| 1/60 | f2.2 | ISO 1600 | 50mm | RAW |
This is a rather bland, simple photo. But the underlying significance is huge. This box represents all of my archived photos from before I started using an image management system. It contains nearly all of the photos I have taken since 2002 (sadly, some are missing) and it is sitting beside my desk, open and ready for me to import and catalog them all.
It's a daunting task, but one that I want to get done. I have actually started, but there is a long way to go.
Why would I want to do such a thing? For three reasons. First, those old photos aren't really getting looked at and there are some good ones in there. Second, I sometimes have a past client ask for copies of their photos again. And third, I have a bunch of family and personal shots in there, too. My wife and kids just love looking at their old photos, and it becomes very easy to find particular photos with proper tagging in Photoshop Elements.
That's right, I said Elements. I use Photoshop Elements for managing my photos, and I love it. The Organizer part of the program is fantastic. You can tag photos, add captions, attach keywords, and search everything based on those items. Best yet, you can limit your searches to specific time frames to help narrow your results.
As for my current photos, everything goes into Elements (the current count is nearly 25,000). I have a specific regimen for importing photos and I don't deviate from it. Every photo that goes into Elements gets tagged on import so I can find it later.
I know that Elements isn't as nice as some of the other products out there (like Lightroom), but it was also only $90. And I went through a two or three month period of trying out a bunch of products. I didn't want Elements to win initially (I can be pretty anti-establishment sometimes, and believe me — Adobe is definitely the establishment when it comes to imaging software). But I realized I kept comparing everything I tried to what Elements could do. So I went out and bought Elements.
What kind of organizing do you do? Anyone want to share?
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2 comments:
Like the photo alot. I'm just starting to use Elements to sort my pictures and find it works great.
I also use the organiser in Elements; like you, I tag any new photos as soon as they're imported to try and keep on top of things. I find it to be very useful, it creates quite a powerful database of my picture files that lets me quickly track down what I want. It can at times be a little bit glitchy though, but I've learnt to live with that.
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