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As you start taking more and more pictures (as I’m sure you will with all my wonderful tips and tricks!) storage and organization becomes more and more imporant. I don’t think I’ve perfected my system yet. And I think whatever system is perfect for one person would be horribly wrong for another. Just to get you thinking about some things (and perhaps overwhelm you with how complicated I seem to have made things for myself), I’ll tell you just what I do. I’m completely open for suggested in this process, so please leave me a comment if you think your system is better in some way (though, note for the record, that I’m horribly stubborn and set in my ways, and often continue to do things that I know are more difficult just because I don’t want to change).

Step One: How I shoot

First of all, I shoot in RAW + jpg (I plan on writing an entry at some point about why and what type of person I think should shoot in what type of format(s), but … not today). You might think that doesn’t have much to do with storage and organization, but it does because my computer (and probably yours) can’t automatically make a thumbnail out of a raw file, so if I only shot in RAW, and I opened up Windows Explorer, I’d have to open up each pictures in a program that recognizes RAW files in order to get an idea of what it’s a shot of.

Step Two: Getting the photos off the card

I use a card reader to get my pictures from my camera to the computer. Do you have one of these? Mine looks like this:

The good thing is, they’re relatively inexpensive and depending on the size/number of pictures you take, you’ll save a BUNCH of time using one. Not only that, but if you’re like me and carry around more than one memory card, it’s easier to switch out the cards you’re uploading in this than it is in the camera. I highly recommend a card reader. This one is for Compact Flash cards because that’s what my camera uses, but they make them for all kinds of memory cards – they even make ones that will read multiple kinds of cards, which is a good idea if, say, you’re currently using a point-and-shoot camera but think you might upgraded to dslr at some point. Oh, and of course, you might have one of those fancy-shmancy computers that have a card reader directly in them. Pbbbt. I don’t.

Step Three: Getting the photos on the computer

I manage my photos with Picasa. I actually really like this program. It’s google’s free (free! I told you I’d help make photo editing cheap and easy. You can’t get cheaper than free) photo editing software. Honestly, I very rarely use it to edit my photos. I just like using it to put my photos into folders and to browse them. Here’s what Picasa looks like as I first plug in my card reader:

Please click to bring up full size!

So, on the left hand side you can see tiny little thumbnails of all the photos on the card, and if I click on one of them it makes it bigger on the right. Now, I took all these photos around the same time, but if I hadn’t, the thumbnails on the left would be separated into groups of photos – where each group was taken around the same time. It’s also smart enough to know which photos have already been put on my computer, and it marks those with a red X, because it assumes you don’t want to move it again.

So, now, if you click the Import All button, you can, well, import all the photos and pick where you want them to go. Here’s the first step that really involves organization for me: I put them into a new folder that I call [Today's Date] – [Short Description of Photos], as shown below:

You can click this one to make it bigger, too!

I will take this opportunity to point out that it shows I’m uploading them into My Pictures. 99% of the time, I do not do this! I have an external storage device called a drobo. It has four slots for hard drives in it, and anything I store on there is automatically backed up, so no one file is only on one hard drive. Therefore, if any of the hard drives fail, I don’t lose any of my data. Exciting stuff, and, having suffered the pain from a dead hard drive once in my life, it’s nice to know that’s one less thing I have to worry about now. So. Why aren’t I doing it now? Because I’m on vacation, and I don’t bring the drobo with me, so it’s going into My Pictures. When I get home, I’ll move this folder onto the drobo.

Also, for the record, I don’t rename my photos. I take too many pictures, so it would take too long. On top of that, I’ve determined there’s no good naming system that I could keep consistent, that would be short and also descriptive, so, they stay in the IMG_#### format that my camera uses.

Choosing/Editing Photos

Picasa is actually advanced enough to show jpg and RAW files, which is nice. Anyway, I can scroll through my photos to figure out which ones I want to edit (as previously stated, I usually don’t do any editing in Picasa, though if it’s just a snapshot of something that I don’t really care about having my best quality out there, I will use some of Picasa’s editing tools, but I’m going to leave that for a “What else you can do with Picasa” entry later on), I can even double click on any picture to make it bigger. In this case, I’ve decided I want to edit this picture of leaves with water drops on it (I’m a sucker for leaves with water drops). Once I have it selected, near the bottom of the screen there’s all sorts of good information like the date, file size, and the file name. In this case it’s IMG_2402, so now I can open that in Gimp, and make my changes. Even though I’m editing a RAW file, I’m going to save it as a jpg, and I don’t want to overwrite the original jpg off the camera (I’m not sure why, it just rubs me the wrong way, it’s my pack rat personality shining through), so after I’m done, I give it a new name. A really creative one. I add “a” to the end of it. So, in this case, I now have IMG_2402a.jpg, as you can see in Windows Explorer:

Tagging Photos

Now, one of the things Picasa does is that it scans any folder that you already have pictures in and if you add any new photos to that folder, it automatically shows up in Picasa, but it puts them at the end of the list for that folder (I’m not describing that well, I don’t think. If you use it, you’ll understand what I mean… I hope). So, if I edit two photos in that “2009_07_03 – Photowalk 27 Wickham Park” folder, they’ll show up at the end of all the rest of that photos, which I find to be a nice feature, because 99% of the time, the only photos I want to upload are my edited ones. And so, the only photos that I bother tagging are those.

Remember how I said I didn’t bother giving my photos a good name? It’s because I tag them instead. I love tagging. I daresay I might be addicted to it. You may have noticed that each of the entries on this site is tagged. I do the same to all the pictures that I feel are worthy of keeping. So, the first thing I do is select all the pictures that I’ve edited in this batch and hit the “Add/Remove Star” Button:

All this does is mark those photos with a little star so that you can tell Picasa to show you only the starred photos, so that makes it one step easier to sort through your photos later. But it’s still not quite tagging. While I still have them all selected I hit the tag button:

Now a new dialog box pops up that I can enter in tags that apply to all of the photos I have selected. In this case, they were both taken in Connecticut, in Wickham Park and on my 27th Photowalk:

Now I select just one picture and add aditional tags. For instance, the photo on the left is a picture of yellow flowers, so I add “yellow” and “flower” and then add “leaves” “water” “rain” and “raindrop” for the other one.

Now the beauty of why I do that… Notice there’s a search bar at the top of Picasa, so I can do a search for “yellow” and that yellow flower photo (as well as 4 other photos, which, I know, doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember, almost all of my photos are on my drobo! Which isn’t here with me!) comes up:

So if I’m ever looking for a certain photo, and I KNOW it has a cow in it, I can search for “cow” and it will come up. I like this so much better than naming a photo something, because with a correct name, you need to know what folder it’s in and then scan the names, and … really, who wants to do that?

Preparing for Uploading

We’re almost to the end of my routine here (I know it sounds long, but I really don’t find it that bad. It just seems long because I babble. And put a lot of stuff in parenthesis).

So, now I have these two photos that I want to share with the world. Whether I’m uploading to flickr or to this site, I never want to upload the full size image. For one, it takes a long time to upload and, more importantly, I don’t want anyone to steal my full size image, so I want to resize my photos. At the same time, in my case, I’d like to move the resized version to my laptop – remember, all my photos are on my drobo, which means if I go somewhere (like, oh say, Connecticut, where I happen to be right now) and I want to show someone (like, perhaps, my parents, whose house I’m at right now) a photo of mine, it’s nice to have it on my laptop, so I can get to it even without an internet connection. This is when I select the photos in Picasa and then go to File –>Export Picture to Folder…:

Now another dialog box comes up and I can pick what size I want (the size is the length of the longest side, and I almost always stick to 1024), and you can see my creative names in action again, because I put all these resized photos in a folder called Resized:

so. That’s pretty much my entire workflow. What do you do? Think it’s better? Let me know!

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