So I’m normally pretty good at keeping things organized on my computer. Files are in appropriate folders, email Inbox is normally kept down to 0 messages (gotta love the Inbox Zero method) and everything is just where I want it.
Ever since I started taking a lot more photos in the past few years (especially with the addition of the iPhone), photos have been the one thing I haven’t been able to keep as organized. Part of the problem is that some are shared on my Posterous site, others directly to Facebook, others on Flickr…you get the point.
But this whole “having a baby and really wanting to document…well, let’s be honest, every smile/smirk/expression/pouty lip that I possibly can” situation is making me go a little bit crazy. So, here’s the deal. I take photos and videos of Caleb with my iPhone (probably the highest number of shots are from my phone), and I take nicer photos (using my fancy portrait lens) on my Canon Digital Rebel. That’s it. But, once I’ve taken the photos, I have no idea where to store them. My iPhoto program just trudges…along…and…it’s…so…very painful to upload photos, but even slower to try to navigate around the program and find photos.
So, right now, all of these super cute photos of Caleb that I’m taking are going to a variety of spots:
- Posterous site (www.adamwc.me): I haven’t been using this as much recently, but it’s where I started
- Instagram: So many of the photos I take now are shared through Instagram, and then shared through Twitter & Facebook. But it really can only be accessed through the phone. All of the photos I post are saved to my phone, but I’m not sure what to do with them next
- Facebook & Twitter: lots of photos are shared through these big social networks. I’ve set up a special photo album for some of the nicest photos of Caleb, and try to get most of them online there.
- Flickr: I’ve started using my Pro account with Flickr again, and send all of my Instagram photos to Flickr, but that’s it in terms of what goes up there.
- Folders, folders & folders: I’ve now taken to dumping the very large photo files from the Canon Digital Rebel onto folders on my desktop, hence cluttering my desktop, which I’m not a fan of. So I have folders with timeframes (December 30 – February 20), some with titles about certain events (3-month birthday, bath time, etc), others that just say “Caleb Photos.”
- External Hard Drive: Lots of my Caleb photos have been transferred to an external hard drive.
So I need your help. I really want these memories to be saved – to be enjoyed later – to be easily accessible to me when I need to find the most embarrassing shot possible for high school graduation or something. Crap.
I would love it if you’ll tell me about your photo storage system in case you have something that works well for you. What are the pros and cons of the route you’ve decided to take? Do you save them all online? Or just on an external back-up drive? And if you do keep them all together, how do you organize them? By events? Dates? Best guesses at dates? Any software or programs you swear by?
Obviously – this is something I’d like to figure out soon before the whole project ends up becoming too unwieldily.
We realy entirely on Picasa to keep things organized. The face recognition is handy and the virtual albums make it easy to have photos appear in two places without duplication.
Thanks for sharing Colin…I’ve messed around with Picasa a bit, but not too extensively…
We use iPhoto for organizing. I have set up smart albums for each month that finds automatically by a data range so dating is automatic. I do also do batch renames within iPhoto with specific dates and general names of whatthe pics are. Finally, I use tags within iPhoto for more specifics – names of our kids, mom, dad, locations we are often at, etc.
Finally, it’s automatically backed up via time machines and I also do a manual backup every few months on an external that I leave in our safe deposit box.
I haven’t gone the route of carbonite.com but have thought about it.
Perhaps it’s just my computer, Ed, but iPhoto draaaaaaaaaags. It is so slow and I just can’t work within the program, which is unfortunate, I guess. That’s pretty much what I’ve used for photo storage in the past couple years, but unless we get a brand new machine, I don’t think it’s going to cut it. Which is too bad, because I think it might work nicely with the iPhoto app that just came out for the iPad…
A few people on Facebook have mentioned going with Lightroom…but I don’t know much about that.
If you go with Lightroom, I’ll never talk to you again 😉
We should spend a little time discussing and even looking at Aperture. But let’s see why your iPhoto is so slow. Shouldn’t be.
I’m in the midst of moving all of my photos from iPhoto to Lightroom and to an external hard drive. I’ve worked through a couple of years worth of photos and the folder system I’m using seems to work well:
Photos2012
People
Caleb
January
February, etc
Skylar
And so on
Destinations
Ashland_January
Niagara-on-the-Lake_March
Events
Adam’s Installation
LocalPlaces
Projects
You get the idea. Once they’re in Lightroom, I tag them with the event and the people in the photo. The hard drive is just the back-up, but the LR catalog also gets backed up to a different hard drive. Once I’m done I think I’ll be able to find almost anything without too much trouble. And as I download your adorable photos I know right where they go.
OK, none of my formatting went into the comments. I think you can figure out which ones are sub-folders.
I’ve used Picasa and currently prefer iPhoto and might look into Aperture. (I do need to be more diligent about backups…that’s the part where I slack the most.)
It probably sounds nerdy, but you might want to look into some posts about how digital scrapbookers organize their pictures. They take lots of photos and need to be able to go through them easily to find what they want to document. A couple posts that might be helpful:
Ali Edwards on Aperture: http://aliedwards.com/2011/09/memory-keeping-qa-digital-scrapbooking.html
Katie’s folder system: http://scrapbooklady.typepad.com/katie_the_scrapbook_lady/2010/02/scrapbook-secrets—digital-photo-organization.html
Stacy Julian’s book Photo Freedom is targeted toward scrapbookers but gives a different model for thinking about how to organize pictures and get them off the computer and into daily life. (Categories like All About Us, People We Love, Places We Go, Things We Do, etc.)