markjay

Hope everyone is getting through this crazy time in the US ! I am living in Asia and watch with amazement at the daily news ...

I have been building my photo collections from trips in the last few years and now realize I have done little to no organization of my photos and frankly dont know where to begin. I am wondering of there is some software that will help me, or if I just have to brute-force it and go through every picture one by one to get myself organized ...

I use a MacBook, an iPhone, and a Canon M5 so all my photos are basically in jpg format. I use the M5 for my travels and locally I just use my phone.

I have today 7,300 photo's on my iPhone. I have a folder on my MacBook where I have downloaded all the M5 photos - already organized by trip - another 9,000 photos. I also have on my MacBook an endless stream of photos sitting in the Photo's App - basically chronological over a long period. 19,000 photos and 500 videos. Many of these are small in terms of storage as they were taken on a phone during the last 15 years when phone images were small. Total over 35,000 pictures !

Many of the photos on my phone are already also on my MacBook Photos App. So in consolidating, of course I prefer to not have duplicates.

I have several questions on how to deal with this .....

1. Where should I keep all of these photo's ? Should I start a new system and migrate all the photos to a new filing structure ? or should I move them all to Apple Photo's App ? I have just purchased Lightroom and just beginning to learn it. I guess that is another possibility. Or should I move them all to a hard drive as the numbers are beginning to strain my laptop.

2. The iPhone photos all have location tags - but the M5 photo's do not, and many of the legacy Photos App images do not. I suppose chronological dates would work for all images. Is there some way of consolidating them into files using the dates as a basis. Is there some software that would allow me to facilitate this.

3. Ideally, it would be better to store them by topic/location than by date. I might have as many as 50 topics ? Do I have to go through an image by image decision to sort these. Again - is there some software to help me ?

4. Apple PHOTOS App seems quite nice in terms of organizing - but I suspect there are much better systems out there.

I know everyone here is highly organized so very much appreciate your help and guidance !

hcmcdole

I tried topics when I started out back in 2000, but it became too large to handle (same subject over several years was hard to give unique names and I might have thousands of files in one folder!)

I then moved to daily folders - much easier to maintain for me and searching could be done on a daily file, a month, a year, or all years. I have not jumped on the LR organizational bandwagon as I prefer to download my files manually.

Whichever way you go, choose one that works best for you.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I used film for years and put the prints in either an album (the good ones) or a shoebox (the others). Albums tended to be kind of a pile of random photos so they were not the answer.

Got into digital with a P&S camera, then a DSLR. Collected a big pile of images, probably around 75K of them. It was a mess. Using the camera-generated file names was no help whatever.

Started using Lightroom to organize my digital photos. The files were still in a big folder all jammed together, but Lightroom allowed me to add keywords to the individual images and search on those keywords. Cut the "keepers" down to about (only!) 25K, but I can still find photos through the Lightroom search in a couple seconds.

About 2 years ago I got an iPhone. I started taking photos with it because I had it with me. Apple saves the photos unless I delete them so I can see them all. But the phone just displays them in chronological order, so I have to remember when I took a photo, which is not something I'm good at.

I started putting the photos into albums on the phone, but soon I had so many albums I couldn't keep track of where things were.

Finally I ijust transferred the iPhone photos to the computer and put them into Lightroom, where I could keyword them and search. Similarly, I scanned some of the old prints from the ancient albums and added them to Lightroom with keywords. That's how I have dealt with bloated photopiles.

The nice thing about keywords is that you can add a lot of them to your image. I try to put the names of everyone in a photo into the keyword list. The location of the photo. The event. The date. Now I can search for photos by date, by place, by name, or any combination of those.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Welcome to the world of trying to organize! You have Lightroom, and that will likely be the most effective tool to handle this. If I may I will respond to your points:

1. Where to keep the images - certainly in one place - and given the fact that you will no doubt be continuously adding to your library an external hard drive might make the most sense.
Understand that when you import images into LR, the program does not actually “suck in” those image files but rather sets up “pointers” to locate them. Any edits, etc., that you make in the program are maintained in the so-called “Catalog” - I use a Mac and while the catalog is located on the main hard drive my images (some 45K+) are on an external drive.
Side note - remember to make regular backups!

2. GPS locations - yes, typically a smart phone will auto-apply these to images, and while you cannot magically create them for old photos there are ways to apply GPS tags to photos taken with a “regular” camera. For instance, there are apps for the phone (there is one I use called "GPS Tracks") that can create a GPX file - this is the standard Garmin format for GPS tracking - which can be imported into the Map module of LR. As long as the camera’s clock is set to the proper time, LR can assign the appropriate GPS location to the images taken with the “regular” camera.

3. A real strength of LR is what you can do with it in terms of organizing. In fact, you need to understand the concept of what are called “collections” in LR - these are effectively alternate ways of organizing everything. Allow me to give an example:

On the hard drive of my Mac (well, that external drive I mentioned), I organize very simply by date. So I have a folder for “Photos 2020”, and inside that folder called “Misc Photos 2020”, and inside that 12 more folders, one for each month. When I load a bunch of photos from my cameras’ chips, I simply put them in the appropriate month’s sub-folder. That said, when I take a lot of images - say, at an event (I shoot a lot of roller derby games) or a week-long vacation, then I create a new folder inside the 2020 folder called “LA Vacation” or whatever. Also, I rename the images as I import them, but that is not necessary - it just makes it simpler to find photos of Moonrise shots” when I am just scrolling through the folders in the OSX Finder.

So all of that is just how I store stuff on the drive. But the real power of LR when it comes to organization are those Collections. These can be anything you like, and the same image can be in any number of collections. Thus, a moonrise shot I took last month can be in the same collection as moonrise shots I’ve taken over the years, simply by dragging and dropping them into a collection called “Moonrise”, for instance. And you can define “smart collections” that follow rules you set up - so using my example, since I already rename my files from DSC_6477 to 2019-03-21-Moonrise-103 (as an example) I can have a smart collection that simply includes all files where the filename contains the word “moonrise” - said collection will automatically show me all the shots I have regardless of when they were taken.

In addition - and this can be quite helpful for family shots (or for paparazzi, I guess) - LR can do facial recognition. You “teach” it by identifying the faces it picks out of images as being “Tom” or “Harry” or “Jane” or whatever, and after a while it starts asking you “is this Harry?”. When you do this, LR adds metadata to the image in question indicating the face found. But the beauty of that is if you want to create a smart collection of all the images you have from over the years and from any source that show Tom’s face - it’s as easy as defining that smart collection. And of course, if there is a family photo with Tom and Harry in it, that same photo will automatically be part of the smart collections you set up for Tom and for Harry.

4. Since you have LR now, I suggest that it is far more powerful than Photos and would be the better choice to use going forward. And I believe if you export the images from Photos as “Unmodified originals” then any GPS data stored therein from smartphone shots will be included, so LR will pick up on those as well.

So I hope that helps. A final word: MAKE BACKUPS!!! - both of your main hard drive in the laptop and of the external drive (remember, LR does not actually relocate the images you import). And preferably on multiple backup drives that you rotate over time.

markjay

Many thanks to f8lee and the others that have offered some insights to this task ahead !
My timing is a bit off - I should have started a few months ago during the lockdown when I had more free time than I knew what to do with - but nonetheless - it has to get done !

Appreciate the time and thoughts you have given. I will learn a bit more about Lightrroom this week and then see how to proceed !

Sarco

I started from a similar position to yourself, but with only about 20K of images. Those images comprised a multitude of scans and images from many point and shoot cameras that have preceded my current Nikon.

You are certainly on the right track with Lightroom as this programme saved me from the chaos that my images were in. Contrary to the advice often given on this site, I just keep my images in folders named by the brand and model of camera; I don't bother with changing the file names. For my point of view there is no need to change the numbering or to try putting descriptors into the file names; leave all of that to LR.

When all of your photos have been read by LR you are likely to be presented with its tremendous ability to indentify faces. It will take you quite a while to do the complete job of putting names to faces, then you need to give plenty of thought to structuring a logical set of keywords. Whilst most keyword trees tend to be somewhat individual I can give you mine as a guide, if you care to PM me.

Good luck.
Ron

markjay

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the reply and input.
Sure - I would love to see your keyword tree. Any real world example would of course be very helpful !
Thanks,
Mark

Gatorcoach Loc: New Jersey

The beauty of using keywords in LR is that you can put as many words as you like; the more keywords, the faster your desired pictures will be found. I still prefer folders but an instructor of mine keeps only one collection with his thousands (over 100K) of pictures and does not have any folders. He merely opens the entire collection, opens the search (CTRL-F) and types in the relevant keywords and "poof" all his pix open up. For example, a keyword tree could be something like: "Lighthouses, 2015, 2018, Montauk, Vermont, New Jersey", etc.

When you are searching for something particular, like the Cape May lighthouse you took, enter "Lighthouse, New Jersey" and all your lighthouses from New Jersey open. You can further dig down to 2018 by adding that to the search.

The beauty is the choice and number of keywords is up to you.

Try it, you'll like it!

WJShaheen Loc: Gold Canyon, AZ

I prefer to use a completely separate DAM system. That way, I can keep processing and library management apart. And, if I switch to another photo editor, my photo database doesn't care.

I've been using ThumbsPlus from http://cerious.com/ and have thousands of documents of all kinds (not just photos) cataloged and indexed. It's my library.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I went through my major organization the first thing I did was back up everything.
The second thing I did was to separate all the files by capture date (not last modified date). That broke the job up into manageable chunks. Or maybe just less unmanageable chunks.

Then I could go through year by year and dump junk, keyword good stuff, and put the good stuff from that year into a Lightroom catalog.

When I was done I took all the Lightroom catalogs and merged them into a master catalog.

I was still working at the time and did it all in my copious free time, a couple hours here and there. If I didn't get through a year in one session, I wrote down the name of the file where I stopped on a sticky note and pasted it on my monitor so I knew where to start next time.

guardineer

Light room has a speedy way to assign keywords. Go to grid view, use spray can to assign certain attributes like keywords. Check out Steve Perry tutorial.

BobPeterson Loc: Massachusetts

(remember, LR does not actually relocate the images you import).

Lightroom can relocate on import. There are options for Add (no change to where a file is), Copy (create a new file in a new place leaving the old where it was), and Move. There is also an option to create a backup copy in another location while importing.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

While LR can relocate by use of Move, it's not recommended. If there's a glitch in the transfer (power line surge or the cat stepping on just the wrong key at the wrong time), you have lost the original. If you really want to relocate a file, it's best to copy it to the new location and when you have confirmed that it's there, delete the old one. In LR, confirmation that the file is in the new location comes when you are able to edit it.

This is particularly true when you are getting the files from your camera card into LR.

The backup copy is not a bad idea.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

When I started digital shooting, I already had a file system for my film photos - organized by topic regardless of camera. I created a like organization on my computer and have gradually digitized my film collection, so now I have photos from film cameras and digital cameras all together organized by topic.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

Obviously there are lots of ways to organize, as evidence by this thread and others. The first thing you need to do is put your thoughts on paper, outline your organization system on a sheet of paper and think it through as you do that: how will you use your images, what type of system fits your needs, what keywords might you use if that is included in your new system, and so on. LR is far superior in both processing and organization that the apple program. I use a mac, have used and still on occasion do use the apple photo software, but rely primarily on LR and PS to get the job done. I've imported (think linked) well over 100,000 images into LR over the years and have processed over 12,500 images using LR and other software. I doubt that you will find a better Digital Asset Management tool than LR. Before you use LR go to the Adobe website and read up on the Library Module, this is the module that is at the heart of the software and reading and knowing about this module before you use the software will save you a lot of grief. I organize by trip, not date, and use keywords. I keep everything in folders and only use collections for very specific uses; for example when I'm putting together a book or slideshow or choosing an image to enter into a competition. The software can meet multiple needs as well as the multiple ways in which we think.