I have a lot of files that I keep related to my photography and need to be able to find them again later on. I have given a lot of thought to how to organise the photos so that I can find them by associated categories and based on date.
A few months ago I decided to move away from my flat directory structure, with directories being category names, to something more advanced. I gave the opensource tools available a look and non of them really looked easy enough or powerfull enough to do what I need to do. Someone at worked showed me ACDSee and its great categorisation system and I thought I would use this as the tool to store archive my photos with. I remember ACDSee from the mid 90’s and figured a product this old and mature would be a safe bet.
As it turns out the introduction of the database into ACDSee is by no means mature, I discovered this when the application crashed half way through making a backup and then corrupting it’s database. Some reading of their forums got me to this thread which suggests I am not the only person suffering from this DB issue. I managed to recover the database after hours of messing around and immediatly exported it to a text format. Now I am starting down the road of developing my own archival system.
The full entry contains details of how I store my files, this is as much intended for someone to get some ideas for their own workflow and for me to document how I work so that I can write the archival system to compliment my workflow.
In the old days with 1, 2 or 3 mega pixel cameras this was not such a big problem, I did not take that many photos since frankly pro-sumer cameras just is not that much fun to use. Since I bought my D70 earlier this year things have changed and I have taken 4000 photos in the last few months.
This presented a huge nightmare from a storage point of view. A number of files are associated with each photo for me:
Original Files:
Stored At: \archive\yyyy\dd\mm\
DSC_XXXX.NEF The original Nikon Camera RAW format file, a direct capture of the information from the CCD. This is the digital equivelant of a negative and cannot be modified.
DSC_XXXX.JPG The camera also stores along with the NEF a preview JPG file, it’s the basic quality JPG and used just for previewing and so forth.
Files created as a result of processing:
Stored At: \archive\yyyy\dd\mm\proc
DSC_XXXX.JPG For photos where the image quality isn’t absolutely essential to be as high as possible, I just work with a excellent quality 8 bit JPG in Photoshop. I usually delete this file once the PSD file is created.
DSC_XXXX.TIF Photos that require the best possible transition from RAW to Photoshop will be saved as a 16 bit TIFF file. I usually delete this file once the PSD file is created.
DSC_XXXX.PSD Once modified in Photoshop the resulting file will be saved as a PSD file.
DSC_XXXX_version.PSD Some files gets done in various versions, example same photo in black and white and in color, or with different crops.
Files created for display purposes:
Stored At: \archive\yyyy\dd\mm\proc\destination_medium
DSC_XXXX.JPG A web optimised version of the photo in the PSD file, usually around 640 x 480 resolution and level 8 quality setting
DSC_XXXX.JPG A print optimised version of the photo in the PSD file, as high quality as possible both in size and JPG quality
So, by way of example, a photo that starts off as DSC_0001.NEF, gets edited in Photoshop and saved for web and print media will have the following layout on my drive:
\archive\2004\01\01\DSC_0001.NEF
\archive\2004\01\01\DSC_0001.JPG
\archive\2004\01\01\proc\DSC_0001.PSD
\archive\2004\01\01\proc\web\DSC_0001.JPG
\archive\2004\01\01\proc\print\DSC_0001.JPG
I will usually assign just the original files to the category structure, each set of files can belong to many categories such as:
Root > Places > UK > Norwich
Root > Holidays > August 2004 > Norwich
All of the files in the structured directory layout and file naming makes it easy for me to find a photo later on given it’s name or date. The categorization means I can find a photo based on browsing the category tree if I do not have the name or the dates for the file.
One possible hassle can be the fact that once I have taken 10 000 files with my D70 I will duplicate file names, but they will never appear in the same directory so I think it should be trivial to spot which of the couple of dupes are the one I am after if I were searching on file name only.
One thing that ACDSee does not have is the concept of a group of associated files. This is essential I believe for serious photo archival since, as above, each photo really consists of many files, some viewable on the web some not etc.
I have created an association table in my imported data that keeps these associations. Browsing by date, directory or category now only shows each collection of files as one file in the resulting lists. The thumbnail will be from the original JPG file or from any other web viewable file that can be nominated as the thumbnail source for the group of files. Viewing the file gives access to all the associated files.
