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The biggest struggle in photo management is that most software created for managing your photos works against you instead of with you with organization. (The same is true for music management.) Whether you work on a MAC or a PC, the issues are the same. What I am outlining in this topic is how I have come to manage the photos my wife and I take, as well as photos (digital or physical) which we receive from others.

I will first outline the system I use to manage photos and then lastly cover the specific software I use currently to work with that process.  The keys to managing photos are convention, naming, centralization, tags and backup. Convention drives how you handle the other three keys, and you will see it is the the theme as I discuss these keys.

Convention

The best thing you can do to start managing photos is to rename the actual files as they come off your camera. All cameras name files such as "IMG_XXXX" or "DXXXX", where x is some random number. These names provide no help to the basic search services provided on Windows or OSX. At a minimum you should renamed these as soon as you pull them off your camera!

You can name the files whatever you want, but I have found this convention works best: <event><id>.<extension>. The key to file naming is the convention, pick a convention and stick to it. The only other rule is to avoid special characters and spaces. Keeping spaces and special characters out of the filenames makes it easier to reference the files. The only characters outside of text and numbers would either be underscores ("_") or dashes ("-"), which serve as a visual separator between the event name and the ID. Event names can be as simple as "DansBaptism" to "OurFirstAnnualCompanyParty". You could separate words using underscores or dashes to make it more readable, but ultimately you don't really need that as you will be working with these files in some type of photo management software.  Why bother renaming them? When you need to manage the files and move files around or check those files on the file system (say to make a CD or publish them) you can quickly and easily see by the file names in a list that you have what  you expect. Seeing something like "DansBaptism-01, DansBaptism-02, etc...." is much more meaningful then "IMG-21234, IMG-21235, etc...". Using camel case (as in the examples just presented) in the event name instead of dashes or underscores is quicker and easier when renaming files.


The ID itself can be any number, it simply serves to make sure the filename is unique. You can either sequentially number the files as you rename them, or you can keep the numerical number from the original file name. I have done both and converted to keeping the number created on the camera since my photo software support its. Simply renaming the files from your camera using this method even if you do nothing else with make managing your photos worlds easier!

Centralization & Organization

The next key to managing your photos is centralization. If you are the only one who handles the photos for editing and publishing, it is less of an issue, but like most you probably share the photos or need to share them with someone else for editing, printing, publishing, etc... There are several ways you could handle this, but you need to store your photos in one location. The best way to arrange the photos is in a single folder or share (typically named 'Photos') with a sub-folder for each major event, and then other folders for smaller categories or groups. I have created several folders of general subjects, one folder for myself and the wife, college, maps, and generic family and friends folders. For major events i have taken to grouping each event in its own folder. This format is simply <year>_<eventname>, with no spaces or special characters and typically only a single underscore to separate the year (4 digit year) from the event name.


This is done to make it easier for any photo software I have to catalog or add to its catalog new photos, but it also suites the way I look for and look at photographs. I am typically looking at the photos from a particular event and just that event. When I am looking for something, I am also looking for it within a particular time frame, so having the photos ordered in folders prefaced with a year, it makes it really easy to zero in on the photos I need. I do not nest events within folders underneath a folder for a year, as it is too much organization and doesn't let me quickly scroll to where I need, either in the file system or in whatever photo management software I am using.

The two exceptions to this are for the general folders I mentioned above and for large trips. In the case of general folders (Pets for example), I don't typically have an 'event' per se which I am taking photos of my pets, so putting them into a folder named "pets" is sufficient since I am typically look for all photos in that category. "Home" is another good category, where I am taking photos documenting different aspects of my home (either for inventory or for changes and work being done). Here a single folder to capture all of that is enough, with occasional sub-folders for specific work.

In the case of long trips, I will keep the <year>_<eventname>, such as '2009_RoadTrip', but I will have sub-folders underneath. Typically I have sub-folders for each day of the trip. This is essentially so that I can work with these groups of folders in easier chunks, as on long or big trips, I tend to take more photographs then normal events.


Tagging

Most photo software and even operating systems can at least read and understand the meta-data in JPEG files. Photos you take with your camera or phone contain way more information then just a picture. The standard JPEG file, and even the RAW format for DSLR cameras, has a standard which is followed by all camera manufacturers and most photo software. This information includes data about the camera which took the picture (type of camera, exposure, ISO, shutter speed, and other 'EXIF' data), GPS information (lat and long of where the picture was taken), and other meta-data such as title, description, caption, keywords, copyright, etc...

The camera information and generally the GPS information is added by the camera taking the picture. There are some applications which allow you to write the GPS data after the fact. The key fields you want are Title (or Caption), Description, and Keywords. Optionally you can access the Copyright field, but only a few applications provide this to you. The two main fields which you should always fill out are the title and the keywords associated with a photograph. Online services also know how to read this information and display it automatically as needed.

In both cases, the idea behind tagging is to keep it simple! Titles don't all have to to be witty or clever, a simple short title about the photo is enough, "Me and Friends having a drink", "Family Picnic", etc... The main reason for filling out the title is that when you post these photos on various online services, you know what the photo is about, but the people viewing those photos may not know what it is about.

Keywords are not for everyone else, but for you to be able to find, sort and group photos. The idea here is to provide enough tags which appropriately cover the photo so you can find photos when you need photos on a specific topic. You don't need to go nuts, and you don't need to recreate the wheel, Items such as camera information or date (Year, Month, day) don't need keywords as that information is already captured and can be searched from the other meta data. Keywords I typically use are: Travel, Event, Family, Friends, Food, Birthday, Holiday, Christmas, Winter, Spring, Work, Pets, Animals, Zoo, etc... You could record peoples names as keywords, I personally have not found that useful. I do tag some photos with names, but not all photos. The rule of thumb I use for recording names is pretty much either how frequently I need pictures of that person(s), such as myself and my wife, or if it is someone who I might need to or want to remember who that was down the line.

Outside of that most of the time, the keywords I listed above along with a time period are enough to get to the photos or groupings of photos I need.

Backup

Though this section is last, it is ultimately the most important! With your photos being digital it is even easier to be able to backup those photos then it was with physical photographs you wanted to make sure are not lost. While computer systems are much less prone to failure then in the past, they can still fail. If you only store your photos on your computer or on a single external disk drive you can end up losing a lifetime of photos.

Two main options, and depending on your situation you can adopt either. If you work out of one main location (e.g. your home) as your central place for storing and editing photos, I would recommend getting a Windows Home Server (WHS), or some other type of NAS, to store your photos. WHS allows you to not only store your photos in a central location so that anyone at home can access them, you can also attach a drive to your WHS and backup all of your photos at once, rather then having to scour all your computers to get those photos. WHS also has the benefit of centralizing your data, it also backs up all the computers (including MACs) on your network, so you can restore from just about any disaster.

If you can't use something like that, then I would recommend an online service which specializes in backing up your data to backup your photos on all of your machines to this service. The fee is typically a nominal annual fee which is more then worth it to backup all of these photos which you are collecting. If you have an issue with the price, ask yourself "how would I feel if I lost all of these photos and could not access them in 5, 10, 15, 20 years?" Think about how many times you have said, "oh, I wish I had that photo from when I was little or from when my son was born!" about a photograph from the pre-digital age.

The best option is the one which you don't need to think about, where your photos are automatically backed-up automatically. Regardless, you should regularly check and make sure you are able to get to those files and restore them. A bi-annual check of the files should happen. The complete system loss or failure is not as common (but it still happens), but you also need to guard against the partial loss of data. A scenario here is where you have some sort of disk corruption, specifically corruption which isn't caught until your computer comes up to tell you the system is corrupt and it need to run a check to fix things. In this scenario you may find that in fixing the corruption on a disk there is some loss of data, though it may not be obvious to you. Having your photos backed up in a place where you can run a compare to find the photos which may have been corrupted or lost is invaluable.

Software

Finally, here is the software and equipment I use in my day to day management of photos. The one guideline for choosing your own software suite (and you will need more than one program, there is not one piece of software which does everything you need) should be that ALL of the meta-data should be written directly to the file it is associated with. If the software does not do that, I would not recommend using the application. The issue is that if you move that file or access that file from another computer, that meta-data won't follow the photo if it is not written to the photo itself. This can result in a loss of all the hard work and organization you put into your photo collection if you need to re-install your photo management software.

For photo organization I had been using Adobe Photoshop Elements on Windows, however on a MAC the same version contains no photo management (which I really don't get, and essentially makes it useless on a MAC, Adobe really seems to have begun to drop the ball on its consumer products).  The software I currently use is Adobe Lightroom, Picasa, and Gimp (alternatively Paint.Net). I had been using Photoshop Elements but for the reason stated above I no longer use it.

For photo management and basic editing, tagging, organizing and exporting, Adobe Lightroom has become my primary tool. While more expensive then most photo management software, if you do any significant amount of photo handling it is a must have tool. It allows me to easily import photos and automatically tag and rename them. If you are on Windows and budget minded, Adobe Photoshop elements will work as well. Unfortunately on the MAC side of things, I have not found any other program which meets my photo management and tagging needs. I would recommend staying away from iPhoto, as it is pretty low end and really restricts being able to really easily manage photos.

I also utilize Picasa for organization, but mainly for being able to quick group photos for export or upload somewhere, or printing photographs. I try and stick with using just Lightroom for importing, tagging and organizing the photos. Lightroom, Picasa* and Photo Elements write the meta-data directly to the photos which is what you want.

There are add-ins for Lightroom and Picasa which provide support for automatically uploading photos to Facebook and Picasa. All of them support exporting to the file system or to a DVD or CD. For printing, Picasa stands out by far as the easiest to print out photos in whatever format you need. It also has some nice features for creating photo collages either for printing or for making desktop backgrounds.

For photo editing I will use either Lightroom or Gimp (Paint.Net is a good alternative to Gimp on the Windows platform), I will occasionally use Picasa for some edits, but for me the controls on enhancing photos are a little too basic.

- Stephen

*Caveat, Picasa seems to write its own Caption tag instead of using the JPEG standard title for tis captions. I have not check recently if this is still the case, but be aware you may not be able to read the title in other programs if you use Picasa to write the titles. It does seem to handle keyword data OK.