Do you "Tag" your images?

R8JimBob88

R8JimBob88

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James Stockton
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I am getting to that point now where I am looking for a previous photo, but can't find it. I use Elements 5.0 organiser as I find it more user friendly than Adobe Bridge.

I'm just wondering how you find yours? Mine are all named but sometimes aren't accurate enough to find them, I have been thinking about tagging them but would this be a HUGE MASSIVE job to do? I just dont want to leave it as it will make it even harder to find them in the future?
 
Within each year I put my images by date and where I went eg Bluebell Railway-271207
 
Thats kind of how mine are now, with the dates and vague title of where I took them. Its sometimes a problem when I'm not looking for a particular image but more of a theme, eg night shots. I have loads but they are taken all over the show and fall into different catagorys.
 
I use a folder structure – year/month/event – and PhotoMechanic as my photo management software which pops all of a particular event's photos up on the screen (light table function) instantly, so that I can find one particular photo real fast among the 50 to 100 photos I generally tend to archive of any single event. Specific wedding and vacation photos can be the relatively 'toughest' to find as I archive a few hundred more of those type of 'events'. But with lightning fast PhotoMechanic that's never been a real problem.

What it boils down to is that I don't tag every photo individually. I can't afford to spend (waste?) that much time on it. And my current photo management system works very well, so I don't need to do it either.

Have fun!
 
Jim

In my opinion the sooner you get a serious tool and start tagging the raw files the less work in the long run.

I use Lightroom but I believe Aperture is also as good. I can tag multiple images, use presets to apply tags to previous images - same goes for metadata. Once held on file any exports can carry these tags. Alamy, photoshelter, Flickr, Wordpress and other common tools/sites will pick up on these tags thus saving you re-keying.

Hope that helps!
:thumbs:
 
Helps a lot, thanks :)

Does anyone know of a quick way to do this with Elements organiser? So you mean, if I tag an image, flickr will also pick up on it?
 
Lightroom uses XMP which creates a sidecar file along with my raw file. If I export a TIFF or JPEG it writes the metadata to the file in the IPTC standard format.

Any program/site that uses the IPTC XML importers can read this data.

There is lots of reading on this but mostly it just works.

Gary
 
I'm with Gary. If your serious about finding images then you need a good programe to sort and organise.

I also use Lightroom. The images are saved in Folders that represent the year. Inside that is the Project/ Shoot.This may also be subdivided. I then rename the images , and add additional keywords.

This system is a bit of a hangover from pre Lightroom times, but being a belt and braces sort of person, if I lose Lightroom I can still find images, but not as easily or quickly. plus it's backwardly compatible to Pre Lightroom

You could try something like Acdsee. Its cheaper than Lightroom, but then lightroom does a lot more than just catalogue images
 
I use aperture for most of my work. After each session images are imported with the basic info for me this is ' . . arrives at such and such' then in the other fields I put location info. When I work on each individual photo more information may be added such as a persons name. Any relevant keywords are included, but this is rare as for me the agency I supply most of the time don't require it, all info is feed from the caption data.
 
I would suggest using Bridge as it sounds like you have it. Bridge is a whole lot more powerfull than lightroom, It just needs a bit of time to set it up properly and then your away.

Or you could look at fotostation or Iview (not sure what its called now microsoft have butchered it).
 
mho said:
IBridge is a whole lot more powerfull than lightroom
Click to expand...
It has some functions which lightroom doesn't but then LR has some that bridge doesn't.

I see Bridge as a tool for designers or producers (it's ability to swap all types of media via various Adobe programs) rather than a photographers tool. The way that Lightroom follows a digital photographers workflow is not equalled in Bridge if you work in RAW.

I now have control my website from within LR (no other programs required) thanks to 3rd party plugins. LR has been re-written to allow more 3rd party development (albeit mostly in Export at present) so watch that baby grow in functionality. :thumbs:
 
I use lightroom myself, its invaluale for me. I probably dont have as many images as some, (6000) but when I come to find one particular image I can just type in one word and bam, the image appears in front of me. This used to take hours before I got lightroom looking through year/month/event folders. It saves a lot of time and you can complete your whole workflow in lightroom from importing the image to outputting it onto your website as Himupnorth says :)

@Himupnorth - Can I ask you for info on these 3rd party plug ins that allow you to manage your website from within lightroom. Cheers :)
 
I've just started to add metadata (both Copyright and keywords) to my RAW images using Bridge. Works fine for me but I wish I had done it from the start as it's taking ages! :D

It's especially useful for subjects like aviation where you will see the same aircraft at different locations, dates, with different paint schemes and carrying different 'loads'. Sorting by folder for this kind of thing doesn't work well (it's how I had been doing it). Now I can search by a number of keywords to find all my matching photos.

It's well worth the effort and the sooner you start the better!
 
himupnorth - the op was talking about the ability to use metadata for searching and cataloguing images, in this case bridge is far better than lightroom, and more easily integrated with other industry standard programs like fotostation than lightroom.
And has the op stated he used bridge that would also save him any out lay.
 
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