Sorting images...

[Maggi Young]

......and all this discussion the day after the BD and I have been searching for a particula shot that he remembers as being digital and I think is on a slide      Not easy to recall what category photo of flattened woman under pile of prunings would come , though, is it? Especially when someone thinks the only pix worth listing are bulbs   

[Susan Band]

I find the tagging system in Photoshop the easiest to use. You can tag photos into various groups such as Bulbs- Frits/crocus etc.
You can use more than one tag such as Frit + Own Garden/Wild. Automatically they can be seached in date. You can also create temporary collections, which I use when selecting a mixed collections for a talk. They are not moved from their origional files just linked shortcuts. They can then be exported in bulk at a particular size for a powerpoint talk.
Come to the Digital Day at Pitlochry for more details 
Susan

[tonyg]

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

Understood - I may yet make the move too!

[Carlo]

Sounds great Susan...I'll just walk across the bridge!

I've read with envy the short accounts of "Digital Day" over the past couple of years. Imagine all those plant/camera nuts in the same room. The mind swirls...

[DaveM]

I use Photoshop Elements. The 'Organiser' part seems to offer a lot, based I guess on a database application of some sort. The files stay in whatever file structure you want; import files to the organiser, sort, add names (additional to the original filename), plus tags (for example for all crocus), and assemble into collections, as Susan says. There's also space for other metadata through the properties dialogue box, which also accesses the exif data and a file history. It certainly offers much that I want - only problem is finding the time to do the sorting and tagging - which seems in severe shortage at present!!!!

[mark smyth]

I  save all images using full name and cultivar name

[johnw]

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

It will be interesting to see how iPhoto09's face recognition search (see the Apple website for a demo) works on Galanthus. If it works it could pull out all the Magnets on one sheet (if it recognizes long necks too), might even sort out Ailwyn vs Fairhaven! We'll see how good it is, might even teach us a thing or two or flop completely.

johnw

[Carlo]

If only John! Keep us posted...

[ian mcenery]

I have nearly gone through all of my images and will have reduced to about a third. In future I must remember I must remember I must remember to edit these before I store them. I now have windows Vista which seems to keep all files in date taken order. However before when I was using XP I always created Files for subject such as Plants, Gardens, Family, Holidays etc. These in turn had sub folders such as Plants January 2008 or under Family say Kids june 2008. I do not name files unless they were saved for the Forum - I want a life  . Also I may never want or need to see it again. Even with Vista I still make sure that I tell any image downloading software to put the images in the appropriate sub folder

Now if I want to find a plant , a picture of a particular holiday it is in a sub folder and is relatively easy to find providing I can then  identify what it looks like which can be difficult sometimes particularly with snowdrops 

[art600]

I find the tagging system in Photoshop the easiest to use. You can tag photos into various groups such as Bulbs- Frits/crocus etc.
You can use more than one tag such as Frit + Own Garden/Wild. Automatically they can be seached in date. You can also create temporary collections, which I use when selecting a mixed collections for a talk. They are not moved from their origional files just linked shortcuts. They can then be exported in bulk at a particular size for a powerpoint talk.
Come to the Digital Day at Pitlochry for more details 
Susan

Susan

TheTAG system is brilliant - wish I had started from my first digital photos.

[Diane Whitehead]

This is a long-standing problem.  I inherited boxes of black and white
photos that never made it into a black-paper album, and have no names
for the people  - family history, but probably destined for the trash.

If I am at home, I name my pictures immediately.  If I am travelling in
the U.S., I have my laptop with me and upload the photos from my camera
and name them each evening in the motel - I am not a TV watcher.

However, when I travel to a country where I don't take my laptop,
(for safety, or just for saving weight now the airlines charge so much
for baggage) I have problems.  I arrived home from Australia in November
with several thousand photos.  I haven't named even half of them yet,
and I'm heading off to South Africa in a few weeks.

When I was with a bulb group in South Africa a couple of years ago, some
people were speaking the flower names into their cameras.  That seems
interesting, and would be ok now that multi-gigabyte storage cards are
reasonably priced.  I will have to see if my camera knows how to listen.
My computer can read to me.  I wonder whether it knows how to take
dictation from a camera.

[gote]

The problem with metadata is that this is a relatively new thing and old pictures do not have it.
Göte

[David Pilling]

The problem with metadata is that this is a relatively new thing and old pictures do not have it.
Göte

Nothing to stop one adding it, and presumably it will survive being uploaded to the web. If there was a standard (PML - plant markup language) then one could Google more effecitvely.

If every plant had an RFID chip embedded then the camera could know what it was looking at.

It is plausible that progress will be made on computer recognition of images, so one day all those un-named snaps may be of interest.

[gote]

Of course I can add metadata if I know how to do it and have the software and above all nothing better to do!
Most of the metadata added by the camera is of limited value since we hardly try to look for pictures exposed at f:8. The only useful metadata the camera adds today is date time of day and I usually do not know that for older pics. I would have to add guessed data at a later time and that is fairly time consuming. Further: How shall I today know what kind of data I will require four years from now. Carlo mentioned finding cushion plants.
If I have the date, I can sort on "private" criteria using a diary type of side information. I think that those of us who go to say the Dolomites would know between which dates we were there.
The other criteria are of the "public kind". A list of cushion plants would sort these out without our needing to put cushion in the metadata.
I do not think that there is a simple solution to this problem.
Göte   

[Susan Band]

I will say it again Photoshop Elements TAG system is great. As Arthur says, the quicker you do it the better. When you upload the programme it will search your computer for all your photos already on the hard drive and you can work from there. The Edit part of the package also has everything you need.
Susan