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It's interesting to me that the author has photos on multiple devices. I sync mine to my PC, where they get placed in folders named yyyy.mm.dd - [location/event

It's interesting to me that the author has photos on multiple devices. I sync mine to my PC, where they get placed in folders named yyyy.mm.dd - [location/event]. Since my kid was born I started adding folders named yyyy.mm, which contain the day-to-day photos for a month. Given that I've been doing this ever since I started amassing digital photos, and that the author doesn't, and that her NY Times post is on HN, I have to wonder what others do with their photos.

rbritton 12y ago
I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside that folder is an Aperture library per category (e.g., Weddings, Portraits, Personal, etc.) Inside each Aperture library there are projects for each grouping of photos (e.g., Valley of Fire). Every file has a unique name that includes the date photographed and the frame number. I do allow Aperture to keep the image files internally because it simplifies backups. Aperture does not support XMP sidecar files like Lightroom and others do, so the only benefit I feel I'm losing out on by not storing them separately is having a file structure that matches the library structure. The libraries themselves are OS X packages, so it is possible to extract the files relatively easily if I'm no longer able to open Aperture in the future. I also do not care to have most photos on multiple devices. I have the ability to remote into the computer with the photos from anywhere I have an internet connection, so I'm able to grab a file if needed. With multiple terabytes of photos it's impractical to make them universally available to all of my devices anyway.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
PavlovsCat 12y ago
I don't really "amass" photos that much, but for what it's worth, I auto-rename all photos to yy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss first thing I do after deleting the ones I don't want to keep. From then on out it's pretty much just a tree of folders, with the ones that have a lot of photos in them having additional subfolders per year. So far I never even had use for using tags, and my main tool is still the delete key followed by enter :)
- DanBC 12y ago
  How do you find all the photos of Bob?
  - Spearchucker 12y ago
    That's a great question and one I haven't solved for my scenario other than knowing who was with me when I did x at y. The idea is to tag photos in a database (photo location and name, plus tags). One of many things on my todo list.
  - java-man 12y ago
    Does anyone know of an open source (BSD/Apache) face detection/recognition algorithm? It would be relatively easy to plug it in into my Secure Digital Archive tool.
    - dunham 12y ago
      OpenCV does detection. I haven't found anything to do recognition, I suspect it's a much harder problem. It's not open source, but in the past I've used picassa to do recognition. You let it run, interact with it to resolve ambiguities, and then pull the face assignments/rectangles out of the .picasa.ini files that it drops next to your photos. (There was also a contacts.xml file somewhere that provided the mapping from a guid to name/email.)
    - rokhayakebe 12y ago
      Jason Calacanis interviewed this company (http://www.kairos.com/pricing http://www.kairos.com/pricing) last week. While not OS, you can implement their product and get 5000 free api calls per month which should take care of your personal library.
    - java-man 12y ago
      @dunham: thanks for suggestion! openCV is c/c++, and for security reasons I can't use external tools.
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
bane 12y ago
I mostly shoot photos when traveling. So I do year\year-month location Then under that yyyymmdd, then sorted by camera (I have multiple) and then location or subject and under that pictures of people I'm with (I like taking pictures of things more than people so my pictures of friends/family go in their own folder, while my wife likes pictures of people more) sorted by person or group of people. So for example 2010\2010-11 Paris\2010-11-27\Nikon\Louvre Is where all the pictures of the Louvre I took on that day are. If I need to find pictures of the Louvre, I just use Everything on the top level folder and search for "Louvre". It works well enough, and I just sort everything back at the hotel while I'm copying off of my camera onto my laptop. I'm not super strict about the specific locations, sometimes under "Nikon" will just be a pile of pictures. Depends on how motivated I am to sort. I'm usually really good about filtering out pictures of people from stuff though, and I post pictures of people to my G+ account so my friends and wife and can enjoy them, and I use my flickr for stuff. The best quality stuff I then publish through Getty. Maybe less than 1% gets professionally published, but I have almost 120,000 photos organized this way. I spend lots of time editing metadata in flickr and even more for the Getty material since they have very high quality control. I don't really make much money at it, but it's a hobby and I get to call myself a "professional photographer" in some settings.
- jwr 12y ago
  How do you deal with multiple versions of a single photo? Ones with vsrious adjustments, or cropped in different ways?
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    I'm sure other applications can do that too, but Bibble (since bought by Corel and named Aftershot or something) allows for several sets of settings to exist as "versions" of a RAW file, so it doesn't actually create "physical files" (the cropped/edited etc. JPEG/PNG version, that is) until it's time for the batch to output them how and where you want them, which means you can always delete and recreate the output files at will.
  - bane 12y ago
    I don't. I just dump them all in the same pot and look at them. If I need to select some out for some purpose (making an album or something), I just make another folder inside there and copy out the ones I need for that purpose. The ones I publish, I go through, pick the best shots from the group and when I go through and edit the levels and crops and such I usually do a little pruning of that set along the way and the edited versions go in yet another folder deeper (so I have a non-destructive copy). It's useful for me to publish several variations (like different zoom levels or crops) so they buyers can buy one that fits their need the best.

rbritton 12y ago

I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside that folder is an Aperture library per category (e.g., Weddings, Portraits, Personal, etc.) Inside each Aperture library there are projects for each grouping of photos (e.g., Valley of Fire). Every file has a unique name that includes the date photographed and the frame number. I do allow Aperture to keep the image files internally because it simplifies backups. Aperture does not support XMP sidecar files like Lightroom and others do, so the only benefit I feel I'm losing out on by not storing them separately is having a file structure that matches the library structure. The libraries themselves are OS X packages, so it is possible to extract the files relatively easily if I'm no longer able to open Aperture in the future. I also do not care to have most photos on multiple devices. I have the ability to remote into the computer with the photos from anywhere I have an internet connection, so I'm able to grab a file if needed. With multiple terabytes of photos it's impractical to make them universally available to all of my devices anyway.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

PavlovsCat 12y ago

I don't really "amass" photos that much, but for what it's worth, I auto-rename all photos to yy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss first thing I do after deleting the ones I don't want to keep. From then on out it's pretty much just a tree of folders, with the ones that have a lot of photos in them having additional subfolders per year. So far I never even had use for using tags, and my main tool is still the delete key followed by enter :)

DanBC 12y ago
How do you find all the photos of Bob?
- Spearchucker 12y ago
  That's a great question and one I haven't solved for my scenario other than knowing who was with me when I did x at y. The idea is to tag photos in a database (photo location and name, plus tags). One of many things on my todo list.
- java-man 12y ago
  Does anyone know of an open source (BSD/Apache) face detection/recognition algorithm? It would be relatively easy to plug it in into my Secure Digital Archive tool.
  - dunham 12y ago
    OpenCV does detection. I haven't found anything to do recognition, I suspect it's a much harder problem. It's not open source, but in the past I've used picassa to do recognition. You let it run, interact with it to resolve ambiguities, and then pull the face assignments/rectangles out of the .picasa.ini files that it drops next to your photos. (There was also a contacts.xml file somewhere that provided the mapping from a guid to name/email.)
  - rokhayakebe 12y ago
    Jason Calacanis interviewed this company (http://www.kairos.com/pricing http://www.kairos.com/pricing) last week. While not OS, you can implement their product and get 5000 free api calls per month which should take care of your personal library.
  - java-man 12y ago
    @dunham: thanks for suggestion! openCV is c/c++, and for security reasons I can't use external tools.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago

bane 12y ago

I mostly shoot photos when traveling. So I do year\year-month location Then under that yyyymmdd, then sorted by camera (I have multiple) and then location or subject and under that pictures of people I'm with (I like taking pictures of things more than people so my pictures of friends/family go in their own folder, while my wife likes pictures of people more) sorted by person or group of people. So for example 2010\2010-11 Paris\2010-11-27\Nikon\Louvre Is where all the pictures of the Louvre I took on that day are. If I need to find pictures of the Louvre, I just use Everything on the top level folder and search for "Louvre". It works well enough, and I just sort everything back at the hotel while I'm copying off of my camera onto my laptop. I'm not super strict about the specific locations, sometimes under "Nikon" will just be a pile of pictures. Depends on how motivated I am to sort. I'm usually really good about filtering out pictures of people from stuff though, and I post pictures of people to my G+ account so my friends and wife and can enjoy them, and I use my flickr for stuff. The best quality stuff I then publish through Getty. Maybe less than 1% gets professionally published, but I have almost 120,000 photos organized this way. I spend lots of time editing metadata in flickr and even more for the Getty material since they have very high quality control. I don't really make much money at it, but it's a hobby and I get to call myself a "professional photographer" in some settings.

jwr 12y ago
How do you deal with multiple versions of a single photo? Ones with vsrious adjustments, or cropped in different ways?
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  I'm sure other applications can do that too, but Bibble (since bought by Corel and named Aftershot or something) allows for several sets of settings to exist as "versions" of a RAW file, so it doesn't actually create "physical files" (the cropped/edited etc. JPEG/PNG version, that is) until it's time for the batch to output them how and where you want them, which means you can always delete and recreate the output files at will.
- bane 12y ago
  I don't. I just dump them all in the same pot and look at them. If I need to select some out for some purpose (making an album or something), I just make another folder inside there and copy out the ones I need for that purpose. The ones I publish, I go through, pick the best shots from the group and when I go through and edit the levels and crops and such I usually do a little pruning of that set along the way and the edited versions go in yet another folder deeper (so I have a non-destructive copy). It's useful for me to publish several variations (like different zoom levels or crops) so they buyers can buy one that fits their need the best.