Photo Management System

I’ve got a big “weekend update” type post in the works, but am waiting on a new laptop, since my trusty ole Dell has decided to finally bite the dust after 4.5 years. It’s coming TONIGHT, and then Ben will get it all set up with my THINGS, and THEN, I will share our weekend. Preview: Annie sees Annie at the Children’s Theater, and Easter Baskets galore!

A few of you expressed interest in my photo management system. As I mentioned in my photography answers post, I have taken many tens of thousands of photos over the past few years, increasing quite a bit with the purchase of my first DSLR. I’ve been using this photo management system pretty much since then (November 2007) and it works very well for me. One of my biggest fears is permanently losing photos, so I always have every photo in 2 places, and the ideal is 3. It might sound like overkill, but you never know when you a computer will go kaput!

First step – getting the photos off the camera(s) – I do this quite frequently because I hate having a backlog. This seems to be the biggest issue people have with frequently sharing their photos – because as you all know, the longer you let photos sit, the more you have to deal with, the more overwhelming it gets, and then you just don’t do it. It practically gives me panic attacks when I see people (MANY people I know) who have hundreds of photos from the past several MONTHS or WORSE that are ONLY on their camera! Then, the camera gets broken or lost, and you’re just totally f-ed. Don’t let this happen to you! If you make it a priority and just do it, same way you have to do many other things, it isn’t nearly as overwhelming. Plus, it’s way more fun to look at photos on your big screen than on the tiny screen of the camera, so this should be EXCITING! :) To me, photos really aren't worth taking if they aren't shared with anyone or easily accessible to look back at later, so these steps are critical to the whole reason I take photos at all.

Sometimes I take photos off my camera nearly daily, but usually it’s around twice a week. I load the photos from both my point-and-shoot (if I’ve used it) and my DSLR onto Picasa in a folder titled by month and year (April 2011) which are all kept in a year folder (2011), and go through and delete the bad ones. Lately I am much more judicious about the photos I keep – I try not to have many versions of the same photo, and overall am trying to think about if I really need that photo for memory’s sake. This doesn’t take me too long, maybe 10-20 minutes depending on how many photos I’m going through. I also do basic edits like cropping, fixing red eyes, and color/lighting correcting (which I rarely have to do). If photos need photoshop editing, I try to just get it done right away. As I mentioned, I rarely edit my photos anymore, unless they are dark restaurant photos. For example – I edited 128 Café’s photos, but not Black Sea. Black Sea just didn’t seem worth editing to me – the food wasn’t that pretty anyway :)

Second step – uploading to flickr. It may be obvious, but I am a flickr lover. There are certain things about it that annoy me, but overall I find it to be the best place for me to store all my photos. We (obviously) pay for a pro membership – they don’t just let you have 33K photos on there for free. For $30 a year, it’s definitely worth it. The main reasons I love flickr are that it stores the full size version of your photos (up to a certain point, it was just discovered, but totally fine for my purposes), and it can serve as a host for your photos on your blog so you don’t have to upload them again to blogger/wordpress/whatever blog host you use. Flickr now has tons of easy sharing options, and my favorite is that they provide you with the html code for each size option of your photo so you can just add the code in to the text of your blog post and POOF - it appears and looks exactly right.

I use flickr’s uploadr tool. It used to be quite annoying and buggy, but lately it’s been working great for me as long as I don’t try to upload more than 200 photos at once. During the upload process, I take the time to arrange into sets, also titled by month and year for general photos, and into separate sets for restaurants and more photo heavy events, such as Christmas. I title each photo (even if it’s a pretty general title) so that I can search later. I didn’t do this always before, and it’s come back to bite me in the butt as I’m searching for photos now. (Like I tried to do for this post - apparently there are zero photos of me with my camera. Zero. I KNOW they exist, but where are they? Not searchable by "photographer, camera, erin camera, erin, taking a pic, taking a photo" that's for sure!) Luckily, I’ve always been good about arranging into sets so it’s not a huge problem to find things. Flickr’s search feature is getting pretty good – I can search for “Dad and Annie” and it’ll pull up everything that has those words in the title which is very handy for me. Some people use tags religiously, but honestly I think that titles and descriptions serve pretty much the same purpose when locating photos later – basically, I don’t want to go back and tag 33K photos so that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Third step – deleting from the camera. Only after all photos have been uploaded to flickr do I delete from my camera. As I mentioned above, I always try to have photos in at LEAST 2 places. At first it is: 1 – the camera, and 2 – my laptop. So, once they are on flickr, the 2 places are flickr and my laptop. I try to do this as soon as possible because I really hate taking new photos when old photos are still on the camera. I like having a clean slate.

Fourth step – backing up to an external hard drive. Ben has set up some program for me so when I connect my laptop to my external hard drive, it searches my folders and finds anything new, and adds it to the hard drive. So that is the ideal 3 places – flickr, my laptop, and the external hard drive. I don’t have unlimited memory on my laptop, so anything older than a year old gets burned to CDs and deleted from the laptop, but still stays on the external hard drive – so the 3 places then are CDs, hard drive, and flickr. I’m not that great at doing this step too often, but I’d say I do a backup around once a month.

So there you have it – my photo management system. I’d love to hear the process that you use – what works, what doesn’t? Any questions, leave them in the comments!