Subfodders.

The problem that I have isn't about finding vacation pictures from June 2010 or 2010_06_15. The problem is when I have an image that is 750x500 of a pepper and it has been sized for the web, but I need to find the original image that this was downsized from. In this case, it was a scan that was probably left as "Untitled_01.psd" but maybe not. And where was it left? on one of 4 drives I have. Did it get accidentally moved to a completely unrelated folder?

So I have the low res image and I ask the program to search for all instances of that image. If it works as I'd like it to, it would scan all my drives and say
"You'll never guess where I found that file!"

What Pete and Clod are talking about is not really a concern of most pro photographers. What should happen with proper DAM is that when I bring images into the database they all get keywords, later on when I need to search for photos I can, in theory, search by keywords, or exif data (lens, focal length, f:stop, date, camera make and model, etc) but again, this only works if I remembered to do this. And it only works for folders that are in the database, it doesn't work if an image got dragged into some wacky folder like a C:Hobos/Ohio/notdeadyet/stillstinky.

You and Pete would so hit it off. Maybe in another twenty years, I'll be rational.:)

I'd hit it off with any woman who makes her own goat yogurt!

Hello my friend.

PZ and CF are talking about how to organize pictures for the way I take pictures. I get that. But some of what we all are doing here *does* apply to you. We've discussed this before; you've acknowledged this before. The key: Picasa is your friend.

Did you know you can search your Picasa database for "iso: 80" and it will return only those images? Or camera model? NOT ALL of the EXIF data is searchable. Lots of it is though. Since you're principally concerned with searching for your photos, I think Google/Picasa is good company to keep.

Not only is much of the EXIF data available to you, but any TAGS you associate with a given image, or folder of images, or album of images... those tags are searchable too. Here is a good starter discussion on the search capabilities of Picasa. Forgive me, but you'll have to manually scan for the Search section (I know--ironic).

Now, to get good results from Picasa, you should set it up nicely. Like, not having your images spread across four different drives. Space is pretty cheap, I'm *sure* you can find a single drive to host your library. Don't forget to buy two so you can do the backups, of course.

Another couple ideas I had was to find a naming convention for resized images. I only have one resize size, I make my images 800x600 for posting here and I use the same image name and append "sm" to the end of the filename indicating "small". You might well tag the original import as part of your workflow with the string "orig" then you just scan for originals. And some discipline on a folder structure helps too.

I haven't even gotten to "experimental" options! I love Picasa. It manages my large library (85k images out of 142k files) nicely.

Yeah, I have all that in picasa and lightroom. The real thing I occasionally need to do is find another version of an image whose exif data doesn't exist. Like I show you a photo and say go find every version of this image, all the edited iterations.

oohhhhhhh....

For a mountain of images you already have on your system.....


Well, sounds like tin eye is a better tool for this process. If you have the originals, ... can't you make your "albums" of originals? then just make your smaller ones on demand? And when you do make that smaller one, maintain enough similarity of filename so you can search on it?

For going forward, I have some ideas. For retrospective access to your already stored collections... I got nuffin.

Yet.