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Photo organization

After only a few years of taking interest in capturing the world about me, I have realized a big problem: To take a good photos requires taking many photos, but many photos means lots of space and more importantly a nearly unsearchable library. Here is the main point:

How does one retain a useful searchable library of photos. Can a GTD type reference section be build from photos in an easy way?

The main classification I have for photos are:
-good photos (artistic, printable, usually posted in flickr)
-sentelmental (not very well done, but they give you a strong reaction, or bring back a memory)
-useful (idientification of something, process, place, I'm in physics, so I have very many data pics of samples etc..)

Some photos fall into several of these, so crossreference is needed.

The programs I'm trying are iPhoto6 (I had 1-2 but they crashed with more then 1-2000 pics) and iView. But I still find that I want an IN Box type format to remember which need sorting etc...

Ideas?

enine's picture

Just for the sake of...

Stew wrote:
Just for the sake of organization, you may want to get a Flickr account. You mentioned having 2000+ photos, so you may be limited by the upload limitations without a pro account, but it makes organizing and finding photos a snap.

I'm an avid photographer too, so I've run into the same problems. I burn my raw data to CD's, organized by date and with the same file names the camera assigns. I then upload copies to Flickr and add the appropriate tags. When I actually need to revisit the original, it's easy to cross-reference the two repositories using the file name and the date taken.

As far as needing an inbox, you could automatically tag uploaded files as "In" or whatever you like to remind you to process them.

enine's method of editing the meta data seems simple. I may give that a go and see what's easier.

I basically do the imbox thing. Copy all from the camera to a temp folder then use exiftool to add a general comment, usually the location where we were when the pic was taken ex: "Columbus Zoo" then drop them into my Pictures folder. Most any file manager can view some of the Metadata so you can solrt and search by it. Konqueror for example displays "user comments" and "comments", Windows XP you have to use the XP specific tags XPComments and such so I usually set both so my wife can see the comments too. I assume Apple can do the same. Then other programs such as KimDaBa read this information from the pics so having the data inside the pictures themselves makes them more portable. I'm seeing now that there are even GPS coordinates tags included in the Exif standard and there are supposed to be cameras that will write that data now as well. Lots of nice info can be added. I've went back and started adding tags to the images I have scanned as well taken from film cameras.

 
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