Keeping track

[Phillip]

To be honest I am not a very organised person and I have yet to find a solution to keeping track of what I have been doing.

 

How do others manage? I know some people will have someone take care of the minor details. I have a few projects planned for the future as I think I will be concentrating on landscape and travel.

 

I have yet to be accepted as a contributor for Alamy, and even if my first few photo's are rejected I will be submitting more. What I find interesting in particular, shooting for stock, is doing the research for keywords.  I am an opportunist, for example, there were some small birds nesting under my BIL verandah, and I managed to get a few stills and some video and then I had to find out what birds they actually were.

 

Yeah, I know about the money, but I am retired so this is more of a let me say full-time hobby, but something I have wanted to do since I was a kid.

 

I should say I am enjoying the journey.

Edited January 8, 2023 by Phillip

[Steve F]

Hi Phillip,

Hopefully you'll get accepted soon, using the A6000. Looks like digital camera world is still a big fan of it:

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/reviews/sony-a6000-review

 

Not entirely sure about which question you're asking. Are you asking about working out what to shoot? I sometimes keep a written list as something occurs to me. And I also keep some photos on my phone in a folder of things/images I've found inspirational. If I'm photographing locally, I do plan shoots, so I can have the light I want. If I'm just out and about somewhere though, I just take it as it comes. I just photograph generally as things occur to me. 

 

In terms of managing photos, I had been putting them in lots of separate folders by subject. But that was an absolute pain when backing up. Another benefit of using Lightroom apart from the powerful editing features, is that it is great for organising images by keywords. But everyone has different systems, see this thread:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/16063-how-do-you-organise-your-jpegs-and-raw-files/

 

Steve

[Rebecca Ore]

3 hours ago, Phillip said:

To be honest I am not a very organised person and I have yet to find a solution to keeping track of what I have been doing.

 

How do others manage? I know some people will have someone take care of the minor details. I have a few projects planned for the future as I think I will be concentrating on landscape and travel.

 

I use Lightroom Classic and organize by dates in the folders and use keywords to find things.  Other people do other things, but my photos tend to be either table tops using whatever Luis and I can scrounge up in my house and courtyard or whatever I shoot when we go out on a photo walk.   Keywords can be nested in LR so you can organize narrow categories inside broad categories, but keywords exported with photos to Alamy won't be nested.   It can be useful to have a caption and at least five keywords before exporting photos as jpegs for Alamy, so they go on sale as soon as they pass quality control, and you have the photos tagged on your computer.   I've done that both ways.   Metadata in LR Classic can be used to sort photos in the Library view. 

 

There are other cataloguing programs out there, but I'm not familiar with those.   People who've used them can describe them. 

 

Helps to get a local geology guide book.  I had Roadside Geology of Virginia and knew which mountain was Old Rag.  There are a couple of plant and animal identification mobile apps: Seek from iNaturalist and Lens from Google are what I use for plants and insects.  Local birds -- I have a couple of bird book covering the East Coast of the US and Mexico to Central America.  I also do a third check on line to make sure the Seek and Lens identifications are sane.

 

Also, anything submitted to Alamy gets a color tag gets a keyword "AlamySub"   I delete the "AlamySub" keyword in the Alamy Image Manager, but keep the photo tagged with that keyword in Lightroom Classic.   I also save the jpegs to a folder on my desktop called AlamySubs.  These are by submission on one date by folder inside the Alamy Subs folder.

 

Other people do it other ways.   Main thing is to come up with a system that works for you.

 

 

[Phillip]

6 hours ago, Steve F said:

Hi Phillip,

Hopefully you'll get accepted soon, using the A6000. Looks like digital camera world is still a big fan of it:

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/reviews/sony-a6000-review

 

Not entirely sure about which question you're asking. Are you asking about working out what to shoot? I sometimes keep a written list as something occurs to me. And I also keep some photos on my phone in a folder of things/images I've found inspirational. If I'm photographing locally, I do plan shoots, so I can have the light I want. If I'm just out and about somewhere though, I just take it as it comes. I just photograph generally as things occur to me. 

 

In terms of managing photos, I had been putting them in lots of separate folders by subject. But that was an absolute pain when backing up. Another benefit of using Lightroom apart from the powerful editing features, is that it is great for organising images by keywords. But everyone has different systems, see this thread:

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/16063-how-do-you-organise-your-jpegs-and-raw-files/

 

Steve

 

The last time I was really doing a lot of photography I had hard copies, negatives, slides, contact sheets and prints they were easy to put into psychical folders and were much easier to keep track of. 

 

I find in the digital world I misplace things, plus there is also the obsolete soft ware. For example I still have discs for Windows 3.1 and word documents that do not open with more modern programs.

 

The other negative of the digital world is that is so easy to accidentally delete files,(yes I know in some instances that they can be recovered but it is a proverbial pain)

 

I have had hard drives crash and loose all the information that I had gathered.  Some I have backed up put the discs in a safe place never to be found again.

 

At least with physical photos they aren't so small and as easy to misplace.

[Jill Morgan]

2 hours ago, Phillip said:

 

The last time I was really doing a lot of photography I had hard copies, negatives, slides, contact sheets and prints they were easy to put into psychical folders and were much easier to keep track of. 

 

I find in the digital world I misplace things, plus there is also the obsolete soft ware. For example I still have discs for Windows 3.1 and word documents that do not open with more modern programs.

 

The other negative of the digital world is that is so easy to accidentally delete files,(yes I know in some instances that they can be recovered but it is a proverbial pain)

 

I have had hard drives crash and loose all the information that I had gathered.  Some I have backed up put the discs in a safe place never to be found again.

 

At least with physical photos they aren't so small and as easy to misplace.

 

I find digital so much easier to keep track of.  I am not as prolific a photographer as many on this site, but I simply sort mine by categories on different drives to allow for backup.  I keep different folders for raws and jpegs and always leave the image number in my final jpg so if I need to find the raw file, it's easy.

Has worked for me for quite awhile.

 

Jill

[Cal]

I have an Alamy folder on my computer, and subfolders for QC pass, fail, news uploads and a few others like pending. Photos are sorted appropriately. I also do this thing where I append [Ed] as an example to a photo caption that is set as editorial only.

 

I process using Lightroom (mostly classic), try to do as much keywording as possible beforehand. I keep all my raws and in most cases also keep a full size TIFF of photos I've processed. Both of these file types are large so for now go on an external drive. Photos I output for stock are sometimes, but not always reduced in size as I find appropriate, and for certain content I'm aiming at the POD market (not for Alamy!), I'll add just a touch of output sharpening .

 

I think it was Chuck that mentioned TIFFs as part of his workflow a few years back and I have to say keeping them as a full size archive copy of photos you've processed is a nice idea. Back up everything, and if you're tempted to delete some raws due to storage, don't. Buy another external HD for $40 - you could make that back in a few sales. I've gone back to older raws after a year or more, processed them, loved the result, and ended up with sales.

 

Incidentally, those Windows 3.1 disks might someday be worth a good bit, or you could load it into DOSbox right now for a fun, retro Windows experience (lots of tutorials about that online).

Edited January 9, 2023 by Cal

[NYCat]

Lightroom has many ways to keep track.... color labels, stars, collections, and, of course, keywords.

 

Paulette

[Rebecca Ore]

4 hours ago, NYCat said:

Lightroom has many ways to keep track.... color labels, stars, collections, and, of course, keywords.

 

Paulette

 

I put things that I'm considering for Alamy into a collection and export from that collection, then clear the collection if everything passes Quality Control and save the exported jpg files to a desktop folder for folders of submissions by date.   Color tags for all formats of photos at Alamy, and keyword for actual submitted files.  I've tried stars as a sorting tool, but found that "Do I remember a  photo" as a better sort if the keywords are decent enough to find it again. 

[Phillip]

On 09/01/2023 at 21:56, Cal said:

I have an Alamy folder on my computer, and subfolders for QC pass, fail, news uploads and a few others like pending. Photos are sorted appropriately. I also do this thing where I append [Ed] as an example to a photo caption that is set as editorial only.

 

I process using Lightroom (mostly classic), try to do as much keywording as possible beforehand. I keep all my raws and in most cases also keep a full size TIFF of photos I've processed. Both of these file types are large so for now go on an external drive. Photos I output for stock are sometimes, but not always reduced in size as I find appropriate, and for certain content I'm aiming at the POD market (not for Alamy!), I'll add just a touch of output sharpening .

 

I think it was Chuck that mentioned TIFFs as part of his workflow a few years back and I have to say keeping them as a full size archive copy of photos you've processed is a nice idea. Back up everything, and if you're tempted to delete some raws due to storage, don't. Buy another external HD for $40 - you could make that back in a few sales. I've gone back to older raws after a year or more, processed them, loved the result, and ended up with sales.

 

Incidentally, those Windows 3.1 disks might someday be worth a good bit, or you could load it into DOSbox right now for a fun, retro Windows experience (lots of tutorials about that online).

I have the originals of Doom and Hexem as well

[Phillip]

On 09/01/2023 at 22:53, NYCat said:

Lightroom has many ways to keep track.... color labels, stars, collections, and, of course, keywords.

 

Paulette

I have been putting off getting light room, just trying to balance the budget at present, but I will get it in future

[Marianne]

The sooner you start organizing your files the better. 

 

Lightroom lets you intuitively organize into folders and subfolders in a way that makes sense to you - some people do it by date, some by subject, some by place, some use a hybrid system. After a few years of trying different things and backing up to myriad small hard drives haphazardly, I settled on 2 big LR catalogs - one for Europe and one for the US. I can search over 100,000 images simply by keyword. For the "US" catalog, I organize by US State> each year as a subfolder>and then in each year I have subfolders by city. I may add a "Processed" subfolder underneath and "In Process" if I'm working on elaborate composites or other tricky edits. Another main folder for food or still life with the type of shoot - Chicken Cacciatore, Sunflowers on Porch, whatever, underneath. 

 

One of the most important things about organizing in LR Classic is that you can search tens of thousands of images by keyword incredibly fast. To make sure I don't lose track of files, I import from my SD card directly into LR and will add a group of keywords to the shoot during import, so, even if I don't get around to processing them for a while, I can find them.

 

I've been shooting digital since 2005, and started with LR v.1.0 when it came out in 2007, but didn't take full advantage of it for a few years, which meant a lot of work organizing old shoots. Now, everything is organized the moment the SD card is imported, usually the same day I shoot the images.  I use a 42MP and 61MP camera these days, so they fill up my computer's 2TB hard drive quickly, but with LR it doesn't matter if the image is on my computer or another drive because I can see where it is in the catalog even if the hard drive isn't attached to my computer. 

 

Like @Jill Morgan mentions, I too keep the file number on my image the same on the RAW and the jpeg(s) and any Tiffs so I can match them up. I have used seven different cameras in the past 17+ years, so each camera has a different starting name which I combine with my naming convention - so, e.g. if I shoot photos here in NY with my Sony a7riv it will be 4NY23_0001 That's 4 for the camera, NY for the location, 23 for the year, and then I let all my cameras keep the numbers going consecutively so that they don't get duplicated. This way I insure that no two files have the same name. And, even if the first part of the filename changes, I can find the original RAW file by searching for the last 4 digits.

 

I'd urge you to get LR Classic if you can manage the $120/year - you'll get LR, Photoshop, 20GB of online storage - so everything you need for organizing and processing your photos.

 

The thing that helps me the most with LR is that I can see thumbnails of all my files so when I'm searching, e.g. by keyword, I can scan through them quickly to find the Covered Bridge or Lighthouse I was thinking of, or see what Fall images I haven't yet processed that I should process and get online. 

 

I use the stars and color labels when I sort - I've been doing that for more than a dozen years now, so I know what each star or star and color combo means even if it might not make sense to anyone else. I use a flag, 5 and red for the very best, a flag and 4 for good, 1 for maybe, 2 for an image I need to combine with another (e.g. for composites) with 3 for the main image, a flag and yellow for images to stack or use for panoramas, and other combos that only make sense to me ... and that's what's great ... you can use it to organize and sort files in a way that makes sense to your unique brain. 

 

 

Edited January 17, 2023 by Marianne