How do you organise all the photos on your hard-drive?

Bygone_Tones

I've got hundreds of photos from over the years of various gear, speakers mainly, and I want to be able to sort them all so I can find them quickly for reference. Like having a database with various searchable keywords for each photo.

Any ideas or software recommendations? Also I dont want it to be uber tedious and take days to sort through them all.

I'm using windows 10, if it matters.

Axe_meister

Lightroom is the obvious choice.
Picasa is a nice free option

Hootsmon

Wife folder

Girlfriend folder(s)

fretmeister

By actress and type of scene.

stickyfiddle

Lightroom for me. Everything goes in a folder which is dated and has a basic description of contents, then each photo is tagged for content (location, subject, people, etc)

Axe_meister

I use Picasa first to do the face recognition and tag the photos then import into Lightroom.

Bygone_Tones

face recognition is not going to help me. but celestion speaker recognition would.

If I was to pay 1months subscription (about £9) for lightroom, would I be able to sort my photos and then cancel the subscription? or would they only be sorted in such a way they can only be searched for within lightroom?

the subscription cost is a bit stomach turning.

any other free alternatives? Picasa is being phased out apparently. 

axisus

I have one big folder. I throw the pictures in. They're all in the big folder.

ThePrettyDamned

Bygone_Tones said:

face recognition is not going to help me. but celestion speaker recognition would.

If I was to pay 1months subscription (about £9) for lightroom, would I be able to sort my photos and then cancel the subscription? or would they only be sorted in such a way they can only be searched for within lightroom?

the subscription cost is a bit stomach turning.

any other free alternatives? Picasa is being phased out apparently. 

Sadly not. They'll charge 50 percent of the rest of the contract. 

You can get a week long free trial - actually maybe 2 weeks. But if a week,get everything into 1 big folder first. 

From there,install the free trial. When done, import that folder into a Lightroom catalogue.

Then, highlight them and batch rename them if it's suitable. This will automatically number them and you can input custom text before the number (eg celestion_001). 

If this doesn't work for you, do some leg work first - use Picasa to put some tags on images such as the date the speaker is. You could then separate them in Lightroom into folders according to year? 

Search Lightroom work flow on YouTube. Ignore raw processing and youll get a feel for how it works. Photos in colour has a great workflow tutorial

capo4th

Print them all and file them in date order 

kossofffan

Just checked mine, 41,021 photo's in 240 folders. Feck!!!

Jimbro66

+1 for Lightroom. Adobe Photoshop Elements is cheaper and also has a cataloging facility but not as comprehensive as Lightroom's.

Fretwired

I use Lightroom ...

Vaiai

If you do get them all organised on your HD you can then think about uploading to Flickr - free account gives you 1TB of storage! Great way to organise and backup so you don't lose them - means you can also select whether top make folders private, unlisted (meaning you can give ppl the link to a folder or file) or public meaning anyone can see/find it in a search.

You can have keywords (tags) and organise in collections too - loads of good stuff and free!

Picasa is the best free option - dead easy to use and organise/tag etc

TimmyO

What I'd do (indeed have done) is pock one of the cloud photo services (Google Images/iCloud Photos/Onedrive etc) and upload the lot in to there.

Then you can take your merry time, from any of your devices, to gradually go through and tag/file/make shared albums.

Also it should go without saying, if all your lovely pics are on your hard drive, get some sort of backup solution happening now. 

ICBM

TimmyO said:

Also it should go without saying, if all your lovely pics are on your hard drive, get some sort of backup solution happening now. 

And some sort of multiple, widely separated backup solution, too. Hard drives are cheap... photos are irreplaceable.

Someone I know had their house burgled - they lost the computer and the only backup hard drive which was next to it.

You need at least one more backup in a physically separate building some distance away to be really safe.

hywelg

Learn about metadata keywords titles and subject. I store  by date and tag by category. 

BigMonka

Bygone_Tones said:

face recognition is not going to help me. but celestion speaker recognition would.

If I was to pay 1months subscription (about £9) for lightroom, would I be able to sort my photos and then cancel the subscription? or would they only be sorted in such a way they can only be searched for within lightroom?

the subscription cost is a bit stomach turning.

any other free alternatives? Picasa is being phased out apparently. 

You can buy Lightroom as a single install rather than the monthly subscription - it's called "Lightroom 6" rather than "Lightroom Creative Cloud". I've just upgraded my version 3 to version 6, it cost about £60. It's an amazing piece of software as it's basically a giant database where you can keywords then search by all sorts of metadata. Picasa does something similar on a free basis but I don't think it's as nice to use.

In terms of folder structure on the hard drive I have a folder for each year, then a folder for each month, then a folder for each event/activity
>2016
  >01 January
      >Birthday party
      >Day out with the kids
  >02 February
     >Naked dance-off competition
     >Pigeon stalking day
>2015
  >01 January
     >Burying that guy I murdered/new patio
etc etc

crunchman

My big problem is that I have lots of duplicates.  Sometimes they have been copied from a phone / camera into a dated directory but not deleted off the phone / camera so that I have a 2nd copy as a backup.  At a later date I've copied the data off the phone / camera again into a new directory with a different date and now have two copies.

If I'm not too lazy I might write a Powershell script to look for the duplicates and get rid of them - after backing it up first.

I really ought to do the off site backup thing.  My backup drive is hidden in a box file, so hopefully wouldn't go missing if anything happened but I really ought to get another hard drive and store it elsewhere.

BigMonka

crunchman said:

I really ought to do the off site backup thing.  My backup drive is hidden in a box file, so hopefully wouldn't go missing if anything happened but I really ought to get another hard drive and store it elsewhere.

All my photos are on my PC. I then regularly (but not automatically scheduled) back that up on to my NAS which is also at home. I then regularly take a back up on to a portable hard drive which I keep in my desk at work. The one at work is just the jpeg files rather than the RAWs so that I can use the smaller drive that I already had. Every few months I take the drive home from work, do the back up, and then bring it back. There are so many pics over the last 10 years that I wouldn't want to permanently lose.

ICBM

BigMonka said:

crunchman said:

I really ought to do the off site backup thing.  My backup drive is hidden in a box file, so hopefully wouldn't go missing if anything happened but I really ought to get another hard drive and store it elsewhere.

All my photos are on my PC. I then regularly (but not automatically scheduled) back that up on to my NAS which is also at home. I then regularly take a back up on to a portable hard drive which I keep in my desk at work. The one at work is just the jpeg files rather than the RAWs so that I can use the smaller drive that I already had. Every few months I take the drive home from work, do the back up, and then bring it back. There are so many pics over the last 10 years that I wouldn't want to permanently lose.

Same sort of thing here - my photos are mostly ones of family holidays and the kids when they were small, so completely irreplaceable. I have two full system backups - one online next to the computer and another, that are exchanged every week when I go to work 50 miles away. Then two more hard drives that are hidden in different parts of the house and which I back up to about every month when I remember or I've just added a lot of photos, and finally one in a lockup garage in the next street which I do a couple of times a year, usually after just adding the new holiday photos.

At that point I feel I'm safe enough. It would take something on a truly catastrophic scale to destroy them all at once, and at that point I won't be around to care.