This weekend I've been doing a bit of digital spring cleaning; I've been sorting files on my laptop and it's got me pondering about something...
Sewing and blogging leads to lots of photos of our makes, it's inevitable. Sewing isn't one of the blogging genres that lends itself to mostly picture-less posts. Until now I've been storing all my photos together, folders by year, then separated by 'event' (and then sub-event folders if applicable. These folders are then named in the "yyyy mm dd - description" format to keep the folders sorted chronologically but with information of what's in them. "Normal' photos lend themselves quite well to this system, and I intend to keep it that way for those, however sewing photos don't work quite as well being sorted by date.
It seems to me that sorting them by project makes more sense. Sorting them by date is less relevant, and makes it harder to find a specific project's folder. Particularly as often on the bigger projects have photos spanning multiple dates, sometimes even months (or years).
Therefore, I'm thinking of changing my digital photo storage system to split the 'normal' photos from the sewing ones, but I'm still pondering the best way to organise the sewing photos. Should I still keep it by year? Should I name the folders by the project name, or pattern name, or garment type? And which will come first and be the primary order of the folders? Should I keep the date in there somewhere? or the pattern company? How will self-drafted designs fit in with this?
(This is my, erm, particular side coming out. I like things to be precise and to make sense).
And so, I thought I'd put the question out there - do you have a system for organising/naming your digital sewing/blogging photos? If so, I'd love to hear about it please!
I've been having the same sorting issue, which I've begun trying to fix. I use iPhoto, and took all sewing/blog photos and moved them to a separate "library." Now all regular/family photos are separate at least. I haven't sorted blog photos further, other than by date, but I wonder if they can be tagged with keywords?
ReplyDeleteI've never used iphoto, I have been using Picasa mostly for photo editing and such. Keywords would be a great thing if it was possible!
DeleteI am the ultimate folder keeper. I have a sewing photos folder and inside it contains folders for each type of garment: skirts, tops, jackets, coats, pants, jeans, etc. Inside each of those folders are pattern companies from which the garment was made; divided by pattern number. If I made the same pattern twice, then there is another folder titled according to the fabric or color.
ReplyDeleteHere's an example: "Skirts/New Look/6274/black & white zebra." This is all on my hard drive. My online photos are sorted according to pattern company and that's it. I don't upload every photo I take, so I'm less organized with those folders.
wow! So organised. I think that might be a step too far for me! I'd rather have much of that information in the folder name, rather than multiple sub-folders, but the order of your subfolders is something I was thinking about. Thanks for sharing!
DeleteI sort into various folders (or albums) as I go... and try to spend some time archiving and sorting old photos too. The biggest time suck is the facial recognition software that semi-automatically sorts as you add photos.
ReplyDeleteWhat software do you use? I use picasa and find it's facial recognition fantastic and not a big time suck at all (except for when I can't remember somebody's name)
DeleteI'm a mac user and I've been using iPhoto to organize my pictures for about 5 years. It's good enough for my needs.
ReplyDeleteMine are sorted into folders by date and in the past I've used Flickr as a key when I want photos of something particular. I think standard photo metadata does contain tags. I started using tags in Windows Photo Gallery (Vista) to tag people in photos (just using names as tags) and found that when I uploaded them to Flickr the tags went with them (and then I had to remove everyone's names from my Flickr tags!). But my point is, there's some kind of tagging/keywords in the metadata.
ReplyDeleteI use a free program called XN VIew but I can't think of anything that would be better in it than in Picasa. My boyfriend who's a bit more serious about his photography bought Adobe Lightroom and thinks it's great.