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.

One of the great advantages of digital photography is the ability to easily share your photos with others. In addition to making traditional style prints, digital images can be posted on websites, uploaded to digital personal organizers, displayed on cell phones and emailed. In my business I email photos on a regular basis. I email photo submissions to publishers, proofs to commercial clients and archived image samples to stock photo buyers. But it isn’t just professional photographers who email lots of images. I also email shots of my kids to the grandparents and photos I took out skiing to my friends. Emailing digital images is most likely the number one thing that people using digital cameras do with their photos and yet many people don’t have a clue how to optimize their photos for best email performance.

         The most important consideration when emailing photos is image size, especially for those of us with dial-up Internet connections, but also for those with broadband. If you set your camera to take images at a size that’s right for email then they are too small to make good prints, but if you try to email full size images they take a long time to send and don’t even fit on the screen for viewing. The solution is resizing. Most cameras these days come with software that can easily help you resize your images for email. It is also easy to resize images in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. However you go about sizing your photos, here are a few tips that I follow to make sure that I’m not the guy emailing photos so large that they overfill inboxes, take several hours to download and can’t be viewed without scrolling around. These tips only apply to photos that are intended to be viewed on screen but not printed. Print size files need to be large to give good print quality.

First, I like to size my photos so they are about 500 pixels on the longest side and have a resolution of 72 DPI (dots per inch). This enables them to be viewed on smaller monitors and even within the email message window without opening them full screen. 72 DPI is important because that is about the maximum resolution that a monitor can show. Images for print often need 300 DPI or more, but this is a lot of extra information that doesn’t make the image look any better on the screen. A 300 DPI image that is 500 pixels on its longest side contains 16 times more data than the same size image at 72 DPI.

         Second, I save the resized images to be emailed with a different name in a separate email folder. This way I don’t change the original image file and I can safely delete the resized images from the email folder when I don’t need them any more without accidentally losing the originals.Â

Third, I save the email images as JPEG (.jpg) files and set the quality to medium (about 5 on the Photoshop scale) to compress the files even more. These steps ensure that I am emailing the smallest files possible and that they send quickly, don’t fill up all the space in someone’s inbox and can easily be viewed on screen.

         One more tip if you are using software like Photoshop is to apply unsharp mask (Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask) to the final sized image before saving and sending it. When you downsize an image it loses some detail that can be brought back with a little sharpening. Good luck and happy emailing.

Have you ever had a problem trying to shoot a scene with a bright sky and dark foreground and finding that if you get the sky exposed right then the foreground is black, and if you get the foreground right then the sky is over exposed? This is especially common with sunrise and sunset photos. With film cameras the only real option is to try to balance the light in camera with split filters or holding a black card in front of part of the scene during long exposures to “hold back” some of the bright areas. Digital photography provides some new ways to achieve a balanced shot when the light range is too great. One way involves making two exposures of a scene and bringing them together in Photoshop that I call “exposure stacking”.

I employ some sort of “exposure stacking” technique in many of my landscape photos especially when the dynamic range of a scene or complexity of the skyline make use of graduated filters problematic. If you would like to try, follow these steps.

1. Set up your camera on a sturdy tripod. Once you have framed your shot, lock everything down so there will be no unwanted movement.
2. With the camera set to aperture priority or manual, take one shot at one to two stops above your meter reading. Now, without moving the camera, adjust the shutter speed to take another shot at one to two stops under your meter reading.
3. Open both images in Photoshop and select the move tool on the tools pallet. Holding the shift key, drag the darker image on top of the lighter image. Holding the shift key will make the two images line up on top of each other.
4. In the layers Pallet you will now see two layers, the light one on the bottom and the darker one on top. Make sure the top dark layer is selected and then click the “Add A Mask” button at the bottom of the layers pallet (it looks like a folder with a circle in it).
5. Now select the brush tool on the tools pallet. Make sure that the foreground color on the tools pallet is set to black. With the brush opacity set to about 30% begin painting on the image mask. Everywhere you paint on the mask the top layer will be erased 30% at a time allowing the lighter bottom layer to show through. If you erase too much you can bring it back by setting the foreground color to white and painting over the erased areas to “un-erase” them.
6. In this way you can bring out the lighter foreground exposure while leaving the sky appropriately exposed. It takes a little practice to get the best results and sharp edges along a light/dark boarder can be tricky, but this technique can make otherwise impossible photos possible. Give it a try!