Keeping pix/videos organized - opinions

For those that travel a lot and take pix/videos on vacation and store them
on your PC ... have you found one way that works better than another ?
Make travel folders by ... Location ? Time ? ( FLA - 2007 then month ?)

I find that WHILE on vacation, I'm dumping from camera into one folder per
day
Day 1 - Miami Tour , Day 2 - Fishing
Day 3 - Beach etc , and just dump all pix/videos into that folder and
then erase the stick.
I rename/edit them later ( on a rainy day of the trip or when I get home).
When I get home I copy all of it to my desktop PC ( lots of disk space).

Sometimes I'm returning to one location ( say FLA) so want to separate by
year rather than dump into one big FLA folder. After a few trips in the
past few months I'm finding that the "Library" disk on my desktop PC was
getting rather full and just did a search for video thinking maybe I had a
few copies of travel videos and found I had sometimes a few copies of same
file ( the camera dump in one folder and the "perhaps edited" "finished
product" in another for example). I was able to delete a lot of them and
when I saw the folders I can see why I created each folder at the time,
but now wondering what is best way ??

When copying to desktop I was filing by time frame ( Travel - Location -
Yr - Month etc) in a folder such as
Travel - FLA- Keys - 2007 ( or WDW or Fishing) etc and I'm thinking ...
in a few years I'll be trying to find a file and not know which trip it
was from.
So file them by
Location ? Then Video OR pictures ? Time ?
Or dump all video/pix into one folder by location then subfolder ?
Travel - Fla- WDW -
Travel - Fla- WDW - 2007
Travel - Fla- Fishing
Travel - Fla- Fishing -2007 - Pictures
Travel - Fla- Fishing -2007 - Video
or
Travel 2007 - FLA .... and a few years from now I'll have to open each
folder to find a particular picture ?
OR
I'll find them and not know which trip ( year) it happened ( - who cares ?
you say - maybe you're right - that's what I'm asking for those that HAVE
done this already)
I've got a few extra 300gb drives that I'm gonna be using soon but , for
now, have alot of disk space to move/organize/put back what I've got and
get organized.

Thanks,
Bobb

In article ,
- Bobb - wrote:

So file them by
Location ? Then Video OR pictures ? Time ?
Or dump all video/pix into one folder by location then subfolder ?
or
Travel 2007 - FLA .... and a few years from now I'll have to open each
folder to find a particular picture ?
OR
I'll find them and not know which trip ( year) it happened

I don't see how the last situation could happen. All you have to
do is look at the EXIF information on the photo to find out when
it was taken. In fact, I've gotten in the habit of using EXIF to
help me put together trip reports, since it can tell me what time
I moved from Animal Kingdom to Epcot, whether I went on Splash
Mountain before or after Big Thunder, etc.


Patty

"Patty Winter" schrieb

I don't see how the last situation could happen. All you have to
do is look at the EXIF information on the photo to find out when
it was taken.

Happens to people like me who never bother to check or set
the date and time of the camera. I think the pictures I take today
are EXIF-dated 2002 or something. Who cares? I know that
I don't ;-)

I put the pictures in folders much like Bobb does - after renaming
them with a number and short description.
And - after losing all my pics of an Ontario vacation to a HD crash
I always burn them on CD as well.

Jochen from Germany

In article ,
Jochen Kriegerowski wrote:
"Patty Winter" schrieb

I don't see how the last situation could happen. All you have to
do is look at the EXIF information on the photo to find out when
it was taken.

Happens to people like me who never bother to check or set
the date and time of the camera. I think the pictures I take today
are EXIF-dated 2002 or something.

Ah, okay. :-) My cameras have always come out of the box with
the proper date set. I've had to set them to the right time
zone, and I have a tendency to forget about DST, but at least
they're always within an hour of the correc time! :-)

And - after losing all my pics of an Ontario vacation to a HD crash
I always burn them on CD as well.

Very good idea. When I'm away from home and taking photos
that are really important to me, I do one or more of the
following steps to protect them:

* Download them to my MacBook
* Make a CD
* Upload them to my directory on my ISP's server
* Put them on a thumb drive
* Swap memory cards and put the full one in the
safe in my hotel room.


Patty

Make travel folders by ... Location ? Time ?

For your photos, the best way is to use a program that stores your
photos and let's you find them by ANY criteria you choose -- date,
event, keyword, etc.

I use iPhoto because I use a Mac, but undoubtedly there are numerous
PC equivalents. iPhoto gives you the option of viewing all photos
chronologically, OR viewing them grouped by event (for example,
"Florida fishing trip"), OR search by date (like all photos taken in
Dec. 2006), or search by keyword ("Dad" or "Fishing" or whatever).

These types of programs work best if you assign keywords to photos
after you import them, but even if you don't they can still be very
helpful.

Here's a link to iPhoto info, but like I said there are PC programs
that do similar things.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/

James

Comments inline :

"ASMx4" wrote in message
...
You raise some interesting questions, bobb...particularly about
finding specific pics several years later. That forces me to
re-evaluate how I'm doin it.

First, I use XP's scanner and camera wizard, whenever possible, to
transfer from camera to pc...it makes it a little easier to rename
pics during the transfer process, especially when there a pics on the
camera from several different subjects...high school dance, scenery,
family get-together as an example.

Second, I create a series of folders by the year;

\\Pictures
\2007
\2008
And then descriptive folder names underneath that...
\2008-01 (Jan)-27 Snowboarding
\2008-02 (Feb)-9 HS Musical on Ice

Because we visit WDW so often, I have a seperate folder for that,
under...
\\Pictures\Walt Disneyworld

... and again, divide them by the year/trip

\\Pictures\Walt Disneyworld\WDW-2004
\\Pictures\Walt Disneyworld\WDW-2006 VIDEO CLIPS

I also created a "Temp" folder under \\Pictures. I'll copy pics into
the temp folder for editing. Usually I just do some cropping for the
Mrs. scrapbooking so they don't need to be saved after there edited
and I just delete them. (well, ok...there's currently 500+mb of pics
in my temp folder but, I know it's no biggie if they disappear.)

A couple things that are helpful,
DELETE, DELETE, DELETE!
...as soon as posible after transfering them to the pc, get rid of the
crappy pictures. you know, the pics of your thumb, totally black pics,
totally outa focus pics, and the like. (I still stumble upon too many
of these taking up lotsa hard drive space.)


That's exactly what brought this up .. today weather cold/windy so I
started cleaning up recent trips and so far have 321 "duplicate files" =
2.33Gb in trash. Like you I had a few temp folders and finished
renaming/copying/moving most but not ALL of them. For many videos (use
Newport Jazz Fest) I had 4 copies of same video - one in the TEMP folder,
one in a Newport Folder, and one in a NJF/which day folder - they all had
DSC00 format and the one in NJF/2007 folder had the "correct name" (
BBKing1.avi etc ). After deleting the other 3 I now can't quickly view by
"which day did he play", but I have them all by year. If I later want to
view for the Ray Charles video, I'll have to check each year's folder to
find it. THAT's what I meant by "years later tough to find", but as time
goes by maybe I'll just move them from NJF to "Live Concerts" and see
them all there.


http://rename.lupasfreeware.org/
a free, simple, straight forward file renameing program. Takes 30
seconds to figure out how to rename 100 pictures at once...very easy.
I have thousands of pics with names like HPIM6041.JPG and IMG_1066.JPG
and it drives me nuts. Anyway, your point about finding certain pics
years later is a good one. Maybe giving the pics very descriptive
names, and then searching for pics by name, is the only real world way
to find them later...I'm VERY open for suggestions/ideas on that part
myself. (The only other thing I can think of is "Thumbnail View" and a
really, REALLY big monitor! or, that connector thingy on the back of
our head..you know, from the movie "Matrix"? That'd be cool!)


What I do is when in that Temp folder (just imported) and I know that
DSC0055.jpg thru DSC00233.jpg are " Disney" pix (e.g.) I highlight
DSC00233 and Shift+Up Arrow (or Shift+PageUp) until all files up to
DSC0055 are highlighted, then right-click on DSC0055 and RENAME. To keep
in that order I rename to
WDW2007 (1).jpg
and all of those will get renamed to
WDW2007 (2).jpg
WDW2007 (3).jpg etc
[ if you leave off the (1), then IT has no number in its name and goes to
end of order next time you view them.]

My problem comes from copy/moving/renaming/editing movies to trim the
unneeded parts . The DATE of the file becomes the date I edited and can't
know when it was originally taken. So when 'looking for a file from a few
years ago from WDW", if I didn't edit it THEN, then I have wrong time
stamp.
Also, sorting by year is handy when taking a trip every few months UNTIL a
few years later when I don't remember " Did we go to Savannah in 2005 or
2006 ?". THEN I wish I had sorted it by location with year subfolder.


For those that travel a lot and take pix/videos on vacation and store
them
on your PC ... have you found one way that works better than another ?
Make travel folders by ... Location ? Time ? ( FLA - 2007 then month ?)

I find that WHILE on vacation, I'm dumping from camera into one folder
per
day
Day 1 - Miami Tour , Day 2 - Fishing
Day 3 - Beach etc , and just dump all pix/videos into that folder and
then erase the stick.
I rename/edit them later ( on a rainy day of the trip or when I get
home).
When I get home I copy all of it to my desktop PC ( lots of disk space).

Sometimes I'm returning to one location ( say FLA) so want to separate
by
year rather than dump into one big FLA folder. After a few trips in the
past few months I'm finding that the "Library" disk on my desktop PC was
getting rather full and just did a search for video thinking maybe I had
a
few copies of travel videos and found I had sometimes a few copies of
same
file ( the camera dump in one folder and the "perhaps edited" "finished
product" in another for example). I was able to delete a lot of them and
when I saw the folders I can see why I created each folder at the time,
but now wondering what is best way ??

When copying to desktop I was filing by time frame ( Travel - Location -
Yr - Month etc) in a folder such as
Travel - FLA- Keys - 2007 ( or WDW or Fishing) etc and I'm thinking ...
in a few years I'll be trying to find a file and not know which trip it
was from.
So file them by
Location ? Then Video OR pictures ? Time ?
Or dump all video/pix into one folder by location then subfolder ?
Travel - Fla- WDW -
Travel - Fla- WDW - 2007
Travel - Fla- Fishing
Travel - Fla- Fishing -2007 - Pictures
Travel - Fla- Fishing -2007 - Video
or
Travel 2007 - FLA .... and a few years from now I'll have to open each
folder to find a particular picture ?
OR
I'll find them and not know which trip ( year) it happened ( - who cares
?
you say - maybe you're right - that's what I'm asking for those that
HAVE
done this already)
I've got a few extra 300gb drives that I'm gonna be using soon but , for
now, have alot of disk space to move/organize/put back what I've got
and
get organized.

Thanks,
Bobb

"- Bobb -" wrote in message
. ..
For those that travel a lot and take pix/videos on vacation and store them
on your PC ... have you found one way that works better than another ?
Make travel folders by ... Location ? Time ? ( FLA - 2007 then month ?)

I find that WHILE on vacation, I'm dumping from camera into one folder per
day
Day 1 - Miami Tour , Day 2 - Fishing
Day 3 - Beach etc , and just dump all pix/videos into that folder and
then erase the stick.
I rename/edit them later ( on a rainy day of the trip or when I get home).
When I get home I copy all of it to my desktop PC ( lots of disk space).


I use the XP Camera Wizard uploader on my computer. It puts all photos in a
single folder by date. I keep photos grouped together by event or trip. Most
folders get added onto the folder name with a comment about what the
event/trip was. ("Halloween Party 2007" or "Disney Trip") If there are a
LOT of pics (such as from a Disney Trip) I might further separate the photos
out by day, and add info as to what went on that day. ("2007-06-01 - Animal
Kingdom, Epcot, PI")

For my photo management, I use Picasa from Google. http://picasa.google.com
It's free to download and use. You can also sign up for online albums
through PicasaWeb. The software and the online albums are easily integrated
for simple creation and uploading of albums.

One thing I like about Picasa is that all of the edits you make to your
photos aren't permanent changes. The edited photo is what you see within
Picasa. And then if you want to save the changes permanently, it creates a
backup of the original file in a subfolder.

Unfortunately for Mac users, Picasa is not currently available for the Mac.

-Rob

I guess maybe I take an overly simple route in organizing mine, but
this is it. I have a folder on my desktop named "Photos." Inside
"Photos" I have one folder for each trip where I've taken photos,
named stuff like "RADP 12 Dec 2007", "LA/DLR April 2007", "Knoxville
Zoo Feb 2008" and so on. So each trip has it's own folder, which also
contains the month and year (since I have, say, 7 sets of WDW trip
photos, but they were all taken at different times). I also have a
"Random photos" folder where I put photos where I have taken just a
few photos at a time. "Random photos" is the only one that has folders
inside it, and they would be other smaller groups, like "Family", "My
car", "My collections" and so on. As for video, I don't have much of
it, so they all go into the "My Videos" folder, and have names similar
to the photos.

My only other tip would be to NEVER delete photos until you get home
and can see them full size. I can't tell you how many I have taken and
not liked, but found something unique or special about them once I got
them home and looked at them full size. You never know when there
might be something funny hidden in it that you didn't see before.

-Julie
TDC Rapunzel, Food Rocks Head Chef and Keeper of the Monstro Table

Sorry for the double post, but another thing that I would highly
recommend is a web backup of all your photos. I use Flickr, and it
only costs $25 a year for unlimited storage (I currently have about
7,500 photos in mine). It archives your photos full size, so if you
ever have a hard drive crash, a fire or whatever, you still have
access to your original quality photos. I like this idea better than
CD backups because in the event of a fire, your CD backups might get
burned with the hard drive. It's a morbid thought, but something to
think about!

-Julie
TDC Rapunzel, Food Rocks Head Chef and Keeper of the Monstro Table

I would highly recommend is a web backup of all your photos

A friend of mine lost years of pictures when a fire destroyed both her
computer AND her backup drive.

So an off-site backup is a very good idea. You could burn disks
periodically and store them at another location (like a relative's
house), but a web backup is usually a lot more convenient.

James