, its very nice to place photos on a disc and view them by the TV, this is a more comfy way for family members to sit around and view an occasion by photos

So theres a couple of my thoughts at this stage ,would like to hear your method.

thanks

[Ken Cox]

I start out with a folder Pictures.then Picts 2003, then folders wihtin that folder example - Roadrace Oct 20 03, newspaper scans, flowers 2003, etc,. I have a separate P2E shows folder -- when i start a show, i start a folder and copy and paste all applicable material i use in that show to that specific folder -- music, icons, notes, picts etc and of course the pte and the exe are saved to that folder.

you will have to do what is comfortable for yourself -- i am comfie with my method, and it looks lke yours is similar to mine

when i want to put jpgs on a cd to view on tv via dvd player, i just put a 100 +- jpgs together in a folder c/w with notes - i use ezcd to burn them as a data disc -- ezcd opens the folder and i drag all picts notes etc [data] to the applicble window and burn it, i let the built in software on the dvd player to do the slideshow. the notes are just for yourself to fall back on if their is anything specific you want to remember about this collection -- it could also be a readme to read by somebody else on a computer

i should add that i name each picture to the specific roll of film and or date -- this is a bit easier with film as all framses are numbered, but digital uses a different system -- and therefore if you want the date you will have to read the EXIF data -- now Irfanview will read the INFORMATION and leave it intact if you resize, rename, adj colour but say if you open the shot in some other software , make changes to the picture, the software could strip the exif data from your retouched photo. you will have to experiment with what your software will do to your original digital photos -- i can only guess at some of these digital problems as i only get to samples that are sent to me -- a former co worker sent me a picture of his family yesterday -- he sent it full size un retouched -- i resized it and lightened it with irfanview -exif data was stll there- i know him and his wife but the last i saw his kids was 20 years ago so i opened picture with Compupic pro and put names on each -- when i did my save as it stripped all the exif data

too little info is worse than too much

"so much to remember, so little time"

ken

[MidKnight]

yes i agree, by burning them straight to CD in folder setup as i said above, i can use the DVD player to view the photos, and still access them by computer as needed..

so i think from now on i will just keep making multi-session CDz till one is full.

Looks great on a Digital TV screen too

[JRR]

I have not started shooting digitally yet - I am getting closer....

But I do have 25,000 ± 35mm slides that I store in plastic pocketed sleeves. Each slide is assigned a sequential number.

I have a database (LOTUS APPROACH similar to MS ACCESS) that lists some 30 fields, each of which are "searchable" independently, or in groups of fields.

That lets me find any image within a few seconds, no matter what the topic, age etc etc.

I will be going with the same approach when I go digital. But I will be adding a thumbnail to the database. (as I should be doing now for the scans of the 35mm slides.)

LOTUS APPROACH (my version anyway) won't let me add a thumbnail, so I will either use MS ACCESS, or THUMBSPLUS. I suspect it will be THUMBPLUS as it is a software specifically designed to work with images in this way.

I won't need to pre-sort the images on "filing", just enter them sequentially.

All images will be backed up (likely twice as I have had one or two problems with CDs) on CDs (and DVD likely in the future when I get a DVD burner)

[MidKnight]

i think the way im going to do mine is probably the better way (for me anyway), the only problem, or the hardest thing about photos to an easy way to find "that photo", so say in day you are talking about "something" and say "ya i have a photo on that", but the problem is trying to find that one photo from your 5,000 photo collection.

Sure i know there are many software that you can tag photos with fields, descriptions etc (ACDSee that i use for image browsing does this), but i think many like myself just dont have that much time to tag each and every photo with a description.