I recently got back into photography, not anything serious though because my camera is a point and shoot. Then I realized that I have now over 33,000 photographs backed up on my external hard drive. I would like to pick out the top 100-500 best photographs and print them out on posters but I have not yet found a simple to do that unless I go through all the photographs. Here is how I arranged my photos:
- All photographs are first grouped by the year they were taken, so I have folders labeled from 2002 to 2009.
- Subfolders are named by year then topic, such as “2009Flowers”
- File names of the photographs are labeled by the same convention as the subfolder and with sequential numbering, such as 2009Flowers001″
I do that to almost all of my photographs unless they are pre 2003. Some folders and filenames are named lazily. So I guess the first step is to rename the files so that every file is in the format “yearTopic#”. After that I can pick out whatever photograph that looks good and copy and past into a Portfolio folder. I can delete photos if necessary and it wouldn’t effect my original.
This process can hopefully help me arrange all the photos and make me pick out the best ones.
LOL, I have about 22 years worth of photos….somewhere in the area of 300,000.
I would really hate in I had to go in and find one certain photo.
Raven
http://cherokeebydesign.wordpress.com/
You sound like you already have a pretty good idea of how to label and organize all of your photos. At least that’s more thought than I have ever put into anything.
I was talking to Estella about this and she didn’t quite understand why you had so many photos. But I tried to explain it to her in terms of what another author said about her writing. Writers (including Estella) tend to journal and write a lot of things even if they don’t use it right away and just keep it stored for years because they never know when they’ll use it. Sandra Cisneros likens it to keeping a “box of buttons” that grandmothers used to keep around just-in-case they might need to mend or replace a button in the future.
I think it’s great that you will be revisiting your work. I need to do the same with some of my writing. Good luck!
300,000 photos? That’s a lot. I thought 33,000, about 1/10 of your photos is a lot. I wish there’s a way the computer can recognize similar photos so if I want a picture of a building I get all the building photos. That say will come soon.
And yes Omar, having so many photos is like have a “box of buttons,” but the box is overflowing. I need to delete photos but then I feel bad because I took them. So I’m going to sort out about 330 (1%) of the best ones. I hope to do that in the next coming weeks.