Call me a Photo Archivist

Finally, I have my photo collection organized, yippee hooray. I’ve been shooting photos for over 4 years now and never put much thought in how to organize them during that time. I had over 7000 photos taking up over 6 gigabytes of space and keeping tabs on them all was starting to become a chore.There are several aspects of photo archiving that are important and I had to change several things and start over a few times before I was happy with how I was going to manage these photos.When I started shooting photos, I tried to use a series of folders to categorize the photographs. I would have folders for people, events, etc. The biggest problem with this was that many photos fit into more than one category and there was no easy solution with the folder based system. I also had a problem when I started using the Fuji FinePix S602 from the Trib. Every time you would clear the memory card it would start naming the photos back at 1 so I had a lot of problems with conflicting photo names, some of them I renamed, others I just put into extra folders, both of which made my system more cluttered.A few months ago I started looking for software that catalog my photos and help make archival and retrieval easier. I looked at the features of Adobe Album and Picaza but neither of them seemed to be as feature full as ACDSee. (Say the name out loud, get it?)ACDSee had the best method of managing the photos. It has a database and keywords which allow you tremendous flexibility. For a typical photo it stores a caption, notes, photographer, a rating, keywords, and can be assigned to any number of database categories.When viewing the archive you can view photos by date taken, categories, keywords, etc. and caption names can be searched. You can even filter against multiple categories; if you want a photo with Heather, Me and Guinness at Christmas time, No problem.After I went through all 7000 photos and had them organized and categorized I realized that I had a problem with backing up the photos. The library was so big that I needed more than one DVD, but there was no good way to split up the files. I no longer needed to organize my new photos in the old folder based management, but the old photos were all in the format and were causing some annoyances.I decided to organize all the photos by date. I made folders for each month, and if there were a lot of photos for that month I made folders for the days. Now I needed to find a way to move 7000 photos to the folder for the day that they were taken and manage to keep my sanity. There was no easy way to see the dates they were taken, the accurate way to tell is to look in the EXIF tag in the photo. And that information isn’t displayed in explorer. I also had a problem with duplicate file names.I found a program named Siren. It was able to read the EXIF tags and rename the files appropriately. For example if a photo was shot today on September 17, 2004 at 12:48:04 it could name the file 20040917_124804.jpg. That right there eliminated the problem with the duplicate file names, and it made it easy to see what folder they needed to be moved into.On my old Kodak camera it would reset the clock every time you replaced the batteries and if you didn’t set the clock it would use its default date of March 1st, 2000. There were several times that we didn’t reset the clock and had a few hundred photos that were all taken on this date. I found a program called Exifer which could batch edit the EXIF tags, so that, along with a whole lot of trying to remember when the photo was taken, I was able to fix the EXIF tags. At this point I just needed to use Siren to name the files just like the others.Making all of these file changes totally blew away my ACDSee database so I had to go through all 7000 photos a second time and re-categorize them, luckily this time went easier since I did all the hard planning work the first time.At this point I decided it was time to go through and delete photos that were either duplicates or just bad photos. The duplicates were from the times that I shot a subject 5 or 10 times with different settings, so I went through and deleted all but the best of the photos. There were also many photos that were just plain too blurry to ever use so I reluctantly got rid of those unless they were the only record that I had of something. There were also a few photos that I shot that I felt were just plain bad so I get rid of those as well. I ended up cutting nearly 2000 photos and almost 2 gigabytes.With the new organization backing up the photos is easy. I won’t be adding any photos to the old folders I can just back them up to DVD in a nice linear fashion. My first DVD held from November 2000 till June 2004. My next one will pick up in July, with my 6 megapixel camera It looks like I’m going to be burning though DVD’s a lot faster then with my old camera. I’m looking for a photo gallery that integrates well with my blog, but I might just use the HTML galleries that ACDSee can make. So keep an eye out for a few galleries from the cruise soon, as soon as I think up captions for all the good photos.