Hot answers tagged file-management
21
CIPA (the Camera & Imaging Products Association) has long established DSC as meaning Digital Still Camera. This prefix is not mandated by the DCF (Digital Camera Filesystem) standard but was adopted uniformly by Nikon and Fuji which named their files starting with DSC_, DSCN, or DSCF. Other manufactures went with PICT, PIC or P which presumable all stand ...
14
Using Adobe Camera RAW you are essentially just flipping switches that don't do much till you export the file to a format such as JPEG. Your original capture time, and the EXIF data associated with that original shot will not degrade due to you changing the EV value or similar.
Changes made to the RAW file are completely non-destructive. The only thing ...
13
My solution for this was to purchase Lightroom.
My reasoning:
Lightroom's workflow is an awesome solution for this problem.
It's not too expensive (certainly not cheap either though).
It's a one time cost that saves be a lot of time.
Details...
Lightroom allows you to run through and flag your images (Yes/No/Unflagged) using keyboard shortcuts, so I ...
13
Personally I would say no , do not import back into Lightroom. As you say - you have the originals. And Lightroom does show you by default the 'latest version', so effectively, what you have exported. Just with the option to go back, edit, change, etc..
What I do is have a Lightroom Exports folder with my exported JPG files. I do not clear this out ...
7
No. it will not damage your card or camera.
The worst case scenario is that the camera would stop reading the card and the solution is to copy anything important on the card to your computer and format the card in camera.
I've been doing this for years with lots of different cameras and never had any problem.
6
According to Wikipedia, the Sony Cyber-shot cameras use the same prefix:
All Cyber-shot models have a DSC prefix in their names, which is an acronym for "Digital Still Camera".
I suspect Nikon adopted the same convention.
6
I have created privately shared folders in Dropbox, which works very well. If your customer also has a Dropbox account, the folder shows on his account view as well.
You can also use a temporary file share service like Dropsend, which I use frequently when an image is larger than the Gmail limit.
Both of these services have free as well as paid options. If ...
5
If you are looking for a free option Picasa is probably your best bet. You can match it up with Gimp to do some more advanced editing.
The preferred solution by many is Adobe Lightroom, which you can find on sale for around $130USD right now I believe.
Depending on the camera that you bought, you likely received a disc of software with it that may even ...
5
Assuming the CameraRAW you refer to is Adobe's, so you're opening in something like LightRoom or Photoshop, it won't change the raw file itself. It saves you're settings in a sidecar file (same base name, extension of .XMP) or in a separate database, not in the file itself. When you go to save it, there won't be any option for just saving the original file, ...
5
I don't think there is a field in the metadata which explicity defines the crop aspect ratio, but there are plenty of other fields which you could use instead; e.g. 'Instructions' where you could manually add the aspect ratio. You can use 'Sync (metadata)' to apply a crop ratio to the relevant images to avoid typing it in more than once.
Then just add ...
4
Photo Mechanic has been among the favorite tools primarily focused on import and import automation for several years. If you simply want an import tool that is flexible and allows custom imports, I doubt you will find a more feature rich solution. That being said, it is not an editing tool, but one focused on import, especially multiple-card import and ...
4
If speed is your main objective, you should really check out Bibble. The goal of that piece of software is to literally be the fastest DAM software on the market. This becomes very important for high volume photography shops, but since you are doing this more for fun, you might not want to spend that kind of money. Below I have listed some various other ...
4
You didn't mention what RAW files do you have but at least Canon's CR2, Nikon's NEF and Sony's ARW have all embedded thumbnails which are in fact JPEG at a fairly workable dimensions but still very small (few kB in size).
So, you can use a freeware picture manager which can be set to display only these thumbnails and if you press a shortcut/button/whatever, ...
3
Give a try on IrfanView. This is a very small, lightweight, fairly fast, and free! tool to view/browse or do some basic editing. Compared to windows image viewer I prefer to use this tool!
http://www.irfanview.com/
The extra pluggin iv_formats.zip provides support for Raw files!
I usually browse through my photographs with IrfanView to delete, rotate ...
3
The issue you are going to face is similar to any database-based solution: the issue is ownership over a file and if two systems are trying to change a file at the same time. This can often corrupt a database for systems that are not designed with this concurrency in mind, and most systems are not designed with this in mind. As mentioned above, there are ...
3
Aperture treats the RAW file and the JPEG as a single composite master and won't let you do anything with them individually except create a new master from the JPEG. That new master can be deleted, but it doesn't buy you anything since the original RAW is still there with the JPEG file.
The RAW and JPEG images are treated as a single master. In a ...
3
Lightroom always keeps the RAW file. It does not convert on import, it converts on Export. Your files will be in your designated LR import folder. Note that there can be more than one of these if you like.
So to find out where your last photos went, you can simply open Lightroom and click "Import".
One of the gotcha's of Lightroom is that it imports ...
3
ImgSeek is an open-source project that claims to do this.
DigiKam is apparently trying to add similar functionality.
Pixcavator is not open source, but there is a 30 day free trial.
3
Exiftool is a very powerful utility to sort and organize photos automatically. See RENAMING EXAMPLES section of its manual.
A new directory can be specified by setting the value of the Directory tag. For example, the following command moves all images originally in directory "DIR" into a directory hierarchy organized by year/month/day:
exiftool ...
3
While you can find several "automator"-style programs for Linux (there's also one specific for working with images, though I can't remember the name off the top of my head).
But if you really want something advanced (and possibly cross-platform), I believe your best option is to develop something yourself. Personally, I quite like Python for such tasks ...
3
Extensis Portfolio Server is one option to consider. It's been around for quite a while and has gone through several iterations as a digital asset management system for photographers, artists, and others who catalog and share media. The server works with the Extensis Portfolio desktop software to allow multiple users to browse, edit, and manage a variety ...
3
Sean! This is a great question, because Lightroom will do exactly what you want already(I think)! I would take a look at the "Publish Services" option in Lightroom. The entire point of Publish Services is to let you export in a much smarter way, with the ability to keep track of the images and even manage them when they are located outside of Lightroom.
The ...
3
It sounds like MacOS is just creating a disk image file (.dmg I would guess) for the USB drive, which can then be mounted. I'm curious if you can actually clone an SD card, or just USB drives...SD/CF cards are usually treated differently than USB drives, and the MacOS clone feature is usually intended as a means of backing up literal external USB drives.
...
3
I've never heard of a camera that does that. If there is one, it should be mentioned in your camera manual.
The simplest alternative is probably to click the Type heading at the top of Windows explorer (or the equivalent in your OS/app of choice) to sort by file type. This will put all of your RAW files together and all of your JPGs together, for easy ...
3
Step 1 - Move the files to the new location. It's important to a) Ensure they no longer exist at the original location, and be preserve their organization (ie. folder structure) on the destination.
Step 2 - Start Lightroom. Be sure you are in Library view.
If you've moved entire folders...
Step 3 - At the left, under Folders, navigate to the top-level ...
2
I'm glad it worked out for you. I'm not sure what exactly made it decide to continue from the number the third time — it's always creepy when software behaves non-deterministically.
I know you said you didn't want to rename your old files, but I find it really convenient to do so. There are a number of free (open source and otherwise) cross-platform ...
2
Consider investing in Adobe Lightroom, it has some excellent sorting/cataloging features.
For example, you can view an arbitrary number of pictures at once, flag (positive/negative, color-coded categories and assign star ratings) via keyboard shortcuts, and compare similar images side-by-side (with an optional synchronized zoom for detailed comparison.)
2
Short answer: Yes you absolutely can add your own date format to the drop down list. Within your Lightroom program folder, go to the "Resources" folder and create a folder called "en." Then, create a file called "TranslatedStrings.txt."
In that file, write the following line (including the quotes):
...
2
Almost but not quite. I'm assuming the last part of your YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD is a folder name, not a filename (as I assume you take more than one photo a day :). If so, Lightroom's Import feature will get you most of the way there but not completely.
To import those photos to Lightroom without moving or renaming them:
Start in Lightroom's Library module.
...
2
There should be no problem at all if you copy or delete files from the card, but each camera uses particular ways of managing data in the cards, so writing, adding or editing files with a computer or other devices may interfere with some functions of the camera.
Using Windows Explorer or another file management utility gives you the best flexibility and ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
