Catalogue -- again?

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I know I have a really decent picture of a moment from football match somewhere on my hard drive but I can't find it. I'll find it eventually but it has brought to the fore how utterly useless my catalogue system is. I tend to rename files to indicate what's in the picture and then have a file structure like this:

C:/Windows/Media/photographs/2014/2014Jan/filename

wherein the year and month change accordingly.

I realise that as my photograph collection gets ever larger, this system becomes meaningless in that if I find a picture I now know when it was taken but that doesn't really help me find the picture in the first place.

Should I forget the year and month? Should I stop using the filename to identify my pictures and use tagging instead? If I use tagging, how do I go back over 6000 pictures and tag them accordingly, or should I just start from now? Also, how should I change my file structure if I'm not using year and month.

I'm getting lost in the mire of photo catalogues so examples of your filing system or advice for mine would be much appreciated.

For arty pictures it doesn't matter when it was taken but I find the year/month useful for family and personal snaps as it creates a history. Can I combine the year/month system with something more finder-friendly?
 
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you store your files in the windows directory / folder ?

a typical file structure i use would be drive letter:/holidays/cornwall july 2013/ and so on a different subject would be filed drive letter:/portraits/mrs blogs family/feb 2012/ and have exactly the same file structure on a different drive for the Raws

works for me :)
 
When my Canon software transfers files from the camera it uses this naming convention c:\Users\Nick\Pictures\DatePhotoWasTaken (as in C:\Users\Nick\Pictures\2014_11_28), I then might add a suffix to the end of the folder name, when I'm looking and processing the images. For example I would edit the above to get the following folder C:\User\Nick\Pictures\2014_11_28-CreteHoliday.

I had though of putting all of my 2013 images into a folder and then into individual months within that folder, but I tried it for a few weeks and it took too many clicks to find anything. So I stuck with the above.
 
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My advice would be to bite the bullet and get a copy of Lightroom or similar.

Spend some time properly key wording your existing images, should not take too long once you get the hang of it.

Then you will have no problems finding things in the future, Lightroom is a fantastic tool for finding and grouping images.

HTH

David
 
ShinySideUp said:
I know I have a really decent picture of a moment from football match somewhere on my hard drive but I can't find it. I'll find it eventually but it has brought to the fore how utterly useless my catalogue system is. I tend to rename files to indicate what's in the picture and then have a file structure like this:

C:/Windows/Media/photographs/2014/2014Jan/filename

wherein the year and month change accordingly.
Click to expand...

Lose the 2014 from Jan (2014Jan) - unneeded

Create your folder structure: Year / Month / then whatever is it..

ShinySideUp said:
I realise that as my photograph collection gets ever larger, this system becomes meaningless in that if I find a picture I now know when it was taken but that doesn't really help me find the picture in the first place.
Click to expand...

Tagging every picture with a keyword / STARS / colours will assist you with this. You just then search for the keyword / s - takes seconds.

ShinySideUp said:
Should I forget the year and month? Should I stop using the filename to identify my pictures and use tagging instead? If I use tagging, how do I go back over 6000 pictures and tag them accordingly, or should I just start from now? Also, how should I change my file structure if I'm not using year and month.

I'm getting lost in the mire of photo catalogues so examples of your filing system or advice for mine would be much appreciated.

For arty pictures it doesn't matter when it was taken but I find the year/month useful for family and personal snaps as it creates a history. Can I combine the year/month system with something more finder-friendly?
Click to expand...

Stay with the Year /Month - it works fine

Tag everything - in Lightroom it is possible to find any pic that has been tagged (& also if not !!) in seconds
 
For my folders I name them yyyy-mm-dd-location-subject, with the subject optional, but the subject would be the most important pics at that location. So for example, 2014-11-29-Rome-Colosseum. It makes for sometimes a long folder name, but it orders all the folders by date and gives a searchable location or subject.

LR may be the way to go though, but even naming the way I do, when the folders are imported, it still puts them in date order. The more keywording you do, the easier things are to find. Keywording possibly thousands of pics can be a daunting task, but LR will remember your commonly used keywords, and you can keyword all, or batches of images in a folder quite quickly.
 
Yes, it's the keyword thing that's the problem. If I could keyword everything I could even put the whole lot in one folder and it wouldn't be a problem. The trouble is I tend to take pictures of anything and everything as and when the mood strikes me so I might copy down ten photos of one thing/event or a hundred pictures each one with a different subject.

Categorising each picture can be a real problem. Take a fictitious holiday snap for example: it's taken during a trip to Germany/Austria/Switzerland, it shows a native in national dress, sitting on a classic British motorcycle -- say, a Bonnevile -- with the alps in the background and a group of Japanese tourists taking a picture of me taking a picture. a) What do I name the picture and b) what keywords can I put against the picture? Would you experienced catalogers name all those things in the keyword/tag facility?

Sorry if these questions seem self-answering but I've got stuck in a circle as I'm still not sure what I want in a picture catalogue and am trying to pick your collective brains for your systems.

I do have Lightroom but TBH I'm not sure exactly what it's doing when I import pictures to it. Is it making copies somewhere else? What exactly IS the LR catalogue and why would I want more than one (another poster has referred to backing up their catalogues, plural)? I have gone through many of the tutorials but feel I have missed some salient point somewhere and at the moment I am just using it to make minor adjustments to my pictures while ensuring that I know where my actual pictures are using my own filing system.
 
ShinySideUp said:
Categorising each picture can be a real problem. Take a fictitious holiday snap for example: it's taken during a trip to Germany/Austria/Switzerland, it shows a native in national dress, sitting on a classic British motorcycle -- say, a Bonnevile -- with the alps in the background and a group of Japanese tourists taking a picture of me taking a picture. a) What do I name the picture and b) what keywords can I put against the picture? Would you experienced catalogers name all those things in the keyword/tag facility?

I do have Lightroom but TBH I'm not sure exactly what it's doing when I import pictures to it. Is it making copies somewhere else? What exactly IS the LR catalogue and why would I want more than one (another poster has referred to backing up their catalogues, plural)? I have gone through many of the tutorials but feel I have missed some salient point somewhere and at the moment I am just using it to make minor adjustments to my pictures while ensuring that I know where my actual pictures are using my own filing system.
Click to expand...

There are lots of Lightroom tutorials on the web as you have found, I think some of the best are on the Adobe website. I like to have the tutorial playing on a second screen so I can follow along without having to keep stopping the video.

http://tv.adobe.com/show/getting-started-with-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-5/

LR never moves any image files, it records where they are on your drives and keeps a record of their location, and any adjustments (including keywords) you have made to them - this is the catalouge and the this is the reason it is so important to back it up along with your images.

With regard to key wording I have seen the phrase "key word to Hell and back" used so use as many keywords as you see fit. When you search in LR you can limit or include keywords, it is very versatile BUT if you don't have the key words there in the first place then it won't find the images.

Stick with LR it will be worth the effort in the end.

David
 
Thank you for that David. I have been experimenting with what the DNG file converter does with images (I only have LR 4 until 6 comes out) and have decided to start using DNG files while keeping my Nikon NEF files in the same directories (OK folders then, but I am old school) just in case. I am not short of storage space so having two versions is not a problem. I shall start converting my entire photo catalogue tonight and hopefully it will have finished by tomorrow morning; wish me luck.
 
I prefer Kevin Kubotas version myself - but both are worth watching... They have different styles..
 
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