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For the past four years, since I got my Sony HDR-CX520 camcorder which I also used for pictures, I used Play Memories Home to import to may computer, and then I have created a simple windows explorer folder system. I use Play Memories Home to view the catalog.
I have a bucket for vacations (separate folders for each), and then I have two folder per month. For January, I have 2015 January various pictures & 2015 January family pictures. For videos, I just have a bucket per month, January 2015 video. The only time I have sub-folder in a month is for special event, like holiday pictures or parties, etc.
All of my pictures and videos, once transferred to the computer, are backed up to 2 portable drives, and a computer in my office. In addition, my Surface Pro 2 has all of my pictures. With that regards, with the CX520 I generally got lazy, and when the 64gb is practically full I just delete everything.
Now with my new Sony DSC-RX100 III, each day (today being my first ), I transfer to my computer and delete from the camera daily. It's silly because I have a 128gb card in the new camera and could save on the camera for quite a while.
Lightroom is a fabulous editor as well as organizer. As far as an organizer the way lightroom works you can store photo's on a portable drive and have full cataloging between multiple computers as well as add and subtract things ,edit and do a whole lot of things all the other computors you use will see.
It has great batching features as well as the ability to mesh with many other products like nik and topaz filters as well as work seamlessly with photoshop.
Windows has plenty of built in features, I just organized well over 40K images for someone half of which had the wrong EXIF date.
Folder structure is simple 2014-01, 2014-02 etc. This is to keep a sane amount of images in the same folder. Using irfanview I renamed the files to prevent file naming clashes and something a little more descriptive. In the name pattern box I used this:
Quote:
$E36868(%Y-%m-%d)__$N
That uses the date taken in the EXIF and will rename the image to something like this.
Quote:
2014-12-25__IMG_1234
IMG_1234 is the original file name for reference and to prevent file naming clashes. If you wanted to take this a step further and use the 24 hour time down to the second:
Quote:
$E36868(%Y-%m-%d_$H$M$S)__$N
Also note when ever naming something by date work your way down starting with the yer first. This will insure they are in chronological order when sorting by name.
Onto windows features, you can insert EXIF information like title, subject etc into single or multiple images. When you highlight an image down the bottom should be a pane with thr EXIF information. Click next to title or whatever to edit it. You can select and edit multiple image. To select a range of images highlight the first file, find your last scrolling if you need too. Hold down the shift and select it. This will highlight the entire range, you cn now insert a title into every image selected.
Alternatively you can select and deselect highlighted images by holding down the ctrl key.
For better information about images switch to the details pane, right click the header and you add columns for date taken etc.
Last but not least learn to use Windows search effectively. If you are inserting titles and subjects this is searchable. Any of the EXIF fields can be searched using the following syntax.
You can use operators, this will return first value and filter second one.
title:text NOT tags:text
Now if you have labeled Little Johnnie's Birthday photos correctly you can search for them and start a slideshow....
What's important is you are using the EXIF information, this is embedded in the file. It's the modern equivalent of writing on the back of the photo. It's independent of OS's and software and will remain with the image as long as it's not purposely deleted.
it all depends how sophisticated you want the searches and how much batching of work you want. with lightroom you can have photos searched and come up from all different folders. if i keyword photos red i can call up every photo from all folders with the word red.
i can apply changes to all photos such as white balance correction all in one shot
lightroom lets you create virtual images which are nice. i can have many photos of the same master all processed differently and do it all wihout having multiple copies of the same image filling up space.
the benefits of using a good organizer or editor like lightroom go beyond the scope of what can even be typed here.
it all depends what your needs are and how much time you want to save doing it.
We have a Canon point-and-shoot and a couple of 16gb cards. When they're full, I copy them to my Linux system in a new folder with today's date, rename each picture or video to have the date/time as part of the file name, and compress the videos to about 10% of their original size.
I copy the whole thing to a backup drive, then finally delete the cards. The whole process takes about 10-15 minutes. It's not perfect but it does what I need.
Separately, I shoot a lot of pics and vids on my android phone, and Google Plus backs them up automatically.
I'm planning to get a few more external hard drives so I can send the whole collection to a relative for extra backup. My music collection, too. I'd hate to lose all that to fire or theft.
I'm also mulling printing out everything as thumbnails, 50 images per page, just to have something on paper.
These subscription services seem convenient, but you have to do it "their way", and for the same money you could buy a couple of external hard drives. Why rent when you can own?
we have 20k in photos stored on an external drive . this way we do not slow down our desktop and using lightroom we have full access from any computer to edit and organize and the other computers will recognize the changes.
we can even edit tiny previews without having the big full files on our lap top. once the lap top has access to the hard drive it will update the full size files with any changes.
that is a huge plus when traveling.
another nice feature is after we post to social media sites if we edit the photos again it will make the changes on the media site automatically.
today organizing is far more than creating a bunch of folders and calling it a day like we used to years ago.
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), I transfer to my computer and delete from the camera daily. It's silly because I have a 128gb card in the new camera and could save on the camera for quite a while.
