DIGITAL CORNER
By Bob Dean
Digital Image Organization
Life is good. No more film costs, processing fees, postage or trips to the lab, because digital photography enables us to shoot a lot of images essentially for free. With this great improvement in “image acquisition” comes added work after we come in from the field. In June the digital corner highlighted a new software tool for workflow. This month we take a look at some ideas on improving organization of all of those images we made for free. Organization and workflow are pretty closely tied together. If you know how your images will be organized, you can adapt the workflow process to make your computer time more efficient. Let’s consider some basic workflow and organization ideas.
The very first thing you need to do is an initial edit of your images to weed out the obvious bad ones. This first edit could be done with the LCD on the camera or a software package looking at the CF card before download. It should be really quick and weed out grossly out of focus, poor composition and bad exposure. This will then allow you to concentrate on the images that have a chance of making it to your permanent files.
After this initial edit, you are ready to download your “shoot”. But wait a minute! Have you decided how you want to file your images? The concept of file organization is boring but with a little planning you’ll be able to locate images in the future. One good way to set up (or convert your existing file structure) is to look back to how you stored images when they were on 35mm film. If what you did back then was good enough for your needs, you could create a file structure quite similar to that for your digital images. I used 3 ring binders and archival sleeves for my images and labeled the binders according to the content. Some examples are large mammals, small mammals, insects, wildflowers, etc. This worked pretty well as I had a list on my computer that had highlights of what was in each book. When I went digital photography in a big way, I kept that same basic concept but decided to use Windows™ ability to build multi level file structures to provide what amounts to binders with tabs and then sections with in each tab. Windows™ allows file names up to 256 characters so you can get a lot of descriptive information in the file name.
Here is a simplified version of my file structure:
| Highest Level | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 |
| Bob's Photos | ||||
| Air Shows and Aircraft | ||||
| Blue Angels | ||||
| Static displays | ||||
| Thunderburds | ||||
| Large Mammals | ||||
| Bighorn Sheep | ||||
| Elk | ||||
| Bulls | ||||
| Behavior | ||||
| Portraits | ||||
| Deer | ||||
| Mountain Goats | ||||
| Babies | ||||
| Mature | ||||
| Monterey Bay Aquarium | ||||
| Jellyfish | ||||
| Misc fish and sea life |
You can see that with
just 5 levels you can really get some detail. Windows™ allows nesting of
file well beyond 5 levels. A really good website on file structure is:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/docs/fms/pc/organize.html
Once you have you files organized, you can add additional folders at any level. Say you have never photographed wild horses before, but on a trip to western Colorado you got some great shoots. Simply add a new folder under the large mammal folder for wild horses. Note that Windows™ will arrange your files in alphabetical order so that into account when you set up your files.
I’ve found it best to create new file folders before downloading from a CF card. I can then specify the location to store the files when I do my download. Since I use Lightroom™, I can specify the import location, then bring my images in from the memory card and do a second edit on a larger screen, add location information, key words and metadata, and group images by quality.
Before
your next big shoot, take some time to organize your files. The longer you wait,
the more you’ll need to move around. In a future “Digital Corner”
we’ll discuss backing up images and how that fits into file management.