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.
