So in my (young) 21 years, i've shot a fair few photos. Naturally, being young, keeping everything tidy has been somewhat last in my list of priorities. I've got photos from all manner of shoots, subjects, locations, scattered over multiple hardrives and various other individual stragglers in various sub-directories.
It needs to end, here!
How have people tackled this in the past? My first thought was to just suck it up and go through everything individually, making sure everything is in the correct folder (Within a shoot i'll have various folders, RAW, Working, web, etc). I'de like all my folders to have the date at the beggining, and looking how windows organised files based on name they have to be formatted year/month/day, rather than the usual opposite way round (Though different again if you're American).
Well, this may not be the right forum for your question, but I'll share my method.
1. Configure the camera's software to rename the files in the format: yyyy-mm-dd_number when downloaded.
2. All files download to a specific directory (mine is called "!" so it stays at the top of the folder list) into subfolders arranged by year and month. This is also handled by the camera software (EOS Utility in my case)
3. Cull out the throw aways then move into final destination folder for editing.
4. The final destination folders I name accordingly so I can find what I'm looking for when I go back. I use subfolders under each as needed (separate sessions, dates, etc..). I originally started with dates first on my final destination folders, but I changed after about a year. It was easier for me to find photos if the primary folder name is descriptive rather than a date.
I have managed without Lightroom and actually find that this is a pretty fast workflow. The only way for you to do something similar is to go back and sort through everything you have... so yeah suck it up and get to work
1. Make a folder called photos
2. Put a folder inside for every month of the year. For instance "January 2009"
3. what ever day I shoot I drag the photos from my memory card into the month of the folder and create a folder say "01 02 2009"
Thats it. I always leave my exif information in my photos so when I have a photo lose and don't remember what day I shot it and need more from that shoot. I just look at the date, and then go to that folder. Been working for me for years.
You may not like Lightroom (Lord knows why?) but you're going to need a DAM of some kind eventually, so you may as well go that way now. There's just no way in the long run for you to be able to remember where all your individual images are.
In the long run a DAM will save you hundreds of hours looking for images.
How do you find Lightroom helps your image searching? (I've not heard the term DAM before either?) Perhaps i've never given it enough time but I already have enough peices of software involved in my workflow and Lightroom has just never had a place in it. I don't use it for edits or RAW processing and my previous messy filing system hasn't had want for it's photo sorting abilities. I generally don't mind taking some time to get to know programs but Lightroom has just always seemed like one of those places I don't want to be. Perhaps it's all the grey..
Unfortunately as my images have been moved over multiple hardrives (And with this, neg scans, DSLR date settings not being correct, etc) I have a right mess finding out when I did actually create half of these photos. I can see this taking a while.
Capture one features heavily in my workflow (Tethered shooting + RAW processing) which creates nice Capture/Moved/Trash/Ouput folders, which I also presume wouldn't like Lightroom much (If anyone uses C1 and Lightroom i'de love to hear how - I wouldn't be too averse to giving LR another try if properly persuaded)
I also had not heard the term DAM before, I'm assuming digital media management?
Anyway, I don't see how Lightroom would help me search for photos. If I know the person's name, or the event, etc... I can easily find it in the folder system. If I can't remember their name that would be a problem, but in that case I don't see how LR could help either??
I'm not against LR, but just like Adrian, I don't want another piece of software involved in my workflow. Right now EOS utility creates all my download folders and renames files for me, DPP let's me make all my quick RAW adjustments, and Photoshop is for everything else.
I have a dedicated 2TB RAID 0 (striped array) drive that I use strictly for photos. In the root directory of the photo drive I have folders by year ("Photos 2007", "Photos 2008", etc.). Inside each of those folders are individual folders for each shoot (event). Those shoot folders are automatically organized chronologically because I use the date in the name of the folder in yyyy/mm/dd format. (If you don't put the year first, the shoot folders won't be arranged chronologically. You also have to remember to always use two digits for month and day or, again, the chronological order can get screwed up.) I also use a title in the folder name to describe the shoot. Example: "2009/04/24 Car Show At Del Mar Fairgrounds". Within the shoot folders are simply the default filenames (numbering) my cameras assign to the photos as I take them.
I import the photos into Aperture in the exact same organizational structure. I have over 20,000 photos in Aperture and I can find the one I'm looking for in just a minute or two without using any keywords. But I'm pretty good at remembering which EVENT I shot a particular image at. Those with poor memories or hundreds of thousands of photos might want to use keywords!
I'm just curious how a lot of people pretends LR is not for them without using it at least 3/4 months
LR is (IMHO) the best software for a photographer that want spend more time to do photos instead to stay long hours in Post Processing, and LR is still in its infancy!
My two cents of course
AdrianRogers wrote:
How do you find Lightroom helps your image searching? (I've not heard the term DAM before either?) Perhaps i've never given it enough time but I already have enough peices of software involved in my workflow and Lightroom has just never had a place in it. I don't use it for edits or RAW processing and my previous messy filing system hasn't had want for it's photo sorting abilities. I generally don't mind taking some time to get to know programs but Lightroom has just always seemed like one of those places I don't want to be. Perhaps it's all the grey..
Unfortunately as my images have been moved over multiple hardrives (And with this, neg scans, DSLR date settings not being correct, etc) I have a right mess finding out when I did actually create half of these photos. I can see this taking a while.
Capture one features heavily in my workflow (Tethered shooting + RAW processing) which creates nice Capture/Moved/Trash/Ouput folders, which I also presume wouldn't like Lightroom much (If anyone uses C1 and Lightroom i'de love to hear how - I wouldn't be too averse to giving LR another try if properly persuaded)...Show more →
DAM stands for "Digital Assets Management" and a DAM is a program that allows you to sort, move, rename, collect and find images easily. Lightroom has a DAM built in (the Library) but there are dozens of others. If you're using C1 then you want a standalone DAM not LR.
The main input into a DAM are keywords. You input keywords into the database (or the image metadata or both) and then the program can easily find and sort images based on those keywords, as well as the file names, folder names that images are stored in etc. When you import images into the database you keyword them. After that it's adoodle to find images.
You can of course keyword in metadata or use Adobe Bridge. But a DAM will also allow you to find the location of images on drives not currently connected to your computer. For example it would allow you to find all images of "uncle Bob" that you have, regardless of where they are stored an a few seconds and have them displayed neatly as thumbnails on one page.
It will allow you to put images into multiple "categories" Say you have two photos. The first is a photo of your family on a beach on holiday in South Africa. The second is your kids in the school play at the Opera House. With a DAM if you did a keyword search for "holiday" only the first image would be found. If you did the same search for "family" both would be found. Other examples are group shots where you would keyword each person in the shot and then be able to search that image based on any one person in the shot.
Regardless of how good you may think your memory is you can find, sort and move images faster in a DAM than you can do it your self and with far more power. A DAM takes a while to set up as you'll need to add keywords and categories to your old images. But once it's up and running it's the only way to go for photographers who take larger quantities of images.
alvit wrote:
I'm just curious how a lot of people pretends LR is not for them without using it at least 3/4 months
LR is (IMHO) the best software for a photographer that want spend more time to do photos instead to stay long hours in Post Processing, and LR is still in its infancy!
My two cents of course
Having given LR a decent trial period, I can see why some don't care for it. When it comes to image processing (and CS4), it's a lightweight. It's a great DAM program though, that much is true.
LR is great for hammering through a load of images. For someone doing weddings and sports and crap like that, and trying to make a buck at it, it's fantastic. For folks who really seek to optimize images, and don't let less than fantastic images out into the public light.....it's not so much.
Johnny Bravo wrote:
Having given LR a decent trial period, I can see why some don't care for it. When it comes to image processing (and CS4), it's a lightweight. It's a great DAM program though, that much is true.
LR is great for hammering through a load of images. For someone doing weddings and sports and crap like that, and trying to make a buck at it, it's fantastic. For folks who really seek to optimize images, and don't let less than fantastic images out into the public light.....it's not so much.
Have to dissagree there. I have most of the commercial RAW converters. LR does not have the best out of the box processing, but since I have made my own camera profiles and presets I can find little or no image quality difference between LR and C1 when in print. LR looks simple but is deceptively complex to master/
Also I think that you'll find that many wedding and sports photographers who use Lightroom are producing images that are both award winning and of the highest quality. Your generalisation and association that these are "crap" is insulting.
I have to agree with both Johnny Bravo and flash. Depends on what you want to do with your photos, what your workflow is, what types of photos you specialize in which opinion fits you.
I fall somewhere between the two opinions. For some things I find Lightroom works well, but most of my work demands layers and editing I can't do in Lightroom.
But I do use Lightroom always for my DAM. I find it excels in that department.
If you haven't read it, get the book by Martin Evening on Lightroom. It is excellent for all the ins-and-outs of Lightroom. Not light reading, but thorough!
