What software are people using to manage their photos?

[dancingmatt]

Another very strong recommendation for Lightroom from me - very clever indeed with multiple views to help you find your way through all your pics, good use of 2 monitors if you have them, clever cataloging system. In fact I use it on my main PC, but it's also very usable on my NC10 netbook.

[menthel]

Downloaded the LR 3 beta. Blimey its comprehensive but also ideal. I can also get it at the student rate which makes things a little easier.

Now the tricky question! How do the LR users handle their workflow? At the moment I have it monitoring all of my photo folders on my server but this just seems silly. Should I create a folder for my raw (in both RAW and jpeg from a variety of cameras!), unsorted photos and plug those into lightroom, exporting the final jpegs to their place on the server?

I am at a bit of a loss for the best way to do it.

[Bobster]

the way i sort my photographs is by putting them in folders - i am not a LR user, i find it slow and clunky - by the time you've imported the shots into LR i've probably already culled the shots and am working on them..

so my photo drive looks like this..

• Events
  
  • Event Name - Day - Month - Year (1 Aug 09)
  • Event Name - Day - Month - Year (9 Sept 09)
  • Event Name - Day - Month - Year (12 Sept 09)
  • Event Name - Day - Month - Year (4 Nov 09)
  
  
• Family (all things to do with the kids etc in here)
  
  • Event Name - Day - Month - Year (1 Aug 09)
    etc
  
  
• Gigs
  
  • Venue Name(Mr Kyps)
    
    • Aritst Name - Day - Month - Year (29 Sept 09)
      etc
  
  
  
  • Venue Name(Winchester)
    
    • Aritst Name - Day - Month - Year (13 Sept 09)
      etc
• Other (fun stuff - photo a day etc)
  
  • Name - Day - Month - Year (1 Aug 09)
    etc
  
  
• Portaits
  
  • Name - Day - Month - Year (1 Aug 09)
    etc
  
  
• Weddings
  
  • Name - Day - Month - Year (1 Aug 09)
    etc

[menthel]

At the moment my photos are arranged in the main photo folder on my server, into sub folders with the name and date of the event. I have not yet managed to change the actual file names!

[Bobster]

grab this software its free and amazing! *uses Java so is mac and windows compatible*

it will pull your files off of your card and then rename them however you want

so as soon as a pop a card into either my laptop or my workstation it pops up and all i do is type in a job name and it does the rest

putting the files into a folder as above ie if its an event i type Canford - Oliver - it then takes that information and reads the exif from the first file to get the date of the photo and then makes a folder called:

Canford - Oliver 2 June 09

all files are then called

Canford - Oliver 2 (it then gives each photograph its taken time) (h)19 (m)50 (s)17 if i take more than 1 shot in a second it gives it the suffix -1/2/3/4 etc

this is very useful when working with more than 1 camera, sync all cameras before hand and then when the files are copied across they will all flow in chronological order

[menthel]

Thanks! Will have a look when I get home.

[tfboy]

The renaming in lightroom is quite nifty as it can/will use the metadata in the EXIF for info such as time/date taken. When in the Library module, make a selection of photos, hit F2 then if you want to rename them in a way different to the options provided, go to Custom at the bottom. This brings up a screen where you can chose your filenaming convention.

For example, I have my stuff sorted a bit like Bobster's in directories, with about half a dozen main categories (Portraits, Parties, Weddings, Tango, etc). Then in those directories, I have a subdirectory for each event containing the photos. Once in that event, I select all the photos, sort chronologically, hit F2 and do a bulk rename, in my case Date (yymmdd)_Event name_xxx where xxx is the photo number.

Other benefits of LR for catalogue managing is the bulk tagging, inserting info into EXIF of all your photos, etc.

Of course, there are loads of different ways you can do it, and you can just chose whichever filing system / organisation suits your needs best.

LR is also good at editing RAW photos effectively. You can create virtual copies and have different edits for a given photo, i.e. black and white, sepia, high contrast, multiple crops, yet it never changes the RAW file or duplicates it - all edits are metadata held in the catalogue. So if you need to output to different formats, it's pretty easy to manage.

[Funkstar]

My photos are organised as follows:

Photos \ <year> \ <year>-<month>-<day> - <short description of shoot>

been doing ti this way since 1999 or whenever it was I first started taking digital photos.

Once I've copied them accross to my drive I open Lightroom and sync the master folder.

[brammers]

Come to the party a bit late, but I do things a bit (but only a bit) differently so I might as well contribute.

I use Downloader Pro to download my shots. It looks pretty similar to the one Bobster reccomended, but a few features that I don't see on his.

DL Pro can recognise cameras by their built in serial number, which becomes very handy when you're running a big event shoot for example and working with say 3 5D MkIIs, a couple of a700s and an a900. When each camera gets plugged in, its files will be assigned a unique marker - this lets you dump them all into the same file straight away.

It also lets you run a 'custom button' on your files before importing. I like to make some exif manipulations, which I can do at this stage using a script in an external program. It also creates an xmp if you want one - I often do.

From then I dump them onto a fast HDD - a pair of F3s in RAID config while I work on them. Naming goes like:

\current projects\2009\12-04-09-macro studio\7233-abramley-a900-macrostudio.arw

File number first, then my name, the camera I shot it on and a job code - all created in DL Pro.

From there I import to Lightroom using Add rather than move, work on them til I'm happy with them, and then stick them over onto a larger drive which also gets backed up to Mozy online backup. Any working copies that I have to create for more complex files (stitches, stuff I've edited in PS) I try to let LR manage - keeps things tidy.

Not sure if that capability will do anything for you over the free downloader tool, but it works for me!