Photo Organization

Curious... what software do you use for your digital photo organization?

They have software for that?? I just use folders!

Mary - some people use ACDSee because you can tag and find your photos, elements, papers etc easily.

But then again you can do something very similar with Windows Photo Gallery.

I must admit that I don't bother much - I am kind of lazy there but I do store all my pics on a separate EHD because I am paranoid about losing them.

I have my photos in folders organized by month and year and then use Picasa to tag family and friends.

I just use simple folders as well. I go by month and if there was a big event within that month there will be a sub folder. I've found I just don't have time to tag everything so I try to use that time to just stay on top of it instead.

Picasa is cool. Like Scrapble said, you can tag people in it, which is awesome.

Other cool photo organization programs are Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop) and the Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer (which comes with Photoshop Elements).

My personal favorite, and I can rave about it for hours if you let me, is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Once installed, you can set it up to automatically open & bring up import files box when you stick your camera's memory card in your computer. It will automatically copy the photos into the right spot on your hard drive, and all of the settings are customizable.

My Lightroom is set up to save the files in a folder for every year, and sub-folders for every day. For example, my Christmas photos went in My Photos/2012/December 25. So, in effect, the photos get organized by event. You can set up Lightroom to automatically tag events if you keep on top of things and import photos after every event, and put other kinds of metadata into the files. The newest version of Lightroom has geo-tagging support and you can find photos later by location (if you import your photos from a camera phone or something with geo-tagging in it).

Then you can non-destructively color-correct photos, crop them, and do spot removal. And you can export them formatted for the web right there, without ever having to go into Photoshop.

By the time I get into Photoshop to scrapbook, my photos are ready and I can concentrate on making my page.

I usually organize my digi kits in Bridge, and organize my photos in Lightroom. It works for me

One more thing about Lightroom: the new version has a Photobook option. I haven't done it yet, but I've heard about it and have been meaning to try it. It will let you arrange your photo book right inside Lightroom, and will even automatically upload it to Blurb for printing. Next time I print a book, that's what I'm doing

Online, for sharing photos, I like the Shutterfly share sites and Photoshop.com. But I haven't done any big family photo sharing online in a while.

Mary

Since I was a Creative Memories consultant when their program came out, I have used Memory Maker. It has a lot more capability than I ever utilize, including setting up an album so that you can import pages pre-set up with journaling boxes and everything into the scrapbooking program. I found it just as easy to do that as I went.
I organize my photos mostly by month (chronologically), but with special events having a separate folder and also special albums having folders. My program stores all the photos so you can place it as many folders as you want, but it only has 1 copy. For instance, I can have a picture of Disneyland in a folder for that month that we visited, in a vacation album and also in a gift album folder for the grandparents.
I can journal with the photo to remember details and mark things as favorites to find later.

Meagan,

Journaling as you import your photos is such an awesome idea. I'll have to start doing that. By the time I get around to scrapbooking my photos, my memories have left, but I usually haven't forgotten when I import the photos.

That software sounds cool!

Mary

My DH just uses folders that he dates and identifies by subject. He makes one for every event; it makes it SO much easier than going through an entire month of photos to find the one I want. I also gives me an idea of what events I have to scrap, which is LOTS!

I use folders for each event labeled as YYYY-MM(-DD) Event Name.

Then I use Picasa for viewing my photos as I shoot in Raw. And it does a pretty good job of automatically ID'ing folks since I have a pretty big library already built.