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Best way to organize photos & videos
Hey Guys, just wondering how you guys organize your photos and videos on the computer. I've just been throwing them in folders named by month and year under "my document", but I need a better way to organize the stuff since there are too many now. I use Windows XP, though I've been dabbling a little in Ubuntu lately. Is there a program you guys use to access your photos and videos that can organize them better?
Comments
For photos Adobe Bridge or Lightroom might work for you. Otherwise on a Mac you could use iPhoto or Lightroom and for WIndows there probably is a program in WIndows Live Essentials, I have no idea though wether it works with XP.
@Luke, Mainly for organization, but sure, I'm up for suggestions on editing software, conversion software, ect. Spend money to organize my photos? Not really. I've just found that I have a lot of photos on my hard drive now and want to find a better way to organize and keep track of them other than just sticking them in a dated folder. I have Picasa which seems to organize based on how I organize my dated folders. Though it does have the facial recognition thing which will also show photos by person. Using Picasa, I'm uploading photos to the drop box to be accessed on Google+ by the family.
I just got a Canon T2i and have been playing around taking a ton of pictures and videos. They are mostly family stuff so I'd like to organize them for making/editing video collages for the parents.
This leads to the concept of tagging files. Throw all the music, videos, and pictures in one directory. Metadata tags can cover whether it is video, music, picture, porn, not-porn, which genres the file could belong to (music and movie classification often tries to create singular, hard categorization which is pretty fail), etc. Then you can create playlists or drill into your media using a tag cloud interface. ID3, btw, sucks ass for its rigid definitions that don't apply to all music.
I would like to use some file tagging software to keep track of and access my media. I've used a few programs in the past, but I can't recommend any of them. They all focus on one media type in particular, have bad user interfaces, or have slow backend implementations. Most of what I found was made for Windows; I could find very little for Mac or Linux.
I have heard something about Google OS going this route, but it all seems like myth and rumor.
I don't know if bodtchboy is interested in any kind of file tagging software, but if anyone else has good recommendations, I am certainly interested.
Not that I can recall which ones may have such functionality.
edit: of course stack overflow has the answers
To answer your original question:
I use Adobe Lightroon 3 on my MacBook Pro. It is a very good tool for both editing and organizing the photos. When you get use to it, you can edit hundreds of photos at a very high speed. I can sort through 2000 photos, select which ones I want to share, edit them, label them and export them all in a single evening. Thankfully Facebook reads (and unfortunately then discards) the metadata, but it means I can put titles, descriptions, captions and copyright in the metadata using Lightroom, and then when they arrive on Facebook the labels are already in place. Handy! You can also upload directly to Facebook and other photo services like Picassa directly from Lightroom, though I've never done that myself.
It organizes by date, but then you can view or share them any way you want with smart collections.
And it is great for archive too. You create a library on your laptop, and then another library on an external hard drive. When you drag a folder to the other library, it transfers everything across, but loses none of the settings of collections or anything if you disconnect the external drive. There is no re-importing into the library, or anything like that. And the coolest thing is that it keeps quite large versions of all the archived images in a local library file. That means you don't have to connect the hard drive to see what is on which drive, or to find the original file. You find the file first, and then connect the correct drive to work with the original file.
It can organize, display and edit video files too. Personally I don't use it for this, as I like to keep video and photos in different places, and archive them in different ways. Maybe if it had this functionality in Lightroom 2, the version I first used, I'd do it that way, but I got used to a different workflow.
Finally, Lightroom costs money. About 200 dollars, I think.
BUT!
Don't let this put you off. Good software like Lightroom is VERY MUCH worth the money. Before you buy a new camera or lens (which if you get into photography you will do) buy Lightroom (or Aperture). It is worth more to a photographer than a new camera or lens. You can effortlessly improve your images with subtle manipulation of the files. It is very satisfying to see your work come to life in this way.
The noise reduction in Lightroom 3 is dangerously good, and knowing it is there lets you shoot in darker conditions at higher ISO without making your photos worthless blobs of nothing. The distortion and colour correction can make a cheap lens look like one 5 times the cost.
And the most important thing is that it makes taking more photos no more burdensome than taking fewer. The more photos you take, the better you get at photography. Installing Lightroom (or Aperture) will make you better at photography, despite any features of the software itself.
The camera then converts it to a JPG itself, and does various manipulations in the process, like adjusting colour balances, noise reduction, lens distortion correction, sharpening, as well as any user-preset options like sepia, black and white, portrait, landscape, and that ilk.
It also picks the best "brightness" setting, and discards the exposure data that is too far out of the range of JPG compression. This data can't be retrieved from the JPG file.
It also compresses the file, which discards even more data, smooths out colour, makes the edges blocky in the process.
Then the camera discards the RAW file completely.
By saving the RAW file, you can then control all those processes yourself, using Lightroom or Aperture or Photoshop or another application. Your computer can do a much better job than your camera, and you can preview the results, and perform different processes to different parts of the same image, and so many other things.
It is possible to do the same processes with a JPG file, but you are just repeating steps already performed by the camera, and each repetition reduces the quality further.
And, of course, if you want to brighten or darken any part of the image, you simply can't do it with a JPG, as it is already compressed to what can be displayed on monitors and what can be seen with the eye. Dynamic range of sensors is going up all the time, and all that is captured in RAW files, to be manipulated later.
When I take photos of jugglers on stage I underexpose intentionally all the time, to reduce motion blur and to make sure any highlight on the bright costume or props isn't clipping the whites. The lowlights, the dark areas of the photo, is usually the black background behind the juggler, and I don't mind loss of detail here. Then in Lightroom I boost the exposure again between half and a full stop, and the juggler pops out of the background, looking sharp and bright. This process would be impossible with JPG, as the background would be a huge area of blocky black tones, badly compressed and easily discerned by the eye.
(copied from an email...)
Cameras:
Canon 60D.
Canon 500D (only as a spare and as a backup video camera).
Lenses I use:
Canon 10-22mm EF-S wide angle - my favourite lens by far!
Canon 50mm 1.8 - slightly broken, and I'm thinking of upgrading to the 50mm 1.4 instead. The 1.8 is an awesome value lens, about 100 dollars for amazing portrait photographs, but the plastic build means they are disposable as I travel so much and use my gear so much.
Canon 70-300mm IS - great value telephoto zoom, good for all kinds of things from portrait to wildlife to taking photos of jugglers on stage.
Canon 18-55mm EF-S - the kit lens that came with my 500D, I never use it for photography, but it gets me the focal length between the above lenses, and that is good for video projects.
Old lenses that are broken, but I can still use in some cases:
Canon 50mm 1.8 - like I said, almost a disposable item.
Tamron 100-300mm telephoto - lasted about 9 months hard use before the autofocus broke. The focus was super slow anyway, and the colour and sharpness of the picture was variable throughout the zoom range.
Tamron 10-24mm wide angle - lasted about 14 months before breaking in a way that I can't explain easily here. Still great for some video uses. The picture quality is surpassed in every way by the Canon 10-22mm.
I bought the Tamron lenses as they are about half the cost of the equivalent Canon lenses, but you really do get what you pay for. In both cases I didn't know if a wide angle or telephoto lens was what I truly wanted or needed, and didn't want to spend 700 euro on the Canon lens, nor did I want to rent a lens to travel with to get a feel for it. But in both cases I realized they were exactly what I wanted. Once they broke, I bought the same model but from Canon, and the higher quality of the photos was noticeable, at least by me. And the Canon lenses don't feel as though they are going to break at any moment, as I felt with the Tamron lenses. And they did break.
If I were to buy a new kind of lens, I think I'd rent one for a week or so, and then go direct to the Canon version. I have a feeling I'd be saving money that way, as I now know more about photography and what I want from gear. But it gets very expensive very quickly, so I probably won't be spending more money on it for a while. There is nothing more I think I need or want right now. I'm still learning how to use my Canon Speedlite 580.
But seriously, buy Lightroom before any new lens or camera. By fiddling with the settings in software you learn so much more about photography, so you'll be way more informed about what new hardware to buy in the future.
I'm also considering an Olympus PEN E-PL1 due to the smaller size.
I would get a DSLR, just because it teaches you so much about photography, like framing, shutter speed, ISO, aperture and potentially photography software. Tis a fine art to know about and you can always use a "photoshoot" as a setup for a data with a cute girl.
So I would recommend a Nikon D80 with the stock 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 (I think that was the stock lens, I am not sure, it was the stock one with the one I borrowed), which are though little mofos, I borrowed one for about a year before I got my D90 new. It is everything you want in a camera, minus live view and video recording, with good all around performance. Depending on how much you want to spend I would get a 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor lens to go with it, but that is an extra $150. How much are you looking to spend? Also, I am not sure of the Canon options (once you pick a brand, you are basically stuck as even if you get a new body, all your old lenses are in the old mount), so ask Luke about them as he is a Canon man. Remember it is worth investing in the body of your camera, as that is what you are going to be using for the longest, you will change lenses a lot.
Tips on starting DSLR photography, buy a large ass card and run around an area practicing, I spend a whole day just playing around in Camden Market and Reagents Park before I was really confident with a camera. Learn yourself the settings (shutter speed, when to use flash, flash delay, ISO and aperture), nothing is more painful than seeing a scene kid with a DSLR who is just using the auto shoot mode, it literally breaks my heart. Also Lifehacker recently did a night school series on the basics of photography, which is brilliant if you are starting out and have no clue what to do. You don't need to buy one of those $20 digital photography for retards books, which are kinda rubbish from what I have seen. Also hang around camera stores, photographers love to explain their art to you and you can usually use their gear for a short while and try out the more high end lenses.
When you hit the UK, I would be happy to come up to the north and shoot some photos with you!