Organizing a variety of photos

Hi Folks,

I’m hoping some of you will have some advice on managing a somewhat messy collection of photos which include:

  • RAW photos
  • Jpgs “developed” from the RAW files
  • Intermediate tiff files generated in the editing process from panorama stitching or hdr, etc.
  • phone snapshots, often of poor quality but personal significance
  • photos taken by friends on trips we went on together

I’m an amateur, there’s no real distinction between personal and professional work, although some of the photos represents a deliberate photographic efforts while others… well, don’t.

I was thinking of just throwing all “developed” images into digikam and keeping the RAW photos organized by a hierarchical directory structure. If a consistent naming convention was followed, it would be fairly easy to find the RAW file associated with any jpeg. An additional benefit of this approach is that it’s RAW editor independent. However, it does seem a shame to leave all the RAW photos un-tagged and relatively unsorted. I don’t always develop every promising photo at once, so I could imagine a few nice shots getting lost in the shuffle. If I do include RAW and partially processed files, though… then the digikam archive gets a bit messy to browse with as many as 3 or 4 nearly identical images of varying file type or crop or assembly, etc. – this makes scrolling through photos to show friends or just to remember old trips kind of unpleasant.

In someways google photo seems like a good solution for final images. It makes it easy to share photos and the interface is nice for browsing. That said, I’m trying to rely on fewer google services, not more at the moment.

A friend suggested using digikam to handle all files, and then export to something like piwigo to present and browse through the developed images. Is that something that piwigo would be well suited for? Most of the examples I’ve seen make it look more suitable for presenting albums of finished, polished work than for viewing old photos in a timeline mode, for example.

Any other suggestions or recommendations?

Thanks in advance!

1 Like

Developing and documenting images should be separated. I only want to comment on documenting.

Since documenting is quite an effort, I would not rely on any dedicated software, because you never know how long it will be supported (as had happened e.g. to Google’s Picasa). I do the following (assuming that text files and some sort of spreadsheets will be available forever):

  • tag images using EXIFtoolGUI and geosetter
  • export tags in a text file, one file per image
  • import these text files into EXCEL with a dedicated VBA macro

Should some day the EXCEL-format no longer be supported, I can export the EXCEL spreadsheet to a text file and import into some other format.

I do not use any special naming convention.

The EXCEL spreadsheet can be filtered (e.g. to select those images with my grandparents on vacation in Italy during 1960 to 1970) and hyperlinks can be used to display the images from within EXCEL. One feature of the macro is to copy the filtered list of images to another device, either for a slide show or to export for friends. Cross-reference between raw images and developed images could easily be included.

Hermann-Josef

Kphotoalbum?
Hierarchical tags, thumbnails (stackable), multisearches…
No problem with 25000 images, nor with raws.

I separate mine by their intention and effort: phone shots and other snapshots go into one git-annex repo, raw files for art go into another repo. I usually don’t edit my snapshots. I also don’t keep intermediate files from stitching usually, but I do retain the PTO file. I have yet another folder for XCF and tiff files, and another one for finished print files.

Looks interesting. What’s the major difference from digikam?

I use seperate folders.

  • One folder with my RAW files (including the darktable XMP and a small jpg for preview and quick browsing)
  • One folder with all exported JPG’s, that includes all you mentioned ‘phone snapshots’ and ‘photos taken by friends’
  • One folder for ‘intermediate tiff files’
  • One folder with all stitched panoramas in PNG

Example directory structure:

Photos
Photos/RAW-archive/
Photos/RAW-archive/20190701_holiday_beach
Photos/RAW-archive/20190621_family_meeting
photos/finalphotos/
photos/finalphotos/20190701_holiday_beach
photos/finalphotos/20190621_family_meeting
photos/panoramas/

The ‘finalphotos’ directory is for showing and sharing photos to others (smartphones, nextcloud)

Kphotoalbum only organizes (one tool, one activity).
No more need to try the “ideal” folder system…