Photo Clutter

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(14 posts) (9 voices)

Started 1 year ago by chacha1
Latest reply from trillie
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chacha1
Member

I don't know how many others may have this issue ... I suspect rather a lot, as it's come up in other threads. The issue is PHOTOS. Digital and print, but in my case mostly digital since I never took many print photos; the inconvenience and expense always trumped whatever impulse I had to record what we were doing.

Now, of course, with my nifty PowerShot I take hundreds of photos anytime we go anywhere. There were 1100 from a weeklong driving trip to the Olympic Peninsula in 2008.

I made huge progress this weekend in "uncluttering" some of this photo archive. We often travel with my laptop and after a big photo day, would download the camera to the laptop so that the memory card would be clear for the next day. Subsequently I was *supposed* to transfer the photos from the laptop to our main computer.

And yet, somehow, I often didn't. Or I copied them over but neglected to delete the laptop copy. But it is, finally, almost DONE. It's one of those trivial things, not hard at all to do (with a wireless home network thanks to DH) and didn't really even take much time (thanks to DH again and giant RAM chips).

The only batch of photos I still have to move is from our trip last year to Sedona and Grand Canyon. I am hopeful that having things all in one place will serve as my impetus to get started categorizing and editing, and assembling memory books on Blurb.

Has anyone else made strides in a project like this? Has anyone else successfully used online providers to create print albums?

Posted 1 year ago #
habithacker
Member

Yahoo, chacha! I still have a bit of a mess with my digital photos, but a number of years ago I dealt with my huge collection of print photos.

I bought a hundred identical photo boxes and labeled them in rather broad categories, such as city we lived in and year...or grandparents. My perfectionist self wanted to be more detailed, but I realized more detail would make the job go on forever. Then I premade labels for future years so i can throw keepsakes and printed photos in the boxes easily.

One thing I've been doing with digital photos is using Picasa's face recognition ability to enter tags that at least tell me who is in the photo. It works quite well. Also, in my computer sidebar I've got a rotating photo display and so every once in a while, in an idle moment, I'll see a blurry photo come up and i'll go to the folder and delete it or label things, etc.

I'm also a fan of the "eye-fi" wireless SD cards which auto upload your photos, as you take them, to the computer of your choice.

It's overwhelming, however, especially for someone like me who takes photos every single day.

Posted 1 year ago #
Laetitia in Australia
Member

I'm a Creative Memories Consultant so this is right up my alley. For those not in Australia, check out the Creative Memories website applicable to your country to find a local consultant. For those in Australia, I recommend our software Memory Manager for tracking and editing your photos and StoryBook for creating photo books, posters, calendars, cards... You can contact me via my website at http://www.mycmsite.com.au/laetitiab for more info.

Posted 1 year ago #
ninakk
Member

I use mac and iPhoto has a built-in feature of making books. I collected the highlights of three years worth of photos taken by either me or my sister, and then made four prints of the book, one for each of us and the two others to our parents and aunt and uncle for christmas. It was a reliable service, so I can recommend them. Don't know about other vendors though.

I really stink at this one. I take the photos, upload them to the computer and occasionally even sort through them in iPhoto, making albums etc., but never get around deleting the original files of bad photos. Kudos on having cleaned house at least partly! And thanks for the gentle reminder of incorporating this into my "staying organized" sessions either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly depending on season.

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

It's the upkeep that is the problem, because sitting at the computer for hours to go through photos you've already seen at least twice can be a bit of a drag. Especially if your cat is banging on the office door demanding to know why she can't come in. :-)

As with many other things, I'm finding my "keeper" threshold has risen dramatically. In last weekend's organizing session, I deleted a lot of photos including some entire batches.

My ambition in re: photos is to get the memory books made and then delete the photo archive. It's one of those things, I'm going to keep taking photos as long as I can see, and my skill is only going to improve, so why should I hang onto 400 shots of sequoias from 2007-2010? I'd rather have a dozen nice little books on my shelf that I can actually pull out and flip through.

DH and I were talking about it and I told him I'd concluded that many of the photos don't really stand alone. They work great as part of a narrative, though. So the books are the way to go, I think, for me.

Posted 1 year ago #
larryp7639
Member

Hi !
I've just visited this forum. Happy to get acquainted with you. Thanks.

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Posted 1 year ago #
Maura
Member

I am in the middle of sorting/organizing my digital photos into folders. I like the idea of having them sorted by year, then sub-sorted into categories.

I also like the idea of having some broader folders --

But I don't like the idea of duplicates, so I guess I have to commit to one system or another.

Here's an example: I came across a folder entitled "Home Remodeling Projects" which includes the bathrooms in 2007, the basement in 2008, a window project in 2010, Should I now separate these photos and place them in their various years, and be done with this folder? Or is anyone in favor of filing photos into broad categories that span more than one year?

I would love to hear about any logical photo structures you use when sorting your digital photos... thanks!

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

I started with years, subdivided by specific events or topics. But I'm going to move things around quite a bit because what I've found is that I have a tendency to take a lot of pictures of certain things - roses, classic cars, the ocean - that don't really need to be year-specific, if you know what I mean.

Obviously, our trip to Sonoma in 2006 is all one topic and the photos from that would all go in one book. But the random trips to the beach over the course of six years can all be sorted together because there isn't any specific "story" related to those photos. Does that make sense??

I'd be inclined to put all "remodeling" photos into a single folder organized by project, even if the project extended over several years. That way you can see it evolve.

Also, for what it's worth, having all the beach photos or all the rose photos in one place makes it much, much easier to see and select the good ones - the "keepers" - versus the just-okay or flawed ones; or to see that you (and by "you" I mean "I") have taken twenty nearly-identical photos of Tiffany roses ... and to determine which can then be sent to the great wastebasket in the sky. :-)

Posted 1 year ago #
Maura
Member

Thanks for your reply. I've been literally at this for the past 5 hours (with a lunch break) and found that I did as you described. As I was going along, there were definitely photos that did not need to be year-specific: Remodeling projects, the Cats ("subject" photos similar to your roses or beached, lol), Photos of our town which my son took for a school project (kept them in case another similar assignment comes up in HS)...

I also created a non-year folder called "Christmas Card Enclosure" and in that is one photo from each year, chronicling the kids development through the years.

I appreciate your reply and helping me think this through. The "sorting" is almost done... now it will take hours going through each, editing and deleting and tagging.... But I'm off to a good start!

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

Glad that was helpful. :-) I have to put together a Cats category too ... it will be pretty lean, as one of my cats is solid black and it is bloody hard to get a good photo of her!

It's a nice feeling to get things sorted though, isn't it?

Posted 1 year ago #
Claycat
Member

I have one of those black kitties, too, chacha1. She is our baby.

Posted 1 year ago #
karenmcgowan
Member

like habithacker, i've got an eye-fi card that uploads my photos to my computer and to my flickr account automatically. it is the coolest thing, just wish my canon rebel used an sd card instead of cf. i also use picasa as a starting point for managing my photos. it's free and cross-platform and the face recognition is fairly decent. it also uses tags which would address the issue of having duplicate photos in several categories. instead of taking one photo and copying it into several folders (year, vacation destination, etc.) you keep one copy of the photo and add keywords. so then you could see all of the photos you took in 2010, or all of the beach photos, or the ones with uncle henry, etc. another benefit with picasa is that the tags you add in picasa are written into the photo's metadata and can be seen in other programs, like adobe bridge or adobe lightroom. neither of thos programs have face recognition, so i use picasa to find all of the faces for me, then i tag the photos with the person's name. now i can use lightroom to pull up the photos of the people i want. not to sound like a picasa commercial, but it also has the added benefit of online albums. you get a limited amount of space to store photos in a picasa web album for free, but $5 a year will get you 20GB and there are lots more options in their tiered payment plans.

Posted 1 year ago #
karenmcgowan
Member

@chacha1 - in response to your original post, i've done a few photo books from kodak and shutterfly. i am a digital scrapbooker, so i tend to create my own layouts rather than use their templates, but i love the result and i plan to make more.

for a very comprehensive round-up of about a dozen photobook companies, this review is really excellent: http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/the-great-photo-book-round-up-review-who-makes-the-best-photo-books.html

i was very happy with my books from both kodak and shutterfly, but i think shutterfly has a better product. there are a couple of companies mentioned in that review that i would love to try because they have some nice features - like hidden bindings and different covers.

i am in the middle of scanning my mother's photos. i had my own negatives digitized several years ago by digmypics.com and was very happy with the results. my only complaint is that we had some truly awful cameras - and my mom's pictures are even worse since a large chunk were taken with those disk cameras that were so popular in the 80's. i've already scanned most of my mother-in-law's, so i am working with a century's worth of photos. it's a huge undertaking, but i do a little each day. best of luck with yours!!

Posted 1 year ago #
trillie
Member

Another thumbs up for iPhoto (I'm also a Mac user) from me -- after not using any photo album software, I came across an article online* about how powerful iPhoto actually is, even if it doesn't look it at first glance. Importing everything was easy (I had already sorted everything into folders after uploading from the camera). I sorted the events mainly by date, but I have a few best of albums, and I like that you can browse by person (that face recognition is fun) or by location. I don't know if I'll ever use it to make printed photo albums, but it's nice to have the option.

With the huge amount of digital photos, I've come to the realization that a few years ago before I had a digital camera, the amount of pictures were fewer and they were much more deliberate and not so random. When uncluttering digital pictures, I try to make the decisions memory-based: If I have ten or more pictures of the same hiking trail and its scenery, and they all remind me of the same day and same hike, I only keep two or three. It's been weird to allow myself to delete photos though (as I would never be so ruthless with the fewer paper pictures I have).

Good luck to everyone sorting through their pictures -- you have to be ready to take that trip down memory lane, and don't be afraid to toss the ones you don't like :o)

* Edit: I could have sworn I found that article through minimalmac.com, but I can't seem to find it now, sorry.

Posted 1 year ago #

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