Best practices archiving digital photos

Any advice on digital photo archival or description? Would you keep files in RDBMS files so you can describe them with date, keyword, classifications and comments? Would it be easier to give plain old files long file names filled with keywords?

How do you categorize them? Folders? Any commercial software or shareware worth using?

What's the best way to back them up? A big thanks!

overweightnerd
Sunday, June 27, 2004

iView Media Pro if it's just for you.

There are other server-based tools available for larger scale operations such as magazine publishers and newspapers, but I feel safe in assuming that you aren't in that situation or you wouldn't be asking here.  If that assumption is wrong, let me know and I'll dig up some names.

Cabby
Sunday, June 27, 2004

A couple of people recommended ThumbsPlus to a similar query a while ago, and I found a thing called LinPHA (http://linpha.sourceforge.net/nuke/index.php) which seems to  solve most of these sorts of problmes

bah humbug
Sunday, June 27, 2004

If you have the money have a look at this: http://www.acdsystems.com/English/index.htm

somemorone
Sunday, June 27, 2004

Adobe Photo Album ( http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/main.html ).

I couldn't imagine managing my pictures (only about 1800 currently) without its 'tag' system.

Essentially drag a category tag for every category that matches to a given photo.  So if I want to see pictures of my wife on the beach, I can click the checkbox next to the "Beach" and "Wife" tags, and I get all the matching pictures.

You can also search by date, date range, etc.  Essentially anything you could do if they were in an RDBMS.

Well worth the money.

Andrew Hurst
Sunday, June 27, 2004

there's a number of systems out there, sorry i can't reccomend one.
but the Adobe program is the first consumer software I can remember hearing a radio ad for in ages.

mb
Monday, June 28, 2004

Paint Shop Pro 8 is bundled with a photo organizer.  You can assign (unlimited?) attributes to a photo and query against those.

Yo
Monday, June 28, 2004

Any reason why these tag/query systems can't interoperate? It's the age of Unicode and XML after all... who has the biggest clout/who presents the de facto tag storage system?

overweightnerd
Monday, June 28, 2004

ACDSee, which someone already mentioned, is pretty amazing for $50.  It has a very nice system for archiving photos onto CD's and keeping thumbs and metadata in a database on the hard drive; very easy to find the picture you want and then it tells you which CD to load the get the whole picture file.  (Of course you can also just get a huge hard drive and devote it to images.)

http://www.acdsystems.com/English/index.htm

As ACDSee demonstrates, there's no need to store the image files in a database to get the benefit of  being able to search metadata associated with each picture.

Herbert Sitz
Monday, June 28, 2004

Take your CD-R to the local photo shop and have them print them on archival-quality paper.  Then write who's in the photo on the back so you'll know 20 years from now.

As much as I like digital technology, I've seen too many file-format changes to trust leaving them in the digital domain without hardcopy backup.  The family photo album has some daguerreotypes in it, and guess what, you can still view them after ~160 years!

chiph
Monday, June 28, 2004

Second on Photoshop Album. It's practical, easy to use, and doesn't take as much time as other "solutions".

Janonymous
Monday, June 28, 2004

I make a freeware image cataloguing program... maybe you find it useful.

Check: www.daremon.gr/cheez/

daremon
Monday, June 28, 2004

I third Adobe Photo Album. I have purchased three copies (my parents, in-laws and self) I love it so much!

m
Monday, June 28, 2004

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