mine are sorted by event or subject and date if that's a differentiating point I need

EG. Xmas 2012, Mackay Feb 2013, etc

Sorting - It's a bit of a pain but your best is to do folders manually and copy/paste yourself to get a really good result.

Otherwise let Picasa sort them which will do dates then create folders. I reckon Picasa is great and is under rated for a freebie.

Use a database, there are too many ways you might want to organise content.

IDImager was the bomb ... then it they started making shovelware apps...

Adobe products come with ugly overheads.

This post was not useful.

I use Flickr: it allows you to create Collections and then Sets underneath. All backed up online.

I organise mine into folder by year, and then subfolders in that based on subject and date

it's easy for me to find stuff, but it's not convenient to browse since it's all so split up into folders

but viewing those photos is not the same as storing them, one could always organise them in some sort of program for organising photos and displaying them, but that's a job for future me or hopefully someone else will do it by then

When I dump my photos to my computer I Put them in a Year - Month - Name folder.
Big trips I also include a bit of a write up, but most of the time (weekend camping, skiing, diving) it's just a photo dump.

Like you, I also have a few Misc. folders, but they're stored in a seperate location and are duplicates of photos in their 'proper' folders.

I would hate to have a task of arranging a massive mess of photos that aren't at least semi sorted... which is why my mp3 folder is such a mess. Too big to worry about (not as important as photos though.)

I use Picasa but have just recently installed Lightroom and am trying to get used to it. I liked Picasa because of the facial recognition stuff for tagging people.

I like using picasa. But i hate looking at photos.

I don't like how picasa pics up all those pics that were for my eyes only and offers to put them onto my google plus wall though.

Do you guys leave the images at full resolution or shrink them down a bit to make the file size a bit more reasonable? Everything that comes off my slr seems to be in the 2-4mb range. If I put them in the "cloud" it would be about 15gb of uploads :/

I do as WHoop doesYear-Month-Day - Event

Same. I upload them to the CLOUDZ after each big session. I use Filezilla; it queues everything and I just leave it uploading in the background capped at 10-20kbytes/sec. I don't shoot RAW but my album sizes are sometimes up to 10GB; how long it takes to upload isn't super important to me.

ahh nevermind; i had blood taken today and i'm talking crazy!

I'm looking for a photo management 'solution' that is platform agnostic, and allows me to tag photo's with custom tags (what camera was used, where the pic was taken, the trip or album name etc etc).

I've got a file server at home (one of those HP Microservers) which I'd ideally like to host it on so I can dump pics onto either my desktop or laptop and catalogue them on it.

I've come to this conclusion because I like the basics contained within the 'iPhoto' software on my Mac, but as I'm running a variety of other OS' at home, restricting myself to a client hosted on my laptop just isn't practical.

Anyone here had any experience with anything I can host locally?
(I have thought of using the likes of Flickr or Tumblr, but don't really want to trust my photo's to another company.)

I would assume that what I'm asking could easily be done with some sort of SQL based web interface, but I really would prefer something that is a little more off the shelf.

I've heard plenty about the likes of Lightroom and love the idea; but really want to have a more 'client/server' based model for storing and cataloguing

I'm happy enough with 'manual' provided there's some sort of 'mass tagging' component.

I'll take a gander @ lightroom.
Any experience as to whether or not I'll get eaten by licensing? (As what would constitute 3 copies are all only for *my* use.)

The initial scope is to get what pics I have in order; the editing will come with time... probably after I get off my ass and jump on an 'intro to photography' course.
I threw some cash at an 'entry level' DSLR so I should really learn the ins and outs.

date - name

and im starting to downsample all my pix, no need for the raw images, they'll never be printed

date - name

and im starting to downsample all my pix, no need for the raw images, they'll never be printed

yes but if you're s*** at photos like I am, having the RAW files means sometimes you can recover photos that would otherwise be unusable if they were jpegs

I go YYYYMMDD_Event for my naming of folders.

Like Ivy_Mike I need a storage solution. I have many picture taking devices (iPhone, Galaxy, SLR) and many picture view devices (2 laptops, PC, HTPC, iPad) and I can't find a *good* way to share the photos between all these things at an ease level the wife can understand.

She wants to plug her iPhone in and magic happens - not import to iPhoto, then export to desktop, then mount the server share, then copy the files, etc. We tried Dropbox for a while but that kills my bandwidth and I end up just creating DROPBOXDUMP_X folders on the server and moving photos out when our Dropbox limit fills up.

Even if I used something like ownCloud the risk is someone deletes a photo, folder or group of folders and those pics get wiped off all the devices. Of course not all devices have enough storage for the photos either!

So hard :(

Here is another interesting problem for photo organisation - reliable, redundant storage.

I have all my photos on a "master" drive at home. I have them copied onto a backup USB drive at home, and one at work. I have them in the "cloudz" on a personal website.

Trying to keep all these in sync is a bit of a problem - occasionally I forget to copy a folder or some files to one of the other repositories.

I've been working on a system to help track these repositories - just a set of PHP scripts intended to check everything was where it should be, so that I could see easily which files/directories were missing from the repos.

I quickly realised that in addition checking the actual file data itself was something worth doing, so the system also became about comparing the file contents to make sure that the mirror was in fact perfect - that each image file was a perfect copy of the others. This would ensure that if I accidentally resized or edited an image on disk or one of them was corrupted, those changes wouldn't accidentally propagate to the other backups.

The interesting thing was that as soon as I got this vaguely working, I discovered that there were some differences in some photos in one of my albums - I had a look at the ones that were picked up as being different from the others and saw a bunch like this:

http://trog.qgl.org/up/1305/corrupt-1.jpghttp://trog.qgl.org/up/1305/corrupt-2.jpghttp://trog.qgl.org/up/1305/corrupt-3.jpg

I couldn't figure out how that had happened until I ran a chkdsk on the drive (an external USB) and discovered it had some bad sectors.

So - the lesson is (as always with anything to do with backups):

- have a way to ensure that your backups are current, complete, and cover all the data you think they should
- have a way to ensure that your backups are consistent and valid and are not corrupt!!

A side effect of this though is it has made me start thinking about using par2 to provide some additionally redundancy in case of corruption, although I think once I finish my magical system that will not really be necessary.

trog - thought of using a VPS hosted git repository?

Yeh, I thought about using some VCS thing and mostly ended up going down this route because I thought it'd be a fun process. Git would prolly be a pretty good solution for it all but this lets me do some custom stuff as well (e.g., I just found a couple images that looked identical but had different hashes - their EXIF data is different, so now I'm putting in some support for separate checks for the binary image data and the exif data as separate things, so I can easily see /why/ two images are different).

I want the photos easily transferred off the device it's on. Copied over to the network share. Viewable by any device that can view pictures. 90% of my problem would be fixed if iPhoto & iOS Photo app can view photos on a remote share.

Can't you use Files Connect for your iOS devices? Works for me.

My setup is - I have all my images on a specific HDD in my HP Microserver. All my PC's, laptops, iPads, Xbox 360's, are connected so i can view them anywhere. (Same for Music, TV, Movies)

Is this what you are after?

I mean you can go all super nerd and write scripts and programs and algorithms and s*** but if you're a plain simpleton like me then this setup works fine.

also for bulk renaming i like this one http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php