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Keeping and cataloguing - Page 2

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Posted: Sun May 13th, 2012 16:39

11^th Post

Doug

Joined:	Sun Apr 8th, 2012
Location:	Adelaide, Australia
Posts:	187
Status:	Offline

Well in the old days you might photograph a family event and produce the most beautiful portrait of a family member

If you had a catalog system based on date, it would be easy to come at your system looking for that specific date and find the complete set of images, with the great portrait being among them, but can you truly remember all those dates? - perhaps if you remember the event as a wedding or specific birthday, but you are either a savant or a liar if you can just remember where every image is

So how would you prevent yourself at time of capture from 'losing' this beautiful portrait when you are looking for portraits of family members 10 years later?

Moving it into a 'portraits' folder' would then mean it was 'missing' from the original event folder
Copying it into that folder just wastes space on your drive and causes confusion later on when you end up using a file that has not been edited instead of another that you might have worked on
Renaming the file or folder to include the word portrait might work, but that is yet another recipe for confusion later on (at best it just slow you down while you scan with your eyes what you could have already discovered through using your computer's much fast 'brain'*

A decent catalog system allows you easily to catalog images so they appear to exist in multiple places within your catalog
Keywords 'Portrait, Maggie, John's Wedding' allow easy searching and Smart Albums automagically fill with photos as you import and keyword

Smart albums and searching examples might include;
Show all photos with keyword Maggie, aperture of f2.8 or above
Show all Macro shots where lens info shows the use of a particular lens
Show all photos related to John
Show all photos related to weddings
Show all photos that are not 2:3 or 3:4 (will pull up all your 1:1, 4:4 (8x10) images that might have been scanned)
Show all images with the keyword 'portrait', a rating of 4 star or better and shot with a focal length of 50mm

Should you organise your images into a folder structure that manages files in a familiar way? Absolutely Yes, but don't eschew a catalog system you have yet to understand and never will until you have spent some time adding keywords and ratings and then using them in earnest

BTW - what happens when you require someone else to sort through your images (i.e.. when you are to busy or just plain gone)
Perhaps your family or successor should just labour through your collection with no signposts or directions?

*I teach people how to use computers 1on1 and I am amazed at how often they will spend several minutes visually scanning a webpage/document/folder for a particular word when they could have already found and done what they needed to do through search

BTW Learning to search is like learning to drive. You will have a few false starts, but once you have learnt how, it will happen without effort or conscious thought

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Posted: Sun May 13th, 2012 17:32

12^th Post

Joined:	Sun Apr 1st, 2012
Location:	Carthew, Cornwall, United Kingdom
Posts:	6987
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I always use in my keywords in my flamenco shot the name of the dancer who appears so I can always find every picture of that dancer at any time.

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