Picasa Best Practices?
April 6th, 2008
I’d like to devise a strategy for organizing photos. Up until now, I’ve manually organized pictures into a directory tree. At the top level, I have a year, then folders for each month, then a bunch of pictures. For example:
2008 | +--01_Jan +--02_Feb +--etc...
The number prefix keeps things properly sorted. But I’m losing out on searching, tagging, etc, and would like to simply move to Picasa.
I’m curious how other people organize their photos, using Picasa. It would be nice if there was a “best practices” guide or perhaps even a “common organization patterns” guide, that listed a few different strategies for organizing photos on the hard drive. Then I could choose the strategy that works best for me.
How do you organize your photos?
I did my thesis on that.
You might wanna look it up!
In a nutshell: Chronolocical organisation works best, but schould be suplemented by contextual descriptions (for better searchablility). That#s pretty much it.
Here is a summary:
http://www.s-m-u-e.de/downloads/ThesisSummary_smueller.pdf
And here is the whole hog
http://www.s-m-u-e.de/downloads/ThesisResearch+_smueller.pdf
also check out photo mesa as an interesting alternative to picasa
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa/
I currently use YYYY/MM/DD/description/ as the directories which then shows up in Picasa as just the descriptions.
The description I keep event/location based (eg ‘Christmas at home’) and then (only for family photos so far) I add tags for each person in the photo. So then if I search for a person’s name I get all of the events that they were photographed at, and for those events just the photos with them.
I don’t change the file name or add a caption to be more descriptive of the photo. I probably won’t because I haven’t needed to, and adding tags in bulk is much easier.
A few times I have also tried to find some ‘best practices’ for Picasa, with no luck.
doesn’t picasa have some terrible EULA that says they can use your images wherever they want?as opposed to flickr which says that you own your own shit?
I organise with Lightroom – it keeps its own directory structure
I use Flickr not Picasa, but my organisation is still relevant.
When you upload to Flickr everything is already searchable by date/time taken and geotag, so detailed organisation and tagging is less important (similar to the way folders/labels aren’t really important any more when you use gmail, since everything is so easily found using search).
About 20-30% of my photos are just one-offs that don’t go with any other photos, so once I’ve uploaded I don’t need to do anything to organise them — being searchable by date/time and geotag is enough.
For the rest of my photos that are taken at an event of some kind, I group them into a Flickr Set with a name for that event. I then have two trees of Flickr Collections, which are really unnecessary, but kinda convenient. One collection tree organises the Flickr Sets by Location, and the other organises them by Year.
You can see the structure here: http://flickr.com/photos/fatcaterpillar/collections/72157600027748338/
Hopefully that’ll help you with Picasa.
My photos are all in “Photos/YYYYMMDD – “, so they will be sorted by year first, then month and day. The events will then be sorted alphabetically.
For searching, I indexed the Photos folder using Launchy.
Works perfectly for me!
Somehow, that didnt come out right.
It’s “Photos/YYYYMMDD – event name”.
I just put all my photos under a folder related to the day I took the photos, such as the name of the place I was walking for example. As the camera puts the datestamp in the photo meta data picassa pics up the new folder and then puts it at the top of the list.
I then tweak the photo’s and select all in a folder, via picassa and export them onto the picassa web site for people to see !
Its so easy its childs play.
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/swebb99
When I offload the pics from the camera, they go into some “yyyymmdd – Event/location” directory. I then erase roughly 80% of the lot (technically unfit, or blatantly uninteresting). Some weeks later I create “yyyymm – Category/Person”, and move pics to them, and then another selection removes 70-80% of that. Some months later, I move everything into Category/Person, and erase some more.
I currently use Picasa, but anything where delete (and recover) is easy will do:-)
I also use the Google Screensaver to show the pictures above. It’s a nice way to have colleagues look at the pictures, and you know a picture is good when you don’t get tired of it.
I use Picasa with the following structure:
YYYYMM
|
+– YYYY-MM-DD Event Name
So you don’t have to search in a lot of folders. Perhaps you don’t remember in wich month the event happened, but at least you have few folders to search in.
PD: Sorry for my English, I don’t speak English as my first language… or as my second…
I use the following structure:
Pictures
+ 2006Q1
| + 2006-03-26 what was taken.jpg
+ 2006Q2
…
so I have about 4 new folders each year, and not so much photos inside. Both 2006Q1 and 2006-03-26 are ISO compliant date formats
I use Pixamo to organize my photos. Instead of the traditional “albums” approach, you can create “albums” or “sets” based on any keyword, any time. So the tags I have placed on my photos can be clicked, and all photos with that tag will come to the front. Sort of like albums that can build themselves with a single click, real easy.
If you’re serious about “best practices” and “common organization patterns”, then you should read Peter Krogh’s “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers”.
About half of The DAM Book is Krogh going on about the details of his particular choices (Krogh is a total Adobe fanboi), but the rest is probably the best single reference (today) about the choices available and the consequences of each choice. The book is surprisingly readable, too.
I have hundreds of thousands of photos. They go back to 1950 and will eventually have some as early as 1920.
I organize by…
- Decade (example 1950s, 1960s, 1970s…2000s, 2010s etc)
– YYYY
– MM – DD – Event/Location/etc
Eric, doesn’t look like any good answers so far? I am searching for the same thing. Most answers here are about folder structure, but I think you (and I) want to know about using ‘albums’ and ‘keywords’ within Picasa. Personally frustrating to me is that you can’t see what keywords or albums a photo may belong to.
Good luck.