Chronicles of Storage, Organization & Processing, revised!!

2009-02-16T06:08:00.000-08:00

I've been rather out of the loupe for a while. Yes, pun intended. I found writing articles as long as this one was too time consuming so I'm willing to bet the same is true for reading. Here is a shorter article.

Adobe Bridge CS4.

You don't have to keep more than one copy of your photo on your computer or external hard drive. You don't have to have multiple directories to organize your photos in. You don't have to spend hours renaming each photo to be able to find them in the future. There is a lot of video support so that you can get up and running quickly.

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Chronicles of Storage, Organization & Processing

2008-05-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

My husband bought his first digital camera a Cannon XTI in December of 2006. If I had known I would be sucked up into photography too, I would have let him buy it sooner. As it is, we found a used Cannon XT for me by my next birthday and away I went. I have so many photos that it is way to time consuming to share them all with you. I took well over 6000 photos in my first year and now I find myself a little more wiser on how to store and share them so that I don't get so overwhelmed. It is really quite easy once the system is habit. Defining the process and making the process habit was the hard part.

The problem arose because I was so fascinated with the ability to see the photo right after snapping it that I did not realize the problem of mass was creeping up on me. I was not skilled enough to trust my ability to set the camera properly and take few shots. So, out of necessity, I took lots of shots while changing the settings to see what would happen. I found this technique was great for not missing the capture but excruciatingly time consuming. Forget catching the moving subject. Animals just don't wait for the photographer to set their camera properly. Hence, the shot is lost.

So, Now I have all these wonderful stills of sunsets, flowers not blown in the wind, landscapes, and frozen people who became stiff while waiting for me to set my camera up. Undaunted, I've accumulated a few really good photos but the time it takes to find them in my mass of unorganized photos is really frustrating especially when I have to review all the mass multiple times to find the ones I want when I want them for the different purposes I may want them.

At first I had no clue of how to store and organize the mass. My husband, Harley, gave me his method but it just seemed too cumbersome to me. In the process of reorganizing the mass from chaos to Harley's method, I discovered keys that were consistent regardless who's method was employed. Some keys are obvious and you would think it would not need to be mentioned here but if I was baffled by the relations these keys held to organization someone else may appreciate the mention.

First Key: Digital photos are stamped with the date taken and can be stored in automatically created folders based upon this date. Obvious right? What was not so obvious to me was that once these folders were created by the camera download of the photos, I could add tags to the folder names to further identify the subjects in the folder. Now I can use my browser to search for say "hummingbird" and find all the dates I've taken photos of hummingbirds.

Second Key: Off computer dedicated hard drive. Storing my photos on a CD or even DVD was way too time consuming to find the particular photo I wanted especially if I did not remember the date it was taken. The browser can only search the disc currently loaded in my disc reader. Multiple storage discs would have to be loaded in the drive individually for the computer to search. Way too time consuming. Multiple dedicated external hard drives can be "stacked" and searched all at the same time with the right hardware combinations. They are larger and hold a lot of photos. The price for this devises is dropping so it has become more economical to store photos this way. They are faster and I can down load directly from my camera to them so I don't have to do any copy and pasting routines.

Third Key: Sequential file numbers can be assigned to the image at the time of download from the camera. Keeping these numbers in sequence is crucial to finding all images fathered by the original. When I was editing photos and saving them with cutesy names, I was loosing the original that I started with and unable to trace the source of my edited jpeg. There were too many photos of the same subject but with different settings producing similar images. Now I begin the name of all my images with the date taken and sequence number so that after the heavy editing I can connect the original with the edited tiff, jpeg or any other resulting format. This may not be important to "some" but it is to "others" and you never know when you will move from the "some" category to the "other" category.

Fourth Key: The process is the same regardless who you are and what you do with the pictures. First, take the picture. Second, download it to your computer/printer. Third (optional), edit the picture. Fourth, share the picture with friends, family or potential buyers. Finally, archive the photo.

Now lets use the keys to define a specific method of processing photos.

Step ONE: Taking the picture
When Harley and I first started in digital photography, our understanding of technique varied substantially. Harley was more knowledgeable of how the camera worked as he was educated in film technique and I had no education in photography at all. Harley found he took more photos because the guess work was removed with the advent of digital technology. He did not focus so much on camera settings because he could edit the photo in post processing software. I on the other hand found the post processing took too much time to get to the end result. I set my mind on learning the camera and related tools so I did not have to do the post processing. Harley set himself to learning how to post process. As we progressed in our respective focuses, we both discovered that both skill sets are advantageous to producing a quality photo. One skill set is no more important than the other, however, flexibility within creativity is increased with increased skill in both.

It is a lot easier to manipulate the environment of lights, props and subjects than it is to change a photo in post processing and still make it look real. I'm sure this will change in the future as processing programs increase their user friendliness and technical agility. For now, it is still a lot easier to blur the background using the camera setting than it is to blur it in post processing.

Skill in processing and capture is important to storage because it will decrease storage requirements for your photos. Fewer quality photos means less processing times and less searching times for the photo that is just right for the intended purpose. I am not suggesting to reduce quantity for the sake of the reduction. There are some instances where quantity is required to ensure the quality for the desired shot. Take, for example, sports, fast moving wild life, and babies whose emotions change quickly. What I am saying is that you don't need to record forty shots of the same mountain when it will be there again tomorrow.

Step TWO: Downloading the Photo
I find downloading my photos directly onto my dedicated external hard drive the most advantageous. I don't clutter my limited computer hard drive with photos I won't ever use. Next I mark all the folders with a read only attribute. My camera came with viewing software that makes this step really easy. I use this program to change the name of the folder. If there are multiple subjects, I will sort the photos in sub folders based upon the common subject tag. The subject is always that which is in focus and most prominent within the photo. Then I will delete all my yuk photos. I don't need to keep white balance photos. I don't need to keep very blurred photos or photos of my shoe because the shutter accidentally depressed.

Step THREE: Editing the Photo
Editing begins with identifying the photo to be edited. I do this in another program that makes this easy too. I know swapping between processing programs may seem cumbersome to some but you cannot beat free. Besides I don't always follow one step right after the other so swapping rarely happens. I just open the program for the step I happen to be wanting to accomplish.

The program I use allows me to place one of three check marks upon an image as I am browsing through the mass. Check mark #1 is for best quality photos that I will eventually attempt to sell. Check mark #2 is for photos I intend to share free on the web. Check mark #3 is for reference photos that I use in watercolor paintings. Once I've finished marking the images I want to use, I do a batch process for each group of check marks. The batch process converts the image from a raw format to a tiff format while it saves it to the respective "to be processed" folder located on my computer hard drive. The three "to be processed" folders become my processing "to do" list and since they are on my laptop the "to do" list goes with me while all the other raw images stay home on my external hard drive. The list also serves to prioritize my work load so that the potential revenue generating photos can be processed first.

I also have a feature in this program that allows me to bookmark my folders so that I will know which raw files I have not distributed to the respective "to be processed" folders.

When I'm ready to actually work on a photo, I open a third (very inexpensive this time) program that allows me to change the name of the image as I have edited it. This is where I add tags to the image to indicate the subject matter within the folder.

Step FOUR: Sharing the photo
Once editing is complete, I will save the file in Tiff format and in the editing program's format. I also save the file in jpeg format as this is the format most commonly used in the public arena for sharing photos. Why three formats? In a rapidly changing industry, I've already run into the problem of backward incompatibilities between hardware and softwares resulting in lost ability to read saved images. I'm not taking this chance in the future.

Step Five: Archiving the Photo
After I have up loaded my jpeg images on to the web, I move them to a folder on my external hard drive for archiving edited images. All three formats are in the same folder. Since the file names all start with the date and sequence number, they stay together in the list of files. They are also stored away from the raw files so I do not inadvertently save over the raw data of the original. I've done this and it hurts.

Well that is my work flow for storing, organizing and processing a mass of photos I just cannot possible do without. May you be blessed in your own endeavors to manage your own dearly beloved images.

Delightful Light Photography

Chronicles of Storage, Organization & Processing, revised!!

Chronicles of Storage, Organization & Processing