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Articles > Photography > Organizing Your Photos
If you are like me (and many people are) you take a lot of photographs. And if you are like me (which fewer people are) you nevery throw anything away. This ieads to a massive organization problem. At last count I had over 20,000 images.
The first thing to do is to get a real photo organizing program. Throw away iPhoto and Picasa, and get yourself a copy of iView Media Pro, Apple Aperture, or Adobe Lightbox. I use iView, but the information in this article will apply equally well to any professional media management software.
When you look at the Organize panel of these programs you might find yourself intimidated by the list of options. iView allows to you classify your photos by date, location, genre, event, keyword, and 20 more categories. Luckily, you don't need to use them all, and you can hide the categories that you aren't using. I classify my photos by rating, date, place, category, event, provider, people, and keyword. I also use catalogue set and job to keep track of how I use the photos is various projects.
iView provides both a five-star rating system and a ten-colour label system. I use the stars to give the photos permanent ratings and the labels to temporarily rate or organize my photos when I am working on a specific project — and then I'll apply completely different labels when I start the next project.
Naturally, if you rate all of your photos as five-star, then that designation will not mean much. You should aim to rate half of your photos as "average" (***) and one-fifth as "below average" (**), another fifth as "above average" (****), and one-tenth as "exceptional" (*****). I use the one-star rating (*) for photos that I am keeping for some reason other than their quality (i.e., photodocumentation of artwork, photographs of damage taken during building inspections, and so on).
Note that I assign at least one * to every photo — I don't have a 'no stars' classification. This is an important principle of organization: once you decide to use a classification (such as rating, category, event, etc.) you must assign a value to every single image. If you don't do this, then you cannot easily distinguish between images that you decided not to classify and images that you forgot to classify. Most image management software allows you to construct queries such as "all photos where 'event' is blank", which makes it easy to find the images you have yet to classify.
This is pretty self-explanatory — it's the date that I took the photograph. Digital cameras record this information automatically, so you don't need to do anything and the date will be recorded automatically.
iView allows you to assign a country, state, city, and location to a photograph. The first three are self-explanatory, but there are several ways to identify the location of a photo. For my photos I divide them into exterior, interior, and studio. If there is a particular location that I use frequently I use a forward-slash to create a subset (i.e., exterior/downtown). This ensures that if I ever search for "exterior" I will get all of my exterior shots, regardless of the city and regardless of whether they are in a subset.
I category my photos according to whether they are pictures of people, places, or things, with an extra category void for photos that do not fit into any category. Note that I have a void category because I even keep my out-of-focus and pitch-black pictures1. Most people would simply delete their void photographs and have no need for the category. You may be tempted to create an 'unclassifiable' category. Resist that urge — every photo can be classified if you think about it long enough.
Both people and things are subdivided by number of subjects: alone, duos & trios, and groups (note that I chose 'duos & trios' rather than 'twos & threes' to ensure that the alphabetic category sort was also the numerical sort). I often use a macro lens to make extreme closeups, so I further subdivide alone into detail. Because I often photograph artwork (both mine and other people's) I also have a category called things/photodoc.
Places are divided into interior, nature, rural, and urban. Because I do a lot of travelling I also use travel to classify the photographs I take from airplanes, ferries, and automobiles. Because I do not photograph indoors very often I am satisfied with interior and did not create more detailed classifications. Let your photographic practice be your guide and define your categories accordingly.
This category scheme works fairly well, but there are always questions. What is a plant? What is an animal? Where do you draw the line between a photograph of a thing and a place? You will have to make your own decisions, but here are my guidelines:
And, ultimately, I have learned not to worry about it too much. I have noticed over the years that the pictures that are difficult to classify are usually not very good pictures — so it doesn't matter if I misclassify them because I will never be wanting to find them.
The category defines what I am photographing. Event, on the other hand, describes how I came to make the picture. Formal situations arise when my subject and I agree to meet at a particular time and place for the photo session. Generally they are dressed more carefully than usual, have carefully applied their makeup, and so forth. Informal photographs are those that result when I see someone and spontaneously ask "hey, can I take your picture?" There is usually direct eye contact between subject and camera, and always an implied awareness that the photo was being taken. Natural photographs are pictures I take on the street, at parties, etc. The subjects are engaged in some other activity and generally unaware of being photographed. And, finally, performance photographs are natural photographs of people on stage or in parades. They may not know that I, specifically, am taking their photo but they are aware of being watched and this awareness is evident in their body language. I once photographed an Ultimate Frisbee tournament and classified the images as Natural/Sports.
The provider classification is used to identify who actually took the photograph. Many people won't bother with this, since they will have taken all the photographs in their collection. I mention it here because, if you do track the provider of your images, you will want to find a way to search for the photos that Mike Gobbi took without also finding the photographs of Mike Gobbi. The way that I handle this is to put hyphens into the names of photo providers — so searching for "Reinier" returns the pictures of my friend Reinier deSmit, and searching for "R-einier" returns the pictures that he took.
You use the people classification to identify the people in the photograph. I divide my subjects into friends and family (who are then identified by name) and clusters (who are merely clumped into groups). For those friends and family members who I photograph very rarely I have created a various label. Finally, I use the label self for photographs of myself. If a friend hires me take some portraits I would file the images both under their name and under cluster/clients so that I will find the image no matter how I am searching.
Note that people is an exception to the rule that every photo must be filed into a category. It would be silly to assign people=none to my photographs of places and things, and I can always search for "category contains "People" and people is blank" to locate any photos that I have forgotten to classify.
If you have classified your photographs using the methods described above you will probably not need to use many keywords — everything that you care about will have been described already. I use them to define things that I care about that don't fit easily into other categories. For example, rather than having things/alone/flowers and things/duos & trios/flowers (or things/flowers/alone and things/flowers/duos & trios) I simply have a flowers keyword. There is, unfortunately, no way to search for "things that look like flowers but I forgot to apply the 'flowers' keyword to", so I must be very diligent when I import photographs to apply all the appropriate keywords right away.
Keywords are particularly useful for classifications that span the usual categories. Street Photography has a very specific 'look,' recognizable whether the photo is an image of one person, a group, or even just a building. Similarly, the photographs that I have sold will come from all different categories.
So you've just finished a photo shoot and you've got 300 pictures that you want to classify using rating, place, category, event, provider, people, and keyword. How do you do it? One classification at a time. And if your software supports keyboard shortcuts, then use them — it will make the job go twice as fast.
The best way to assign ratings is to go through your photos one at a time identifying the best (*****) and worst (*) photos. Then go through again identifying the better (****) and worse (**) photos. What is left are the average (***) photos.
Add up the photos in the top four ratings: you should have 10% *****, 20% each **** and **, and 50% ***. If any rating has too many photos go through it again and be more discriminating, assigning some photos to the rating above or below. Note that this 10/20/50/20 distribution is the ideal distribution for your whole photo collection, so it's possible that a given photo session may differ. Sometimes you have a session where everything is golden, and some days it's all junk. Finally, go through your * photos and delete any images that aren't worth keeping at all.
For a given photo session, almost all of the photographs will fall into one place, one category, and one event, and come from one provider. Select all of the photos and assign them to the appropriate classification, then go through re-classifying the exceptions.
Any particular person or keyword will generally apply to several photos in a shoot, but not to all and not in any particular order. The fastest way to apply these classifications is to choose a classification (i.e.,Friends/Nancy) and go through the collection selecting all the photos that fit, then apply the classification to all the selected photos at once. Repeat for the next classification, and the next, and so on until you are done.
So at last you have finished classifying your photographs. Are you done yet? Not quite — there is one more step. The various classifications that you have set up are now stored in your photo management software's database, but if that database gets corrupted (and it does happen) you lose everything. Luckily, all the modern digital image formats allow you to embed this information directly into the picture file (look for Synchronize or IPTC in the documentation). This means that if you need to rebuild your database you can do so very easily, and if you mail a photo to a friend or client your classification and rating will go along with it.
And that's it! Back up your files to CD and you are done!
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