Hot answers tagged organization
40
The key is adding some specific tags every time you import.
I use Aperture (which is Mac-only,) but Lightroom has similar capabilities, as does iphoto.
What you need to tag depends on what you shoot, and what you think you might be looking for someday, but this works for me:
The people in the pictures. I use Apple's "Faces" feature to tag people in the ...
23
Adobe Lightroom is one application which a lot of professional photographers would use both for reviewing large quantities of images, and also for doing some initial post-processing. A lot of photographers these days find they rarely use Photoshop anymore, finding Lightroom very powerful in it's organising and post-process abilities.
From it's conception, ...
15
For a free option, have a look at Google's Picasa. It allows you to sort your images via folders and tags, and easily upload them for sharing.
It can be found here: http://picasa.google.com/
It also has rudimentary editing options, but I'd recommend Lightroom if you want a decent processing program. Conor's right, it's far from free at ~£250, but you can ...
13
I'm a Mac user with Lr, and I have my files structured how I want (YYYY/MMM/DD/).
What I would say, though, is download the free trials of both applications, as they're both workflow management tools and have a fair degree of structure which they impose on you, and see which one suits your workflow best. You can get the free trials from here and here for Lr ...
12
Aperture will allow you leave the files in your own folder structure.
I can't compare it with Lightroom as I use Aperture exclusively.
Aperture stores all the meta data on a photograph in an Aperture Library folder. By default it will import masters into the library. However, when importing you are offered the choice of:
import masters into library;
...
12
Lightroom is the way to go. Download the trial and give it a try, though I do recommend reading a bit or watching a few videos first to get the most out of your trial.
Lightroom will let you do whatever you wish on the file system side, and then offer flexibility beyond it. This is important, because this NAS won't be your last, and in fact, you may have ...
11
As a heavy Lightroom user, I can't recall any time where it has enforced any particular folder structure on disk. It has its own catalog where it stores metadata, original masters, and whatnot, but you can choose where to store that. When it comes to photos, I import wherever I choose. Particularly with Lightroom 3, you have some pretty rich options around ...
11
Adobe's XMP metadata standard supports information defined by the Metadata Working Group (MWG), which includes a definition of how to store face tagged data. See:
Adobe XMP: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/standards.html
MWG: http://www.metadataworkinggroup.com/
where you can click on the specifications, download the PDF, and then look at page 51 ...
11
There is not. IPTC, another image metadata standard, also does not contain a "People" field. There's a Contact field, but that is used for contact information for the photographer.
Most people I know will store people as keywords. The main debate is whether or not to include spaces (would a photo of me be tagged as aaronhockley or as "aaron hockley"?). ...
11
It doesn't make a lot of sense to organize photos by something that is already in the EXIF data, like the date the photos were taken. I organize my photos in folders by event/location. The most important thing is to make sure you tag as much as possible when you import. The chances of going back later to tag are basically nil, so you need to make sure to do ...
10
If you don't want to pay for Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, you could go with Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa.
I'm most familiar with iPhoto; it does a fair amount of hand-holding when it comes to organizing photos. Smart Albums are really nice; you write the filter logic, and iPhoto shows you the matching photos on an ongoing basis. Works wonders for ...
7
I've been using Picasa version 3.6. In addition to tags and geo-tagging, it also recognizes (some) faces and can attach "name tags" to photos. I use separate folders for the date the photo was taken grouped by months and years, e.g. Photos\2010\07\0720.
Picasa orders the pictures by folder and date, or album and I can also search by tag, person, or ...
7
Unfortunately I had the exact opposite criteria as you :) I looked at every software I could which did NOT touch the files and stored the information in a central database. The one constant is that having a central database makes it much more efficient to perform searches and filter your images.
I do have hundreds of gigs of photos and the most efficient ...
7
I used Picasa from Google for quite a while before deciding to move to Lightroom.
It's free.
Good tagging options
Decent editing options (but really only for basic editing)
6
If you have a Mac, you should consider Apple's Aperture. It's a fully featured workflow program that simplifies importing, tagging, organising, processing and publishing.
It's often compared to Lightroom, and is significantly cheaper if you buy it using the Mac App Store - currently $79.99 compared with over $200 for Lightroom.
It's also generally ...
6
I use Photo Mechanic for this purpose. While not free it's quite cheap and it allows you to rank (and then sort) images by a number of means, displays images along with histograms and exif information, and more importantly preloads and caches the images so you can cycle through them much more quickly than for example the windows image viewer. The program is ...
6
First of all, you will save a lot of effort by adopting a software that includes worflow management and Digital Asset Management. Aperture, Lightroom, or even Adobe Bridge to name a few.
This is a bit arbitrary but works for me as a hybrid between a keyword-based and a directory-based workflow management. I use a very specific directory structure explained ...
6
Well, actually most photo editors can't do it. The category of software you are looking for is called digital asset management (DAM) software. There are review of 5 popular options here:
http://www.neocamera.com/article.php?id=dam-software
If simple and fast is your criteria, then I suggest you look at PicaJet FX. It is available for Windows for $60. You ...
6
Yes you can preserve your directory structures in Lightroom, even though it is database driven. You can actually make it more robust by relying on keywords and renaming patterns to let Lightroom create reasonable and predictable directory structures. Here is a real world example; it is a bit arbitrary but works for me as a hybrid between a keyword-based and ...
6
WLPG stores data in the image, and in a database.
High CPU usage may be a background process scanning images for faces. This can take quite some time (days). It's a low priority process, so (in theory) it won't slow down other applications; however, the elevated CPU usage will consume power (stay plugged in until it's finished).
If you edit an image, be ...
5
I don't think there is ... you can take a look at the EXIF specifications at http://www.exif.org or http://www.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/standard_e/pdfpage.cgi?jk_n=47
EXIF is a technical standard for images files ... not the content / subject of the image.
5
In the Linux world Shotwell, though still new, shows a great deal of promise as a photo collection organiser. It is quick, intuitive, powerful yet simple to use. It provides essential post-processing tools and when those are not enough can call Gimp.
Shotwell web site
5
I used to be all LR2 until Aperture 3 came out and I've given LR3 vs Aperture 3 a long hard trial and wound up using Aperture 3. The main reason I decided on Aperture 3 is if I opened a RAW image in both editors and either did no (or minimal, ie exposure) adjustments and looked at the exported JPGs side by side I always liked the look of the jpg that came ...
5
I don't tend to asset tag any of my camera equipment as it does not lend itself to tagging. I simply enter the serial numbers of the asset into my asset register instead. This is sufficient as the asset register is just a means of tracking fixed assets owned by your company and serial numbers are a valid way to do this.
5
Instead of hunting down perfect solution with bunch of different software
Why don't you:
Install Lightroom on both systems (call Adobe about PC/MAC user licensing, not exactly sure if they will let you use your license on different OS, download trial versions for each OS and use your serial number on both, see if that works, if not call and complain)
...
5
You can reorganize folders quite easily within Lightroom -- just drag and drop. The trick is simply to do all of the work in Lightroom so that it understands where you're moving photos to and can keep the database updated. (That is, do not go to Finder or Explorer and start dragging folders around.)
In the Folders panel in the Library module, I'd go about ...
3
I have used Aperture since it came out, I also used Lightroom a lot in the early betas and off and on since then to see where it is going.
So far I've stuck with Aperture because:
1) The full screen editing is better - one key to go to a true full-screen. The levels of "lights off" in LightRoom looks cool, but I find the frameless full-screen editing in ...
3
Sounds too simple but I found Windows Live Photo Gallery the best out there. First of all it's free and built into Windows. The most important features for me are that I can tag pictures (and it actually touches the IPTC metadata so it's portable over different file-systems if you have both Windows and Mac) and find them very easily using Windows search or ...
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
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 ...
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