Sorting images...

[Carlo]

O.K. I'm with all the people on the "Moan, moan..." thread who are in the throes of sorting through and cataloguing digital images. I'm trying to take a professional and systematic approach since I do sell the use of images on a free-lance basis. Although I believe I know what I will do to organize (who was it mentioned TIME...), I'm interested in what everyone else is doing to control the image glut that digital allows. How are you sorting and cataloguing so that you can find that image of Boopis chubutensis in the digital haystack?

[mark smyth]

On my external hard drive I have folders called Images 2008, Images 2009 etc. In each folder there are 12 folders for each month named 01, 02, ......12. It's in these sub folders that I keep all my original images and edited named images. It as worked extremely well for for since 2003 when I bought my first digital camera. To find an image, like I'm doing to for new lectures, I right click on the external drive icon, click search, enter Boopis chubutensis and click search. Because I take the same plant photos over the years dirrect results open in a window. On the top tool bar I click view as thumbnails.

For each lecture I create a new temporary folder in which I copy and paste all photos I might show.

Vista is different and much quicker. As you type in your search it pulls up all possiblities until you finish the name almost like it is searching a dictionary

[Brian Ellis]

In iPhoto on the Mac, you title your images and then just search for something.  All relevant pictures are then displayed for you.

[ranunculus]

The iPhoto option is wonderful, Brian ... I use it all the time.  My overwhelming problem is that I began my digital 'phase' by using Mark's system, but WITHOUT individually naming each image ... they were simply coded as to year, month and/or location. (Hence I now possess many thousand of photos from the Dolomites and the States that are correctly dated and, in effect, chronologically sorted, but I still have to manually pick my way through them to find each required subject)!  It was a naive 'lazy mans' approach at the beginning and now I am paying for it. When you are the owner of a few hundred images it is still quite workable ... with sixty thousand plus (and continually growing) it is a minefield.

[Carlo]

I'm doing everything on a Mac...using Photoshop CS3, its Bridge ingester, Camera Raw...and ultimately cataloguing in Expression Media--formerly iView Media Pro. Because I'm dealing with thousands of images, and adding thousands new every year, I need a more robust solution than that presented by iPhoto. Far beyond name, I may be pulling a photograph for time of year, color, foliage, mood or effect and dozens of other factors--and sometimes combinations of them.

I'm getting close to making the investment in a scanner to incorporate my 35mm slide images into the library--and then the fun continues.

All of this is NOT to say that I've got it down. I'm continuously looking for the ideal solution, but warily because of all the work that a transition would entail. I've not gotten to the cataloguing bit of it and, at present, am pulling from memory like some of you. This is getting increasingly frustrating...I've got lots of nice photographs that don't see the light of day often as they would if I could just pluck them out.  Once I commit to a system for good it had better last for the duration. (And we all know how likely that is...)

[mark smyth]

I see so many photos being posted on this web site with the same problem for example imgtoday.jpeg

[tonyg]

I guess this is no good to you Carlo but Windows Photo Gallery which arrived here with Vista allows a search by file name and can organise all images by date taken.  Folders and sub folders drill down through year, month, day.  You can use the search by name on the entire image collection or on individual folders if you wish.
There must be something similar for Mac users but it sounds like you're pretty clued up already.  Good Luck!

[Carlo]

The whole idea for me is to make the images as useful, easy and flexible to pull by ANY characteristic (not just family, genus, species, plant type [sub-shrub, shrub, mat, cushion, vine, tree, etc. etc. ad infinitum]). The more I can add to it without driving myself mad, the better it will be for me and my clients.

As for Mark's comment...an image without as good a name as you can put on it is just about useless. No one will be able to pull it out of a pile and after its initial posting, it's basically lost forever (unless someone else does the work of remembering where it is). By and large forumists are pretty good about this. AND I'm partly in that group, as are, I suspect all photographers. I've got a box of slides and an equivalent number if digital images waiting to be identified. Without a name, I can't file OR sort.

[Carlo]

Tony,

I've just about gotten over the Windows thing completely. I've gone to Mac and I'm not going back!

[Maggi Young]

The whole idea for me is to make the images as useful, easy and flexible to pull by ANY characteristic (not just family, genus, species, plant type [sub-shrub, shrub, mat, cushion, vine, tree, etc. etc. ad infinitum]).

Does this not require all these details to be added to the file name in the first instance? Sounds like a virtual impossiblility to me...... can think of many pix where use could be required for any number of themes.... total referencing of all those would really require someone doing that and only that...as their full-time employment! 

[gote]

Already Windows 2000 allowed search for files and I think 98 did too. The problem lies in naming.

I do the following. The pictures are downloaded to a folder that uses the date as name. The camera software will number the pictures. I find that I usually can refer a picture to a date. I do remember which year and day I went to Farawayistan. This is the basic storage of pictures and a mirror copy is kept on a separate disk. To make some kind of tree structure I use the camera (or film format of scanned pics) as top level category, then year, then day of downloading.

When it comes to plants I use the botanical system as reference. Thus I have the folder Monocots with the subfolder Iridiaceae with the subfolder Crocus.
In some genera I use species folders. Thus I have all Corydalis solida as a subfolder in corydalis because there are so many solidas.
I then use the species name plus the date as picture name. This means that if I sort the display after name I get every species sorted chronologically so I can see how the plant has developed over the years.

I keep the original picture in the strictly chronological register. I take a copy of the best one, crop, turn and adjust as necessary and put that in the botanical register.
The same of course with other kinds of pictures like grandchildren.
That is what I do but we are all different and what works for me may be bad for someone else. I can, however, find a picture of a plant very quickly.

Göte.

My big problem is that I have many pictures and files that float around in the system which are not only twins or triplets but quintuplets or even worse and I would like to have software that could do a fuzzy sort so that pictures and texts that were no longer identical but very similar could be identified.



  

[gote]

It is possible to use database systems for the pictures as long as they have identifiable names.
Suppose I were to put all pictures of Gagea luta in a folder with that name. I could then use a list of all plants native of Sweden plus a list of all Liliaceae (or whatever they are today) and the program would pick all pictures of Liliaceae belonging to the Swedish flora including Gagea lutea.
It is done for automotive spares but i doubt that it is worth the effort for your pics Carlo. It would be as much work putting the lists together as finding the pictures manually from a system like mine.
Göte

[David Pilling]

Does this not require all these details to be added to the file name in the first instance?

Instead of using the filename, there is the possibility of using "metadata" embedded in the image, e.g. Exif tags, cameras will automatically add some information as Exif, like shutter speed (GPS?), and then you can use search programs that look at the embedded data rather than just the filenames.

[Carlo]

Maggi,

Either name, caption, key words, or meta data. All have functionality for the kind of detail I'm talking about. Probably the easiest is key words since once you've got a list going it's much quicker to put them in.

[Carlo]

I've just gotten through the better part of a day of pulling images for a new talk ("Inviting Cinderella to the Ball: Shrubs in the Perennial Garden") to be given early next month. It may be the last talk I give with slides. Having gone through the "Shrubs" file, I had to rifle the stacks of waiting-to-be-catalogued sheets for additional material--and found some gems that would have been at my finger tips had all been digitized. Like a carnival ride gathering speed when the switch is thrown, I'm slowly building up the motivation to attack this rather large problem...