DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGE MANAGEMENT

Sunday, December 18, 2005

It has been nearly six months since I have gone digital. And when I moved from slides, one thing that I was relieved from was the pain of managing and guarding the transparencies carefully. Besides organizing them, they had to be carefully cared against dust and scratches. Now I just had to shoot and leave all the images on my computer. I knew that eventually I will have to worry about managing digital images too, but I procrastinated till I piled up a lot of them. Now the time has come when I am finding it a little difficult to rely on just using windows explorer for all my image management. I have decided to organize my images for ease of access, and my choice of software for has been Picasa, at least as of now. As of now because currently it seems to take care of most of my needs, and it comes free! And things may well change in the course of time if I discover that I need some more features, or if I just find some better software.

FEATURES TO LOOK FOR

To begin with, here are the features that I was looking for in my image manager software. It is a very small set provided by most of the software available as of now and I guess they would suffice for me for a long time to come.

1. It must recognize raw files along with other most common image formats. It makes no sense if I need another set of software for organizing raw images.
2. Labeling or categorizing images. For example: landscapes, birds, New York City, etc,..
3. Add title and descriptions to the images.
4. Add exif data to the images. It makes life easy if I can add some image information to the image instead of storing them somewhere else.
5. A search feature, based on labels, file names and descriptions
6. Facility to rate the images.
7. An interface for creating backup CDs

The above are the features that I would find useful. There could be other additional features that would be nice to have.

1. Creating calendars, screensavers or wallpapers
2. Slideshows, thumbnails, image album, contact sheet generation and other fancy means of displaying images.

Note the absence of a feature for editing or fixing the images. I would usually not want to use image management software for this except for may be some rare occasions when I would need some quick fix and am not worried about the quality.

ORGANIZING FOLDERS

So far, though I did not have an image management software, I still had to ensure an easy way of accessing images. I maintained a folder structure which helped me access my images without much difficulty. I am going to continue using the same folder structure, since I have found it very useful so far. Picasa will now help me in managing keywords and make quick searches, and hence making accessing the images much easier. Here is my folder structure.



I have made a separate partition on my hard drive for storing digital images. Here is the description of each of the folders shown in the image:

digital images: This is the root folder for storing all the images
place1, place2, ..: For each place I visit, I make a separate folder where images from that place go to.
2005_10_01, 2005_11_11,..: All the RAW image go to the folder named after the date. Under the folder for places, I make another folder named after a date. So if I visit the same place on two different dates, I will have two different folders for each date. That way, it is easy to get to the date when the image was taken and I can easily zero in on the image I was looking for. Note that the date folder only stores RAW images(occasionally jpgs) straight from the camera.
processed: This is where all the processed images for that date go to.
web: When I decide to post a processed image on the web, I simply make another folder called web. Here, I store optimized small sized images that I post on the web.

The structure makes it easy for me to find images based on a place or date, and also based on the type such as raw images, processed images or images for posting and emailing.

USING A SOFTWARE

So far these folders had worked great for me. But there are some disadvantages. If I am looking for images of the same kind, it is not easy to find them. For example, if I am looking for all the images of lakes I have photographed in different locations, I have to keep browsing through each location, which is a pain. This is where labeling and searching(and hence an image management software) comes in. Once again, if I am looking for only the best images, I can search based on ratings, which saves me the pain of going through all the mediocre images.

Another area where software can help is in backing up images and burning CDs. Ideally, I would prefer to let the software automatically find a diff between previous archive and current archive based on a set of rules and burn the backups on the click of a button, but unlikely I can find something with such a feature yet. So I could just use the software for selecting images to burn. My ideal frequency for backing up images is once a month, but I usually miss that.

WHAT TO KEEP AND WHAT NOT TO KEEP

It is easy to get tempted to keep all the images. But you will soon be overwhelmed by the number of images you have, and of course run out of space too. Especially so if you shoot raw. My policy is to discard anything but good pictures without any hesitation. Even with that, it is easy to run out of space. I used to save processed images as TIFF files earlier. Now I have settled for jpegs. This makes things much easier for me. It is faster to process, takes less of computer's RAM and requires less disk space. I was in a dilemma about backing up - whether to burn only raw images or the processed ones too. The answer was easier - I can't discard the effort spent on processing an image, so it has to be backed up too.