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February 17, 2006
Reboot
My apologies for not writing anything for the past week or so. Somewhere between the list of things I needed to do and the things I wanted to do the blog went to the wayside. It's a shame. I really felt the absense of being able to produce something creative if but only a few nights a week.
I'm ready to gear up again; At home I've got a new PC and a new monitor calibrated and ready to go. Expect me to post some new entries to the photoblog soon.
Moving over to a new PC and migrating all of my data has caused me to re-examine my present strategy for catelogging my photos. The way I'm doing it now seems to take too much time and effort and it doesn't map well onto the world of virtual albums or Flickr-like tags.
The way I'm organizing my photos now closly tracks how I've been posting them into my on-line gallery. The system is: I arbitrarily decide how to divide my collections of photos in a evermore complex and personal hierarchy with sufficently detailed filenames to maintain searchability. There are no tags or keywords and often little to no reliance on any metadata.
I've heard over the years that people have liked the way I've organized my on-line collection. I think they find it interesting to see how I've divided things up...but truthfully its just too hard to maintain. A Flickr-like system of tags and virtual albums would be far, far more tenible. I want to change the way I organize things and I want to do it now. The first thing I've realized is that I'm going to need to make a tool change and a file organization change.
As far as tools go, I've decided to look at two tools: Picasa2 and ACDSee Pro
Here's the procedure I'm thinking of using starting from importing the data to my PC from the camera to how I would like to be able to later slice and dice the data:
- Copy all of the files from my camera's memory storage device and rename the folder into one or more folders taking the format "YYMMDD-NN Short Description of Grouping" where Y, M, & D are the familiar date elements and NN is a number like "00", "01", "02, etc. depicting what import number it is from that day.
- Rename all of the files in that directory as "YY - Folder's Short Description - Place/Subject.ext"
- Add tags/keywords.
- Optionally create interesting virtual folders based on tags/keywords in my age-old metal hierarchy and publish these to my on-line gallery.
I've already ruled out Picasa2 to help me achieve this procedure: it simply doesn't have the capability to construct a hierarchy of albums or (as far as I know) to be able to combine its keywords into simple boolean statements—such as, create a folder with photos of "japan and (me or Evan) and 2005"—so I'm evaluating ACDSee Pro to see if I can bend it to my will.
Does anybody else have any other suggestions out there? How do you keep things organized without overhead overkill? Are there any other tools out there you would suggest?
As for my old photos and my old organization strategy, I'm going to make 2006 a landmark year and just make the change going forward. I'll put the old stuff in an directory named "before-2006" and go through it every once in awhile when I want to feel haunted by nostaligia as I do with my other old drawers and boxes of junk.
Posted by jordanh at February 17, 2006 11:24 AM
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