Comments on: Print photographs have been scanned: Now what?

By: David

David — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:00:04 +0000

Some thoughts on folder/filename structure can be found here:

http://www.impulseadventure.co.....older.html

By: halifaxgirl

halifaxgirl — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:13:24 +0000

I too am looking for the correct way to catalogue my photos and spent some time wondering whether or not if I label (tag, descriptions) all my photos, how future-proofed is this work? Will they transfer between programs as technology advances? I found my answer here and I hope that you check this article out before you do all the hard work….seems like it could be wasted time unless you pay attention to some techy details about future transferability….

Hope this helps!!

http://genealogy.about.com/b/2.....h-iptc.htm

By: consumer_q

consumer_q — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 05:37:07 +0000

Check out (from the library) the book entitled _The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers_ and read the chapters on archiving, file naming, and metadata. The book will help you knock out a workflow and put a digital asset management system into place (one that is “future proof”). You and your family will learn to appreciate the time you invested to thoroughly tag and organize your photograph collection (using industry standards, of course) when they are looking for “that one photo with…”

By: RHPotter

RHPotter — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:16:57 +0000

I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this yet, but–

For iPhoto, the ‘batch edit’ (I think that’s what it’s called, I don’t have the software in front of me) is my best friend. I can grab a group of photos, whether an entire roll or just certain ones, and change all their titles, descriptions, dates, or other data to the same thing all at once. So say I come home with fifty pictures taken this last Christmas. I can grab the entire roll, and batch change the titles to ‘Christmas 2008′, and Iphoto will append a -1, -2, and so on to the ends to keep them organized. Then I can throw them into a folder or subfolder, as I like.

Sadly, this won’t help with comments for individual photos–you would still have to enter those by hand. But it might help with the organization of your photos collection up to that point.

By: Inki

Inki — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:01:38 +0000

I’m late to the party, but just wanted to recommend Keyword Manager (http://www.bullstorm.se/KeywordManager.php) for iPhoto – makes entering keywords SOOO much easier! You can enter hierarchies of keywords, it suggest keywords based on ones previously entered and names based on what is in your address book… And no, I don’t work for them, I’m just a very happy customer

By: Jenn Ryan

Jenn Ryan — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:42:07 +0000

I store each event in a folder – for example, last Christmas would be “2009-1225 Christmas”. I always start with the year for easier searching. I use Windows Live Photo Gallery (free) to organize. One awesome feature is the ability to change the date taken – for all those scanned pics and the ones where the date is reset to 01-01-1900 on your camera. You can easily tag photos as well; each photo can have multiple tags. I tag pics featuring different people, pets, even pics of craft projects I’ve made, so they are easy to find. Not sure about a fast way of adding notes, sorry!

By: Mandyfuji

Mandyfuji — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:35:40 +0000

As a scrapbooking enthusiast and a mom of 2 young kids, I have lots of digital photos that need organizing. I love the Creative Memories’ Memory Manager program.

http://www.mycmsite.com/sites/.....edCategory=

It’s so easy to use even a tech dummy like me is able to quickly learn how to use it. It allows you to add journal with each photo, perfect for transferring the text in the back of the photos.

As for the quickest way to enter all of them, I would suggest breaking down the process into smaller steps and set a goal to do a few a day so the project doesn’t seem too overwhelming.

By: Rae

Rae — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:10:51 +0000

This is a fantastic article, and the comments are incredibly helpful! I’m at the very beginning of organizing my photos and I had no idea there were so many options. Thanks so much to everyone. You folks are great!

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:26:13 +0000

for organising photos digitally, I order by date.

the folders are labelled, starting with the year, so 2009.

then, using the (reverse for me) month and day the photos were taken on – so the final folder is labelled, for example, 2009-0731.

that’s rather strict, though, as it leaves no room for collections of photos and such, unless you want to do that yourself. personal preference really, but ordering by date is very convenient.

By: Jude

Jude — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:54:41 +0000

I’ve been scanning slides for awhile. I uploaded quite a few to Flickr. After a few hundred, I realized that I needed to assign an accession number so that I could find them a particular slide again. I still haven’t finished annotating all the slides I already uploaded to Flickr, and I have about 2000 more to scan, so that project is on hold for now. Similarly, I delegated the process of photographing our local cemetery to my daughter (I currently lack a camera). I still haven’t annotated those. With the slides, they’re organized by year or decade, although sometimes I make sets for special events or categories of humans (e.g., my Mexican cousins). It’s not fun to do any of this organizing stuff, but it is wonderful to be able to share the photos with anyone. I could never afford to pay a professional to scan my photos.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:12:03 +0000

With a substantial number of photos you may want to consider storing the images themselves using a unique filename that can just be a serial number. Then, put the other information such as subject, year, location, etc. in a database system along with a filed that holds the filename so there’s a link to it. I’m not familiar with databases for the Mac but I’m certain there are several good ones from which to choose.

The advantage to having a true database is not only can you search for a photo or event easily but you could at a later date more readily generate reports on what you have in your archives… “find all photos from July of 1997″, “find all photos of Aunt Betty from any year”, “find all photos from the Smith family reunions”, etc.

The down side is it will take some up front effort. The upside is over time it will save you a lot of frustration if you routinely need to get things from your archives.

Tim

By: megan

megan — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:20:54 +0000

Snitzels — I use ScanCafe for my slide scanning. It’s 20-some cents per slide (I don’t remember right now). They hand scan them as opposed to sending them through a feeder, and you can review your scans online and pick-and-choose which ones you want to keep (as long as you pay for at least half of them). Much easier than sorting this out when in tiny slide form!

By: Snitzels

Snitzels — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:34:38 +0000

By the way, anybody every faced with scanning old slides and know some reasonably affordable way to get them digitized?

By: Snitzels

Snitzels — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:33:29 +0000

If you have Adobe Bridge, it will let you group the sets of pictures without re-filing them all, and it will SUGGEST keywords and can actually recognize FACES and tags them for you(CS4). I would strongly recommend it, it’ll speed up the process quite a bit! go to the adobe.com website and look under Bridge if you want more information.

By: Candied Fabrics

Candied Fabrics — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:49:55 +0000

3 words: Adobe Bridge CS4

This simple program lets you group, arrange, sort, tag, digital photos (without making duplicate copies – like so many other album programs like iPhoto). It then has all these neat output functions that lets you create albums to print out, save to your computer or post on line.

I’m just learning the whole CS4 shebang, and I’m amazed at it’s power – but this Bridge program, all by itself is an amazing organizing tool!