Photo organiser

[Poider]

G'day, Just wondering what everybody uses to organise their digital photos, I would like to be able to organise them in categories and be able to bring up all the photos in a said category, I have PSE9 and have considered using the organiser, but am wondering what happens if I have to upgrade the computer or reformat my main drive, I have an external drive with all my photos but can I save the categoreis in PSE to a disc or will I have to reorganise each time I upgrade etc?
Peter

[mariaramil]

Hi Peter;
I find Elements organiser a bit too slow and awkward for my liking...
If you can afford it and have lots of pics, I'd advise Lightroom. Brilliant for organising, key wording, tagging etc.
If you'd rather try something FREE, there's a neat program that you can download from Faststone (http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm).

[Poider]

Thank you mariaramil
Peter

[Tony M]

Peter,

I also recommend Lightroom. It's an excellent organiser and photo editor, with lots of thoughtful features that make the photo post-processing and workflow experience easy and quick. (Well, I still spend too long doing PP, but that's because I'm still learning.) You still have control over your directory structure, allowing to you organise with a mix of keywords, LR portfolios and file system.

I could go on, but you'll learn more by looking at Adobe's web site.

Tony

[thatguyfromvienna]

A really good free alternative is Google Picasa, IMO.

[rpcrowe]

I absolutely HATE the Photoshop Elements Organizer (although PSE is a fairly decent editing program).

Actually, I always filed my images according to my own system and NEVER misplaced an image although I had tousands upon thousands of images. When I tried to use Elements Organizer, it wanted to tell me where I should put my images, That drove me crazy.

I have a military background and we can organize things pretty well because of the way we have been trained. We describe things differently that civilians. Instead of saying "Chapstick", the military designation is:

"Balm, Lip, tube, summer" or "Balm, lip, tube, winter".

I would have a photo in a file organized such as

"Richard Images> Dogs> Maltese> rescue> and the name of the dog"

or

"Richard Images> China Trip> Beijing> Great Wall"

I tried to get past the Organizer by eliminating it but, then had all kinds of problems opening the elements program.

[Boatman]

I have used Picasa and Lightroom.

For basic organization Picasa is easy to learn and use - and its free. However, it has an annoying habit of occasionally losing its database. There are a number of posts on how to recover the database when it gets messed up, but it can be time consuming to fix.

Lightroom is more spophisticated than Picasa and it will cost you $149, which is actually a very good value. Lightroom has a wide range of sorting and classifiying features along with virtual images, virtual albums and metadata keywords. Lightroom has a sophisticated database structure which includes automatic backup. It takes a bit to learn but there are plenty of instructional videos available. Since I began using it, I have not had any issues with the database at all. It seems very stable. Lightroom also has outstanding image adjustment and PP tools including a superb RAW converter.

If you just want a simple tool for occasional snapshots, use Picasa. If you are serious about your photography and are going to do advanced PP and RAW shooting, invest the $149 in Lightroom. You won't regret it.

Update:

I follow the Picasa user's forum and this post turned up today, which brilliantly explains why someone might want to have Lightroom AND Picasa.

https://groups.google.com/a/googlepr...U/Ysxwt8MUdKwJ

[Poider]

Thank you all for your advice, I do not do a lot of PP, mainly cropping and straightening, with the occasional brightening/ darkening.
I go on a lot of walks with my wife where we just take photos of anything we find interesting. When I get home I usually download to my laptop and name the file 'Peter's Wetland' or 'Peter's Botanic Gardens' etc, I like to look at all my bird photos or all my road sign photos etc without having to duplicate the photos into a 'signs' photo and so on.
I think I can do that with tags in PSE, But I need to be able to save the list of tags to a disc in case of reformat or new computer.
Peter

[xpatUSA]

I absolutely HATE the Photoshop Elements Organizer (although PSE is a fairly decent editing program).
I tried to get past the Organizer by eliminating it but, then had all kinds of problems opening the elements program.

I started with PSE7 and made the big mistake of using the Organizer just once. All downhill from there . . every image saved I had to uncheck the Organizer box, and PSE took 100 years to start up while it lazily toured the hard drive looking for more pics to "Organize". Then I, too, tried to eliminate it - after which PSE got so cranky that I deleted the entire application and bought a PSE6 CD on eBay and have had no problems since.

I too do my own organizing. I do have Picasa 3 on the computer mainly for uploading trivial stuff to my on-line family albums - convenient and free.

[drjuice]

Good question! I 100% agree with the negative comments on other folks deciding how I want to organize my images. With my 35mmslides, I have more than 60K scans plus I've taken a further 20K images since I went to my DSLR mode. And, how I organize things now is based on what I used to do in the bad old days before I built my database of image metadata. I think everybody knows by now that I keep an external hard drive with all my archived images and offsite archives on archival DVDs which conveniently fit well into the environment where they live.

To start with, I have a particular directory structure that holds all my archival images. These NEVER get moved or saved. If I want to use one or more, I make copies and stash the copies in the current project's piece of my harddrive in the same kind of structure as my archive. The structure is yyyy, then yyyymm, then yyyymmdd. Sometimes, for a major trip (lasting several months) I'll insert the area as an extra directory level between yyyy and yyyymm.

All pictures within the yyyymmdd directory keep their original exposure name/number until forever. If I create a derivative image, it has the original exposure name/number at the beginning and the notes on what I did in the derivation process, for example, .

When I get into the yyyymmdd directory, it's divided into AllARW (Sony's RAW format), AllJPG, AllPNG, and AllTIFF. By having all the formats ready to roll, when it comes time to use the images, I already have them in the format appropriate what the printer will want.

Then, when I'm classifying them, similar to TAGging, I put all the metadata about the images into a database. All the identifying information is in each image's record in the database. The record also contains information on how I've used each image and a pointer to the record of any derivative image that I may have created.

The TAGs I generally use are political/administrative unit (country, state/province, county, city, arrondissemonts for example), natural regions (Rocky Mountains), parks by name (Yellowstone, Anza-Borrego), buildings, etc. Then, since my EXIF information is all extracted, that information appears in fields associated with each image. Next, I have any "natural" phenomena noted in text ("crepuscular rays", "lava flow", "volcanic eruption"). Finally, I have a field in each image's record that contains what I call "vhnote", stuff that I might want to know about the picture for some reason. For example, one picture that I know I'll use a lot has "rutile, purple flower" in the vhnote field because until about a week ago, I didn't know what it was. But, I don't often take pictures of things next to a road's right-of-way, so I knew that information would stick in my mind to search for. For any wildflowers, the vhnote also contains the common name and the Latin name. Finally, each derivative image has a dnote field which contains the specific modifications for that particular derivation.

By having the metadata in a database, it saves me a LOT of time retrieving the picture because all I need is the directory structure and the images' name/number to get to it and copy it/them over to the current project's directory.

HTH.

v