How should one best manage large collections of photographs?

Question

With gigabytes of pictures accumulating over time, I'm wondering what systems (software, strategies, etc.) people are using to keep track of their collections? Let's say you remember a picture and you want to find the file on disk, how do you ensure that this will be successful?

Answer 1

I'm a fan of Adobe Lightroom - its way of working seems to fit my mental model so I find it fairly natural to use. That does depend on you tagging the photos with appropriate metadata of course and not everyone thinks the same as me, so you may not get on with it.

Picasa has matured nicely over the years and has a nice "face finder" that does a pretty reasonable job of auto-finding people in photos and matching them to people you've previously named.

Supporting this I have a fairly simple folder structure of

\photos \ shoot description

Because I rely on tags in the software I don't really need too much hierarchical organisation and IMO hierarchies are the wrong tool for the job anyway because a photo will naturally fit into multiple categories but a hierarchy only lets you express one.

I think the short version of the answer is "Tag everything" - doing it on import isn't that painful and means you can finds it later, but going back through gigabytes of history to add the tags is a soul destroying task.

Answer 2

This management is exactly what Lightroom is designed to do. I used to be responsible for document control for a CAD department, and came up with lots of tracking and revision systems. I can say that using Lightroom is the easiest and best way to manage lots of images. I have over 40,000 images organized using Lightroom.

I have mine setup to place the images in the following structure: Year Month Day

Then I add lots of keywords. Using Lightroom I can find pictures quickly and easily. Including ones that are keepers and ones that the electrons can be recycled without missing anything.

Lightroom has a 30 day trial for both Mac and Windows, so you can try it out and see what you think. Adding in the ability to do editing and management just adds to the power of the program.

Answer 3

Before all this digital hype, I stored my slides in boxes after having numbered each of them (from 1 for the very first picture to more than 7000). In a simple text file I carefully noted the index of each slide, where and when it was taken and a little description of the subject.

Finding a picture was (and still is) just a matter of remembering some of these infos (where, when and what) and searching through the file.

In my long process of scanning my slides, I continue to use this text file for feeding infos in the cataloguing software I use (this is iView Media Pro).

For digital photos I use both iView Media Pro and iPhoto.

Answer 4

Another vote for Adobe Lightroom here. It combines the Adobe Camera Raw processing engine with a powerful backend database to allow you to store your images and more importantly find them again easily. A side benefit is even the processing is stored in the database, you only need to store one copy of each image (the raw) and the processing is applied on the fly.

For Mac users Apple Aperture does much the same thing, but Apple have chosen to price this at about 1/4 of the price of Lightroom, so that is worth a look.

For a more consumer level option Google Picassa also offers cataloguing as well as image processing, it works well, especially considering it is free software.

Answer 5

Well, I think Lightroom is your power answer, but I'm similar in the old fogey category in that I structure on disk. Basically, my layout is:

year/#-month/day-subject

So, for example, one would be:

2010/10-October/21-Water Drops

I do the numeric/textual month thing for quick glance and sorting. It's been working for me, though it may start to fail if my memory starts to slide. ;)

Answer 6

I created software, the SeaRisen Image Browser to organize and quickly find your images. I too have gigabytes of images and find it a real time saver when looking for particular images, or series of images.