Digital photography cattle dog

[Peter Lewis]

I'm a recent convert to digital.

How do you file/catalogue your images?
Do you rename each one, from the sequential numbering system to something more meaningfull? If you don't, how do you keep track of which image is which?
When you have more than one image of one aircraft, how do you differentiate one from the other?
Do you actually print off one or more images, or just keep them in electronic format? Do you back up the collection, and if so in what format (the original RAW file, or some converted format)? On to CDR or some other medium?
If you do print, do you use a commercial printing service, or print them off yourself? The cost of photographic paper seems to be higher than the cost of the finished print around here.

I need to get some sort of system underway before I loose control of the whole collection!

Any comments or ideas welcome.

[planeimages]

This is what I do:

Put the DF card into a reader which is connected to the PC.

GOto Start/right click Explore.

Open a file ( I use a separate hard drive to save clogging up the main HD)

Select the DCIM and drag to the new file.

Then burn a DVD with Nero with all files. I select each DCIM's files as a group rather than the DCIM itself.

I retain the sequential file numbers.

Then I print a proof sheet using the software supplied with the 20D Canon.

I file the proofsheet in a twin ring folder and write the date on the first page. I file the DVD in either a Disc Stakka or a desk top Disc Pod available from stationery shops

If the images are shot in RAW then they will need to be opend via Canon sofware Pro. This has a method whereby the thumbnails are converted to jpegs and printed out via Easy Photo-print.

I am sure there are similar systems avilable for other brands.

The bane of my editor's life is digital. He is used to keeping all his photos of particular aeroplanes in appropriate sliding draw files.

When I send him a DVD it is of a specific event. If I need to send him images of a particular aircraft then a file is created and I put the image files into that. He needs to have the files labelled with names pertinent to the subject. This is a pain in the neck but I have to do it if I want to be published. I retain the original file number so I can locate them easily.

You could separate your specific aircraft image files and burn a disc with that info.

Pretty steep learning curve but if I can do it anyone can!

I also have a website where I can display my images. www.planeimages.smugmug.com This costs only $US 47 PA and is excellent value. Please feel free to use the code from my site or my email address. You get a $10.00 discount and I get a $10 credit. We all win.

I hope all this helps.

Peter

[Kereru]

I use a CF card reader USB2.0 so that it is fast downloading to my 11" Powerbook when I use my 2Gig card. All photos I shoot are in raw (.NEF) format. I keep them on the HD for a while and then burn them to DVD when I need more room. I use a program called Iview MediaPro to keep track of them and the good thing about this is you don't have to have the DVD in your computer to view the thumbnails. As soon as you select one it gives the info at the top showing the DVD it is on etc. Each DVD has the following info printed on it:-
Photos 31
Folders 218 - 225
Photo No. 2572 - 3509
Date Range 23 Oct - 05 Nov 2006

I have found it easy to track down a shot when needed and it doesn't take long as I usually have a date to start with and then a short search on Iview brings up the one I want and I insert the DVD and it can be viewed full screen. I use Adobe Elements to edit and have had a dable with Adobe Lightroom for raw conversion/editing so far but need more practice. Iview is now a Microsoft company and looks to be a bit more expensive than when I bought it a year or so ago. Still worth it for me.

www.iview-multimedia.com/

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom beta web site(this is free for a while yet)
labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Colin

[corsair67]

Okay guys, here's an example of how bad a 'system' really can be:

I download the photos I have taken onto the computer and then burn them onto a cd. I then attach a post-it to the cover of the cd with a rough outline of where and when the photos were taken.

When I need to find a particular photo, I then spend anything between a few minutes to a few hours going through all my cds trying to find which one has the photo I'm looking for!

Peter, I'd highly recommend you use either Peter or Colin's systems, rather than mine. ;D

[Peter Lewis]

That's the sort of trap I don't want to fall into!
I have a good system for films/prints, but the digital thing is another sort of problem.
Fortunately I have a (cough) cuzzie who works in the 'trade' so I have access to any software that I need, the Iview option is worth considering.
What is the potential life of a CDR? - I have heard that it's fairly short (a few years).

Any other workable systems out there?

[Kereru]

I forgot to mention Iview MediaPro has the facility to rate photos and add all sorts of additional info to the exif data which in turn would be searchable and make them easy to find. Other programs like Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture etc would do the same thing.

CD-R, DVD I had heard the same thing from not lasting more than a few years to lasting only 10 - 15 years. Some of my slides are over 40 years old and still quite good and others are not so good(I shouldn't have bought that cheap slide film!!). Bit of an unknown quantity until the years pass by for CD and DVD too I think. I do keep some on an external back up drive as well so I have two copies of most of them. I guess storing high quality versions on the net somewhere might be another alternative. Cost might be the only drawback and then there is blu-ray just become available here from Panasonic with 50+Gig storage on each disc but again I have no idea how long there life is either. At the moment I have decided to make a couple of copies on DVD and a back up drive to see how it goes. I guess the only real back up will be a very high quality print stored in ideal conditions but how far does one go to preserve ones treasures?

Colin

[planeimages]

Got a bit lost on the "Peters" there Corsair!

[corsair67]

Yeah, we've got too many Colins and Peters on this forum: it's hard to keep up with who's who.

Actually, now that I think of it there might be two Craig's as well?

[musice]

only just found this thread.............. here is my two cents worth...........

Firstly I dont shoot in RAW - it requires three extra steps to edit the pics........ CS2 from Adobe does such a good job with JPEG files that the extra time taken with RAW is just not worth it........... and you get a lot more pics on your (my) 2GB CF card.......... donrt get me wrong..... RAW is the 'superior' method of shooting.......... but as I say - with CS2 there is so little differnce in quality there is no point....... most publications these days will accept pics in JPEG form...

taking the pics and keeping track......... first make a folder on your hard drive for the pictures..... e.g "Camera originals Nov 2006" the as you take the pics open that folder and make a "new" folder with the days date - "22-11-06 wex" where 'wex' means where the pics were taken - in this case Wexford St Wellington Airport (if it's a special REGO as well add that to the folder name..... e.g. 22-11-06 wex NGG


next we put the pics in the folder........ place the CF card in PC open 'cam orig Nov' folder create the date and go to "My Computer" - CF card Drive (I:CANON CF CARD" open the picture folder - highlight all the pics - COPY (or MOVE) to the PC folder........... (replace the CF card back in the camera - 'Format' to clear and your ready to shoot next day (dont forget to recharge the camera battery)

now the pics are on the PC --- open CS2 - and have the new pics folder open on screen lower right......... move the CS2 screen so you can see the pics folder......... highlight all the pics and drag them into CS2 screen.............. your now ready to EDIT ;-)

(wont go into editing detail at this stage) once a pic is edited you want to save it - so you can find it again easily........ you start with IMG_2000.JPG you save it as IMG_2000cNGGus22-11-06 where c stands for CROPED image NGG (aircraft Rego) us = UltraSharp mask 22-11-06 (date) you can now search this drive of your PC for DATE and/or REGO to find all files of NGG (have a look at www.jetphotos.net/showphotos.php?userid=12531) pic on a pic - open it - right click - save as and save it to your PC....... open the picture and you will see my final 'File Name' for the picture.........

once a month I save all pics to a DVD-R for backup purposes......... and if you have them filed by shoot date/location/rego it's a fairly easy job to 'find' (via start/search/hard drive location) any file by date rego or location ;-)

[musice]

by the by........... CD-R and DVD-R media are good for about 8 years......... BUT they must be kept in a DARK 'still' place........ a CD rack in a wardrobe is an excellent storage place........... (some of my first copies have been here for nine years now......... and still play very well..........) so dark and non moveable does help :-)

just dont forget - every five or six years to make another copy.......present software to accomplish this is the NERO package.......

also if you change or update your PC/DVD drives - it's a good idea to make new copies on the new drive of the old discs - to keep them compatible with the changing technology.....

[corsair67]

Guys, all this advice is absolutely fantastic, especially the shelf life of CD-R and DVD-R media as I was not at all aware that they could perish quite so quickly.

[greaneyr]

What I'd do (this is do as I say, don't do as I do here!) is use something that allows you to add IPTC tags to each image. IPTC tags are basically metadata (data about data) that are saved with the file. What you can do is add keywords to each image which are saved into the jpeg itself, using lossless compression. Many image management apps these days allow you to search by tags (Picasa does, for one, and is free) which solves the problem.

I went down a lot of roads over this years ago, trying to find the ultimate method of doing it. Many image cataloging apps allow you to store keywords with each image, but if you re-install windows or copy the images onto another PC, the keywords are gone. IPTC tags live as long as the file does.

The thing I like about storing data with the image is that locating it is no longer conditional on it being placed in a meaningful folder. The big thing that Apple are pushing (And I think Microsoft will start to follow on soon) is that folder locations are becoming less relevant for data, and shouldn't actually matter. What matters is the content, not where it's saved to. For instance, say you take some Nice Q300 photos at Nelson. Do you store them under the date? the airport? the aircraft type? or the registration? The answer: You don't! You attach all this data to the image itself so a search for any of those fields later will give you a match.

In fact, IPTC is an aging standard and the new one supposedly is XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform) that Windows Vista will supposedly support. Having said that, IPTC will still be around an usable for a while yet.

I say "do as I say, don't do as I do" since I haven't done this! I keep meaning to start, but as the number of images on this pc grows, the amount of work required increases a lot, as you can no doubt imagine.

Also, having a lot of images on CD negates the need a little too.

[phil]

OK, well here's how the Air force photo trade does it....and they have quite a few photos!

All the photos are downloaded to a folder, and the 'keepers' are selected and copied to another folder. These are then renamed with a 'year-neg number-frame number' eg 07-0123-01. In photoshop, file info (metadata) is added, the info added is photographers name, unit, location photo was taken, date and a copright notice. The most inportant info added is the caption which follows a convention of: Service, Base, Unit, Aircraft/equipment type, photo class, short caption to include names etc. An example would be Air, Ohakea, 2 sqn, IRO, Technical, damage to aircraft cabin floor.

Files are always saved full size and max quality!

The files are then added to one big folder containing all the images for the year, and cataloged using Portfolio Browser, which allows a search for any of the info contained in the metadata. Generally out of the 20000 or so files per year, you can find what you are looking for in less than a minute.

The files that were not used are deleted when the job is finished, or if you are an untidy bugger like me, kept for a while longer 'just in case'.

[Peter Lewis]

Oh dear, what a trap!

I'm using Lightroom to keep track of my digital photographs, currently some 46,000 images. The images are stored on a 1TB drive.

A few days ago, I decided to clean up and defragment this drive, which has been getting slower and slower.
That took a while, but now its complete there is a bit more room on that drive.

The sting in the tail came when I reopened Lightroom.
The catalogue could not find any of the actual images, and just showed the thumbnail plus a ? in each case - unable to locate the image. Panic!
Tried restoring Lightroom with the backup catalogue, which is kept on another disk. Same result.

Golly. The photos are still there, in the files.
So, this evening decided to re-import all of the 46,000 photos back into Lightroom.
That started to work - slowly - but I feared I might need to re-identify and re-title each and every one of those images. Not a job for the faint-of-heart.

Overcome with fatigue at the prospect, I left the computer to its laborious task and went and lay on the bed for a snooze.

In between waking and sleeping, a solitary little grey cell stirred.
That photo disk now the H drive, didn't that used to be the F drive?
Maybe the cleanup work has somehow resulted in a change of identity?

Back to the computer, stopped the photo re-import, and changed the ID of the disk back to F.

Bingo! The catalogue works once more and we have all those photos with their titles intact.

Now all I have to do is delete the catalogue entries for the 28,000 or so duplicate imports and I can breathe again.

So, if all your photos mysteriously disappear, check that the disk ID has not changed.

[Gavin Conroy]

Thanks for the info Peter, good to know.
Cheers

[Peter Lewis]

Heard a good one on NatRad today:

'I was at the local photo shop.
The woman in front of me was in there to collect a photograph of her family.
Apparently the photograph had inadvertently included the rubbish bin, and she had asked for the bin to be digitally removed.

"There you are" said the assistant, handing her the print. "The bin has been taken out"
"That's very nice", said the customer, "But where's the dog?"
"What dog?" asked the assistant.
"Our dog" said the woman". He was behind the bin". '

Well, I though it was quite funny anyway.

[Peter Lewis]

Got back from a week away at the Tauranga air show, and a few other places.
Uploaded the latest batch of a few dozen photos (well, ok, a thousand or so)to the Seagate FreeAgent hard disc.
"Thank you very much" it said, and died.
Just on three years old.

After quite a few hours of battling I managed to get some stored folders off it, but no way would it allow me to copy the photo downloads - all 86,000 of them.

Fortunatly, I do have a backup copy of the photo folder on another expansion disc, and I never delete photos off my camera cards until the backup has been updated.

So have now spent several nights sorting this lot out. Don't think I have actually lost any images. Coincidentially, Noel Leemings have 4TB expansion discs on sale at $228, so that is the replacement for the failed one.

Golden rule - you can never have too many backups, and they can never be too current.

[erik]

I store my photos in a very simple folder structure, where I keep all the photos per single event. In my case - country - location / event - date/period.
(e.g. US - Luke AFB (AZ) - 08.2012,  US - USS Nimitz - 09.2005, NZ - Wings over Wairarapa 01.2009, etc.)

I just toss all my photos in there, which could be several GB per event/location/visit and then I use Lightroom to import everything into my catalogue.
Once in Lightroom, I will assign the proper keywords to the metadata so I can easily find something if I need it. I don't go as far as enter the serial number of each individual aircraft as I rarely need a specific airframe, usually just a specific squadron, wing or aircraft type.

I then go through the photos and quickly rate them using 0-5 stars. I then process the 5 star photos individually although I may use a more generic batch process for lower rated photos.

And there is the beauty with Lightroom - gone are the days of keeping copies of copies of copies of copies of photos. Whenever I need something, I can quickly select the photos I need and run them through a predefined export routine, send the JPEGs off to a magazine or requester and I usually delete them afterwards.  It took me a while to covert to Lightroom but now I am a 100% convert - it's the best invention next to sliced bread if you ask me, it just works. (And it's not all that expensive,  through Amazon in the US, Lightroom 5 can be purchased for ~$150 NZD - it is worth every single penny).

In terms of storage and backups - I gave up putting things on DVD recordable as 4.3GB just doesn't cut it. Instead my internal drive (1TB) is replicated onto another internal 1TB drive and periodically backuped onto 2 external hard drives, one of which is not at my house. However, with blue ray recorders becoming mainstream (and thus cheaper), I am considering using those as additional backup. With 25GB per disc, it makes backing up on 2 BR discs a more palatable solution - opposed to burning 10 traditional DVDs!

Just a note on hard drives, I am a little picky perhaps but I only use Western Digital Black drives for my photo storage. Of course any hard disk of any vendor can fail at any time - but WD has been very reliable for me, with Seagate a close second (but only their Barracuda series). What perhaps also helps is that my drive bay in my workstation is cooled with 2 80mm fans, with sufficient spacing between each drive to ensure an effective airflow.

[Peter Lewis]

My drives are Seagates, I thought a name brand would be reliable.

Perhaps I am wrong.

[htbrst]

Backblaze is on online backup service that uses 25,000 hard drives, 12,000 which were seagates- the blog post below is from 2 weeks ago

This graph in particular is useful:



blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/