Hack 49 Name Folders to Organize Your Images  You have many digital-shoebox applications to
choose from to help you organize your photos. Or, you could simply
use the built-in tools that come with your operating
system.Of all the places
I've been, the most amazing one
I've seen remains my grandfather's
basement. It was organized.He had, perhaps, an unfair advantage over the rest of us. As a
pharmacist in the days when all pills were white, being disorganized
could have been fatal. The discipline of being organized was part of
his daily routine.But he also enjoyed the advantage of organizing things, which is
simply being able to find just what you need without the frustration
of looking for it. The screws were on these shelves, the nails there,
the adhesives right here, the rubber bands (sorted by size) over
there, and on and on. His basement was as neatly organized as
Noah's ark.Fortunately, he passed that gene on to me, so when I started
collecting digital images, I quickly established a scheme so that
I'd never have to look for them or remember where
they were.This was long before asset-management programs such as Adobe
Photoshop
Album (Windows), Canto Cumulus (Mac/Win),
Extensis
Portfolio (Mac/Win),
iPhoto (Mac),
iView
MediaPro (Mac/Win), Kodak EasyShare (Mac/Win),
Picasa (Windows),
QPict (Mac), and
others were available. I had to rely on the only thing available: the
filesystem.
5.4.1 Filenames
When I was the computer guy at the office, I used to have a standing
offer of US$100 to anyone whose problem could not be resolved by a
clear understanding of the four parts of a filename. In the days of
MS-DOS business systems, I never had to pay out.Here are the four parts of a
filename:The volume name (e.g., C:\ or
Macintosh HD:)The directory and subdirectories, if any (e.g.,
DOS\ or Documents:)The root name (e.g., AUTOEXEC or Read
Me)The extension (e.g., .BAT or
.txt)
As you can see from the examples, this tends to be true for all
operating systems. In Windows, you might see
C:\DOS\AUTOEXEC.BAT, and on the Mac you might
see Macintosh HD:Documents:Read Me.txt, but all
four parts are there in each filename.Each part does a different job:Volume name
Tells us where the file can be found. The volume can be the internal
hard drive (as in our previous example), an external storage device,
a CD, or a floppy.
Directory and subdirectories
Together with the volume, these give us the pathname of the file. The
pathname in our example is C:\DOS\ or
Macintosh HD:Documents:.
Root name
Pretty much what we call a filename, period. It's
the basic name of the file. Without the root name, we
don't have anything.
Extension
Often, our only clue to what kind of data the file contains The
extension .jpg indicates a JPEG image,
.tif a TIFF image, .txt an
ASCII text file, .doc a Microsoft Word document,
and so on. So, we don't want to mangle our
extensions (even if modern operating systems sometimes hide them from
view). Tread carefully here.
5.4.2 Organizing by Filename
To use this information to organize thousands of
images, first think about your images and
the way you shoot. Do you shoot business separately from pleasure? Do
you shoot more than one event at a time, storing them all together?Then, work out a naming system for your volumes. Give meaningful
family names to your external (and infinitely extendable) storage
media, such as CDs and DVDs. You might name the volumes by year,
season, location, or client, depending on how you work.The volumes represent your permanent collection or archive. Your
internal hard disk should only be a waiting room for your images
until they find a permanent place on a removable disc. And that disc
should be copied so that your collection can exist in two places: one
at hand, and one offsite for insurance. That way, when your smoke
alarm goes off, you won't have to grab the photo
albums on your way out. You can grab clean underwear.By using well-named directories and subdirectories (or folders),
these broad categories can be organized into smaller collections.
Just don't overdo it. Remember, you
don't want to have to remember anything. A hierarchy
of one or two levels is deep enough.
5.4.3 Real-World Example
I originally used a scheme much like the one used by iPhoto: a folder
name for the year, another for the month, another for the day. That
buried my images a little too deeply to see what I had quickly.Gramps wouldn't have approved of a system that put
everything in boxes that were stored in drawers behind cabinet doors.
Everything has to be out there on shelves or in cubbyholes, where you
can see it.So, I simplified my system by creating long folder names that said it
all. Of course, I wasn't restricted by the
eight-character root MS-DOS filename limit anymore. Modern Macintosh,
Unix, and Windows systems all support my new scheme, which is simply
the year, the month, and the day (in numerals), followed by a short
description (a slug, really) of the event.For example, 2003.12.25-Christmas works on any
operating system. You can use more than one period, and hyphens are
fine. Not every character is legal, though. Beware of slashes and
colons especially, but every operating system has its taboo
characters.Folders named this way will sort naturally by date in any
alphabetical directory listing. So, you can quickly scan nothing more
than the default directory listing to find someone's
birthday, a client shoot, or anything at all. You can even use your
operating system's search utility to limit results
to just those events.In the real world, we don't just shoot images; we
edit them. But that doesn't make the originals
indispensable.As soon as I copy the images to my hard disk from the flash memory
card, I copy them to a second device. Only then do I return the card
to service, wiping it clean only in the camera. I make two CDs of the
original images and leave them on my internal hard disk for a few
months to edit, print, and share as I see fit.I save the new versions in a folder with the same name as the
originals but with a little appendage, such as
-r for retouched. So, our
Christmas images in 2003.12.25-Christmas might
have slightly improved versions in
2003.12.25-Christmas-r.
5.4.4 Auto Keywords
There's another advantage of using an
explicit pathname. If you do one day
decide to use a program such as Photoshop Album or Portfolio to
catalog your collection, the pathnames can automatically be parsed on
import to create keywords for each image in the directoryvery
cool.Keywords make it easy to find images with a greater degree of
precision than our shoot-oriented system. With date and event
keywords automatically added, you can spend your time adding specific
keywords to each image to identify them further. Nothing else will do
when it's time to find pictures of Dad
or My First Girlfriend or
My Last Husband.
5.4.5 Image Root Names
Many programs let you change the root name of your image file from a
nondescript DSC2345.JPG to something meaningful.
That strikes me as too much work. Your camera names each image. Let
it and forget it. This system thrives on not remembering anything.If you simply put the description of your shoot in the folder name,
you don't have to change the root names of all your
image files. And you can change any particular ones you want without
disorganizing the collection.
5.4.6 Final Thoughts
Gramps didn't organize his basement just for the
pleasure of it. He was an avid amateur golfer who played in
tournaments all over the state. Keeping the basement in shape gave
him more time to hone his game.Keeping your image collection in shape will, at the very least, let
you spend more time taking and editing pictures. And you
don't need to spend a penny to do it!Mike Pasini |
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