As more and more people are discovering, digital photography opens the floodgates for lots and lots of picture taking. There was a time when I wanted to take more photos, but cost of film and developing, plus the hassle of dropping off, picking up and dealing with tons of prints or slides kept my shooting sporadic at best. These days I find I have the opposite problem. My camera goes along with me pretty much everywhere and I can shoot when the conditions aren’t perfect or just to experiment and have fun without concern about the cost, piles of slides building up or guilt for being wasteful. The recent explosion of very accomplished digital photographers is testimony to how many people are shooting a ton and getting good quickly.

All this prolific creativity does have its downsides, the most common being trying to manage and organize gigabytes worth of image files that are overflowing your hard drives. Without an image management system you will soon have a photo collection that is about as useful as a library in which all the book pages have been torn out and stored in a large pile in the center of the room. There are unlimited systems that could work well for indexing and organizing large quantities of image files. There isn’t one correct way to do it, just as long as you find a system that works for you and you actually put it to use.

My system is by no means perfect, but I generally make good use of my hard drive space and can find images without too much effort. Here are my top 10 tips for managing a digital photo collection.

1. Download images from your camera to your computer often. After months or years of sitting on your memory card in your camera, images are more likely to be forgotten and deleted to make more space when the card fills up. I usually download images after any photo session and then format the card so it is empty for the next photo session.
2. Initially put images in “delete and edit” folders. I have about ten numbered “delete and edit” folders into which I download images right from the camera. I know that images in these folders are awaiting processing and require my attention before they can be filed away into my larger archiving system. If I put images directly into my filing system then I forget they are there and never do any deleting or editing.
3. Be merciless about deleting images. Before moving images out of your “delete and edit” folders to your filing system, trash can any image that isn’t great, isn’t sentimental, isn’t useful or has one or more close duplicates. There is a tendency to save every single image we take. Be strong and hit the delete button on all images that won’t stand the test of time. It is also a good idea to go back through your filing system from time to time and further purge photos. You’ll save tons of memory space in the long run and you won’t have to search through so many dogs to find your winners.
4. Leave the original images unchanged and save any cropped or enhanced photos under a new name or file type. If you are going to do any enhancing to your photos, such as color adjustments, cropping or other “Photoshopping”, make sure to save the enhanced “master” version with a slightly different filename so you don’t make permanent changes to your original image. You never know when you might want to go back to the original. Way back in the day I made the mistake of downsizing a bunch of images for email and saving them as originals, not as copies. Later I wanted to make enlarged prints only to find that the shrunken images no longer had enough resolution. I also save my “master” files as .tif or .psd (Photoshop document) files that don’t further compress the image. .jpg files are good for images you are prepping for email or web because they are smaller. But each time a .jpg is saved, the image gets compressed again and loses some quality so it isn’t a good option for your “master” copy. If an original file from my camera is called IMG_4562.jpg, then I would probably save the enhanced copy as IMG_4562.tif, or IMG_4562copy.tif or IMG_4562crop.tif. I keep the same image number in the file name instead of giving it an entirely new name so I can always trace my “master” images back to their originals.
5. Use a piece of image browsing software like Bridge in Adobe Photoshop or a stand alone application like ACDsee to rank images and place them in categorized folders. Once you have done all the enhancing you’re going to do for the time being, it is time to move your images out of the “delete and edit” folders into your greater filing system so that you can find them again when you want them. Software designed for this purpose makes it fast and easy to create and name folders, move photos from folder to folder, rename photos and rank them in various ways for easy sorting and locating down the road.
6. Create a hierarchical folder filing system. Mine is based on geographical location and/or main subject matter. Dates and numbers don’t work well for me because it is difficult to pinpoint any one image to the date it was taken or to an unrelated folder number. In my system a folder path leading to a certain image might go something like this: Landscapes>Mountains>Oregon Cascades>Mt. Jefferson. Within the final Mt. Jefferson folder are…you guessed it…photos of Mt. Jefferson. In addition to “Mountains” my top level “Landscapes” folder also contains folders for Lakes, Deserts, Rivers, Valleys and so on.
7. Create as many subfolders as needed so there are never too many images in one folder. Instead of putting all 700 of my mountain photos in one huge “Mountains” folder, I break it down by mountain range and then by specific peak if necessary.
8. Use your image management software application to add keywords to your image metadata. This can be time consuming and tedious so I only recommend it if you plan on having many thousands of images in your archives. However, if you do, it can be a savior. Let’s say you have an image of a snow-covered mountain in winter. At the time you decide it fits better in the “Winter” folder instead of in the “Mountains” folder and a year later you’re pulling your hair out because you can’t find it. If you have added keywords that describe the image you can do a search for one or more of those keywords and let your computer quickly locate the image for you.
9. Use a back up system so if you have a hard drive crash all your photos are not lost. See my post on back up systems by clicking HERE.
10. For your best photos create one finished “print ready” file and then use that to size or crop for various uses. Don’t save multiple “master” versions of the same photo. It gets too confusing trying to keep track of them and it takes up memory. In a future Photo Tips feature I will explain preparing images for printing, email and other uses from your “master” in more detail.

Last week I took the Eurovan on a road trip to southeast Oregon to do some photography in the Alvord Desert on the east side of Steens Mountain. Talk about some remote country. There are only about four public roads in all of Harney County. From the town of Fields (population less than 20?) on the south end of Steens Mountain to Burns, the county seat, one must drive for two hours on a paved road along the western side of Steens or three hours on a dirt road along the east side of Steens. Either way you pass through only one town not any larger than Fields. One day I drove the entire loop and saw fewer than ten other cars the entire day.

Steens Mountain is actually just one fault block mountain but because it stretches from north to south for so many miles it is often mistaken for an entire range of mountains. From the west it gently slopes up making it look like a large hump in the desert landscape. Then the eastern slope abruptly drops nearly a mile to the Alvord Desert below. Viewed from the east Steens looks very impressive.

The Alvord Desert, named after an old ranch in the area, is an alkali flat that once was a shallow lake. The ground in the flat is, as the name implies, completely level and devoid of any plant life or other features for 100 square miles. It is very similar to the Black Rock Desert where the Burning Man festival is held each year.

Part of the time I focused on taking wide landscape photos of the cracked surface of the Alvord Desert with Steens Mountain as a backdrop. Stormy, dynamic or otherwise dramatic skies and sunset or sunrise light are critical elements in interesting photos here since there is very little else to place in a composition. Unfortunately, with the lowest rainfall totals in Oregon, the skies are often clear. But, when there is moisture in the sky it is often pushed up the west slope forming wave shaped lenticular clouds similar to those on the east side of the Sierra.

There are also several hot springs in the area that are fun to explore and photograph. On the northwest side of Steens is the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that sees many thousands of migrating water birds each spring and fall. Not far from there is the French Round Barn, one of the last remnants from Pete French’s 19th century cattle empire. During the middle of the day the interior of the barn makes for some interesting photography. Soft light reflects in the open doors gently illuminating the intriguing geometric patterns created by the umbrella shaped roof structure.

The town of Frenchglen makes a great staging point for driving and hiking trips up the western slope of the Steens. The road is closed by snow in the winter and spring, but in the summer, the views from the top are great. There are several glacier-carved gorges that can be accessed by hiking from the Steens Loop Road.

In April of 2007 I made a solo trek through four valleys in the Mt. Everest region of Nepal. While part of the country of Nepal, this region is largely populated by the Sherpa people, who practice Tibetan Buddhism and whose ancestors are Tibetan. The Chinese occupation of Tibet over the last half century has made practicing traditional Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet very difficult, restricted and often dangerous. In 1959, in the face of growing danger from the Republic of China, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India . As the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama has been leading his government in exile and working for peace and the freedom of Tibet ever since. Thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns have also fled Tibet to practice in peace in other parts of the world. Being close to Tibet, both geographically and culturally, the Mt. Everest region is a desirable place for refugee Buddhist monks and nuns to come to. Monasteries are found in many of the villages in the region and carry out their traditional roles as an integral part of Tibetan Buddhist culture.

While trekking through the small village of Thamo in a valley to the southwest of Mt. Everest I came across a partially constructed monastery. The lama in residence was glad to give me a tour. The monastery is being built to house a group of Buddhist nuns who have been worshipping in the village for some years and have outgrown their space. As funds are raised, construction on the new monastery goes forward. The project has been underway for several years and several more years are needed before completion. In the meantime the nuns have been conducting their daily practices in a very small hut that used to be a schoolroom. I was allowed to observe their ceremony and, for a donation to the construction effort, encouraged to take photos. The young nun in the photo is a Tibetan refugee who had first studied in the south of India and had recently moved to the Thamo monastery. During their puja, or ceremony, she never stopped chanting but was very curious about the blond foreigner with the camera. Her inquisitive gaze followed me around the room while many the older nuns continued chanting as if I wasn’t there.

1/50 sec at f/5.6

ISO 1600

Canon 5D

28-135 mm lens

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