How can I tidy-up my muddled photo collection?

[Rudolf Zurbuchen]

Hello

As a Downloader Pro and BreezeBrowser Pro user, but a newbie to this forum, I hope for some enlightening on my following problem.

As a photo hobby enthusiast I took thousands of photographs during my professional live. However, for lack of time (foresight, courage …), I neglected systematic and stringent organizing. As a result, all my pictures and backups are now scattered over two computers and external drives.
Now retired, I’m determined to clean up this mess by organizing my picture collection into a logical structure. To accomplish this trying task, I envisage something like the following

WORKFLOW ?

1. locate all existing picture files to establish a starting inventory
2. extract monthly batches using Date/Time EXIF data
3. get rid of duplicates and obsolete derivates (with a minimal risk of a catastrophic loss)
4. weed out no-keepers
5. rename pictures and place them into a Photos\Year\Moth\ directory structure and backup onto two existing external eSATA drives
6. start cataloguing, I’m not yet fixed on a solution, but my aim is a good balance between efficiency and ease of use

As for the tools, my most urgent need is for 1., 2. and 3.
Currently I have DLP, BBP, Capture NX and Paint Shop Pro X

TOOLS ?

1. Flexible and reliable image file search and sort tool, using EXIF data such as Date/Time, Camera Model, etc.
(may be one day this will pop-up in the Breeze tools  ?)
2. idem, using EXIF Date/Time
3. ideally part of application used for 1. and 2.
4. BBP, I tried and find it very functional and efficient
5. I think that DLP should work well, provided the upfront cleanup is well done?
6. ???

Any suggestions regarding methods, tools, articles, books, (warnings?) …. for cleaning-up my pictorial chaos would be highly appreciated.

Rudolf Zurbuchen

[Rudolf Zurbuchen]

Sorry, in my preceeding posting I misinterpreted the thumbs-down icon as a question mark.

[DavidB]

Rudolf

You seem to have thought about this issue a great deal, and I think that the most important piece of advice I can offer is that you are on the right lines.

I hope that your mention of the eSATA drives implies a backup strategy. There is much to be said for mirroring the file structure of your photo collection on two (or more) physically separate drives. I prefer to do this, rather than using my backup software (Acronis TrueImage in my case), because that makes the files more immediately accessible than when they are all bundled up in a backup archive. The software I use to produce the mirror is the drive/folder synchroniser in the venerable but still very useful PowerDesk file manager, now sold by VCom.

You also seem to have made the decision that your basic system of organisation will be the Windows file/folder structure, rather than a separate (Adobe style) catalogue. I think this is very wise. Your data will probably be of use for much longer than any of the applications you currently use to deal with it, and the file system is much more enduring even than the operating system itself. Also, with a coherent folder structure, you can perhaps get away with less key detailed key wording (always a laborious task, especially with large numbers of images) than if you were using a catalogue. If (as is likely) you find that it would be advantageous to have particular images in more than one folder, the facilities in BB Pro for creating shortcuts can be very useful and save a lot of disk space.

You rightly identify the lack of search facilities in BB Pro as an issue. This comes about because BB does not use a database/catalogue, and therefore (in my view) is faster and more robust. We have to accept that, even if Chris decides to include search facilities in BB Pro, it may work more slowly (and be less suitable for searching large numbers of files) than in a catalogue based application. I believe that this would be a price worth paying. It may be useful to use a secondary application for searches. Some folk (though not I) use IMatch alongside BB Pro; the two applications are a reasonably good fit, as the authors of both programs are committed to standards compliance, particularly on metadata, which, if you read these forums, you will know is a very thorny subject indeed.

If you are not sure how you want to implement search facilities, you could try the freeware viewer and toolkit XnView, which you can download from here (http://www.xnview.com/). This has search facilities, and a fairly basic indexing system, and a rather similar set of views to BB Pro, though it lacks a number of BB Pro's best features. But, if you set XnView as your secondary editor in BB Pro, you can switch between the two programs almost seamlessly.

As regards DL Pro, my practice, from almost as soon as I became interested in digital imaging, has been to download to a dated folder in the Download area of my image library, do all the initial viewing, culling, sorting and (if needed RAW conversion) in the download folder, and then transfer the processed shoot to the appropriate subject folder in the library when the initial work is complete. The Download folder, as my photographic In box, then becomes both an easy means of finding recent images and a constant reminder of how much work I still have in progress.

I hope that these ideas are helpful.

David

[Rudolf Zurbuchen]

David

Thanks a lot for your valuable information and suggestions, providing me with plenty of food for thought and experimenting. This is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.

Rudolf

[nigeldh]

Rudolf,

1. Dedicate a single drive to your images. 1 TB external and internal disks are on sale in the States for under $200, less of an issue.

2. I put some metadata in the image file name. I put even more metadata in the directory name. See below.

3. Downloader Pro has a much richer set of file renaming tokens.

Here is my workflow.
For my workflow Downloader Pro & Breeze Browser are the perfect first steps. I now shoot RAW + low res JPEG to same the post download time of converting an entire RAW folder to JPEG. I have also started adding the date & time to my image metadata name - finding other images is much easier when you know the date, not just the image number.
1. DLP to rename the images to 20080720_1645_40d_img_15274 from _MG_5274 & put them in a first cut folder - images.in\2008\2008_07_20\raw
2. Use BreezeBrowser to sort the images into folders with metadata in the directory name:
images.in\2008\2008_04_15_[train].us.wv.lansing.[mw,new-river-gorge]\raw.
3. Then I move the "good" images up one level. Here is where being able to view child folders in BB would be useful for latter editing passes.
4. Since I shoot RAW + JPEG I can quickly produce proof images from the JPEG shots.
5. The final step is to move these folders into an "archive" directory. images.for.backup\2008\2008.01 etc.
I actually run robocopy, robust copy, which has mirror etc. switches, on all my image directories. Robocopy is part of the Windows Resource Kit.
I mirror my two image directories to the external hard drives. This way, as I move files and rename directories, the external drives stay in sync without my having to delete old files.
I only copy my images.art directory since that is my working images, graphic files, directory and I want to control any deletions on the external disks.
I use two external drives and rotate them to off-site storage at a friend's place.

6. Here is a sample of the metadata in file and directory names I use in my images.art directory.
D:\images.art\prints.art\prints-4x6\fountain - directory for 4x6 prints of fountains.
fountain-bronze.ratio-1.50.p1070692 - 4x6 is 3:2 or 1.50 ratio.

7. For those of us used to Unix/Linux file systems, ntfs file systems support links. sourceforge.net/projects/ntfslinkex is one utility. On Microsoft Windows, hard links can be created only on NTFS volumes, either with fsutil hardlink or mklink. Also, the Cygwin set of utilities has a ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link

My image cataloguing software is ThumbsPlus - keeps a database of images and keywords. I have started to use iMatch which also keeps a database of images and keywords.

ThumbsPlus also has the option to show child folders. This way I can see all the images in the 2008 directory at once. Or my family can see all the 100,000 plus digital images we have taken since 2000 by starting at the image.for.backup directory level.
ThumbsPlus also includes "find similar images" in their find options - use an image as a find subject and find images that match that image within 80% or 90%.

For printing I use Qimage and the Studio verion of Q has RAW file processing.
I like BibblePro and Helicon Filter for processing and editing RAW images.

have fun, Nigel