How do you catalogue

[Barreti]

Hi chaps,

Although I've only been taking photos for a couple of years I've got hundreds - no, that must be thousands by now - of photographs.
I really should be catalogueing (sp?!) these better than I do which is to create a folder with the name of the event at the time - Spain Holiday April 2007 etc.
This isn't really a big help when I'm looking for a good photograph of a specific type though.

I've done a search for CATALOG* on here and haven't found a thread discussing what people use to keep track of their photos. So can you help me here and tell me how you do this?

Ta.
IanB

[TonyHetherington]

I do a similar thing to you....I have my photo hard drive which contains simply folders with appropriate names; "Norway Jan 07" or "My Exige".

Within that I think have a sub folder called "rendered" which is where I put the edited versions of photos from that trip.

So, urmmm, the same as you I guess

There are catalog programs out there but I've not found one I get on with.

[Podie]

We use the following syntax;

[year] [date] [location / event]

- and store the RAW files. (We bin the dross).

Then under that location there is a folder of edited photos where we store the edited TIFFs.

It's so quick and easy to resize / convert to JPG we don't store those.

[AlfaFoxtrot]

Barreti said:

Hi chaps,

Although I've only been taking photos for a couple of years I've got hundreds - no, that must be thousands by now - of photographs.
I really should be catalogueing (sp?!) these better than I do which is to create a folder with the name of the event at the time - Spain Holiday April 2007 etc.
This isn't really a big help when I'm looking for a good photograph of a specific type though.

I've done a search for CATALOG* on here and haven't found a thread discussing what people use to keep track of their photos. So can you help me here and tell me how you do this?

Ta.
IanB

Your file system is fine - the easiest way to catalog photos so you can sift through them more easily is to get something like Adobe Lightroom (I'm playing with the trial atm and liking it!) as it allows you to assign keywords to each picture. So in my case, I've been able to go through all the family holiday shots and put peoples names in the keywords. You can then do a search for "dad" or whatever, and up come all the shots containing that keyword from any album.

[horacethefrog]

Another vote for Adobe Lightroom although it's a heck of a lot more than just a catalogue - does the full workflow from capture through to print/web with integration with Photoshop for the tricky stuff that Lightroom can't do. Don't know whether Adobe Photo Album is still around but that was reasonable as a basic image management tool. There's a few other's out there that a Google for 'image management' will show up.

[The_Jackal]

Any program that uses metatags will do exactly what you want.
It means you can attach any number of words to describe what is in the picture and then search on them. Lightroom, photoshop and I am sure Paintshop Pro all use this method. Its kinda the in thing with most graphics programs so you may even have the feature already but not know it.
What apps do you use by the way?

[RobDickinson]

I use date / description then metatag the pics if I want.

[GravelBen]

I use datedescriptionnumber, and add a letter onto the end of the filenames to remind me what processing I've done, ie a=adjusted (generally for contrast/brightness etc), c=cropped, r=rotated. For example 01_01_2008Tree001ca would be the first in a set of a tree taken on that date, cropped and adjusted (and in a folder called 01_01_2008Tree).

I sort those folders into bigger folders for category ie motorsport, climbing, etc. within some of those I also sort into subfolders for year.

Simpler than I make it sound I think.

[GenePoolReject]

When I upload from the camera I name the file what event it was and it automaticly adds the date too. Also have folders for 10x8's (some i print but its the size the pictures on my web site are cropped to) and have a spare folder for me to pic sets of pictures out of a certain event to edit. Might sound messy but works for me.