Organizing/naming photos?

What's a good way to organize photos? Lately I've been organizing them as "EVENT_Year_###" where ### is 0-999. However, I want more detail in the naming scheme, or something similar. For instance I want to say basically the W's: who, what, when, where. I was thinking, mp3s have ID3 tags that are read with other info (such as year, artist, track, etc.), do photos have any similar capability? Moreover, since I don't think photos have that capability, does anyone have tips on naming photos?

My main thought is that I want to have these photos organized and named in such a way that if I look back on them in twenty years I'll know who is in each picture, when the picture was, where the picture was, etc.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

-fool

Well, you could save them in a format that supports layers like PSD (Photoshop) or PSP (Paint Shop Pro), then just have a layer behind the original picture with information about the picture, plenty of room on even a 1mp picture (using small font) to describe whats on the picture.
But this way you might need to have duplicate backups of your pictures, one in an easily "browsable" format like jpg or bmp and one with the layer version, then if you are unsure whos on the pic (or where its taken) you could pull out the layer version and look, just keep the filenames identical except for the format ofcourse.

There are prolly easier ways but this is one way it could be done.

well in Windows, i simply right-click on the photo, go to properties, then the "summary" tab. However, i'm not sure if the info i put there is portable across devices or operatiing systems.

also, in naming the file itself, i use a combination of description, date and number sequence. i also organize them into descriptive folders, for example:

family/mom/mom-6-3-2004-1.jpg
family/debbie/debbie-6-3-2004-2.jpg
friends/college/halloweenparty-10-31-2001-15.jpg
travel/grandcanyon-8-3-2003-13.jpg

etc...

I use Adobe Photoshop Album. It's $50 and you have all of your photos organized in one program.

Basically, all of your digital photos are shown with thumbnails. The organization happens when you assign tags to each photo. You create categories to label photos, such as Beach, Disneyland, Mary, Jim, etc. Then you can perform searches to locate all the photos with Mary at Disneyland, or Jim at the beach, etc.

It's really neat to be able to see all your photos sorted by date, or sort them by event or person.

Also, you can easily print pictures and e-mail pics right from this program.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/main.html

Adobe's Photo Album softwre is a nice way to go. I have it, but I didn't end up taking the time to set it up.(going to sometime) I use ThumbsPlus, and I have been since 1999.. It is also a really nice program. It allows you to database all of your photos, assign keywords, etc...

Here is a link for ThumbsPlus:
http://www.thumbs.com

You will just need to try out some of these type programs and see what fits you best.

I created folders for all of the years. Ex. 2002, 2003, 2004, and then put folders underneath the years with description, then put the photographs in that folder.
ex. /2003/Graduation/graduation03_4 <--- 03 is of course the year and 4 is the picture number.

S@nDmAn

i have been organizing mine by year and then with subfolders for the events... and for the file names i usually use more like a long description.. but that gets old and takes forever to rename.. i'll have to check out some of these programs mentioned as well.. sounds convenient

In My Pictures

2003.01.January\
2003.02.February\
2003.03.March\

...

2004.06.June\

i have a quick question for the people using adobe's software.. i just downloaded the starter version to give it a try to see if i like it.. it seems to work pretty good but do u gotta go back and re-organize all your photos if you would format your hd and reinstall the program? i have all my pics on a seperate partition so i dont have to worry about losing them.. but i dont ever wanna re-organize them all again

Here are the backup/restore options for Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. I think it will do exactly what you need.







And finally:



Starter Edition is just a tease... you're gonna have to get Album 2.0 to get all these great features... It's worth it though, I've been using it for years!

thanks for the info.. yeah i kinda like this program.. i thikn i'll have to get the full version

MScrip said:

Here are the backup/restore options for Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. I think it will do exactly what you need.

Click to expand...

Thanks for going to the trouble of posting all those screenshots. I haven't organized all of my photos in Adobe yet, but I was wondering about the backing up of the database/catalog. Now I know.

S@nDmAn