Organizing Photos

Five weeks into DSLR photography and I have a library of thousand photographs! Phew! Organizing them is another challenge. I spent 3~4hrs one day and decided to continue with Picasa over iPhoto. I will write down the reasons why I choose Picasa over iPhoto another day but there still is one aspect of Picasa that is yet under-developed and one of its biggest negative aspect is the inability to rank photos inside the Picasa environment.

For example, within the iPhoto environment, a 5-star system is available that you can utilize to browse through photos in different styles at different time. Like, if you want to sort out “good” photos from the entire collection, you can assign them a 3-star. For the “outstanding” photos, you can assign them a 5-start. Later on, depending on the situation, you can search for only the 5-star photographs and browse through them.

Picasa’s has a simpler method where you can “star” photographs as you browse them by simply hitting the spacebar. Unfortunately, when I have a thousand photos, this simple solution is insufficient and I need a more developed solution. Hoping a Gmail type multi-colored star solutions, I decided to check if any plug-in is available that supports such a solution. Unfortunately, the answer is NO.

So, (against my wishes), I came up with my personal 3-level hierarchical solution. The solution consists of 3 folders. Photos_all, Photos_Star, Photos_Flickr.

Photos_all is the library where all photos from the camera are exported to. After the transfer, as I browse along, I prefer to star them. The number of starred photos are approximately 40% of the photos shot. I next browse the starred-photos again to select a smaller number for basic editing (like cropping, straightening, etc). This is around 20% of the original set. Over time, this second layer of selection and retrieval was becoming increasingly difficult. For this purpose, I created the Photos_Star folder where these photos are moved to. Now, during the final step, I move 5% of these photos to the folder Photos_Flickr where I keep the photos I intend to upload to Flickr where I have decided to upload only my best shots (and naturally that number is very small).

In a way, the photos in Photos_Flickr photos represent my favorite shots and a quick slideshow of these photos from my laptop is also sufficient to show someone my photographic experiences. If someone shows more interest, I can then go to Photos_Star, which should be sufficient most of the times. If I have to upload photos to Facebook/PicasaWeb, where I upload a larger number of photos to share with my friends, I can also access Photos_Star to quickly do the job.

As a last bit of criticism and why Picasa must build the multi-starred solution, this process of creating multiple folders doesn’t work when I come back from a trip and I don’t want to create multiple sub-folders each time.