Temp Notes

Photo Organization Steps

They say a picture is worth 1000 words … and photographers are tasked with quantifying that into photo meta-data. Luckily, an international standard (IPTC) was established to help standardize that data. Unluckily, the scope of IPTC can be overkill for most (home) photographers. Any user can easily generate thousands of photos (depending on their enthusiasm), thereby generating a significant amount of work defining those photos. To limit the work I have to do, and ease the number of fields I would have to search upon, I have chosen to only use a specific subset of the IPTC data fields: LABEL, RATING, TITLE, DATE CREATED, CREATOR, COPYRIGHT NOTICE, URL, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION.

Photo Meta Data

When looking at a photo, there are a certain number of factors that are important to quantify it:

  1. When was it taken (date)
  2. What is the context that surrounds it (description)
  3. What is in the photo and its location (keywords)
  4. The quality the photo (rating)

There are others annotations (copyright, creator, etc), but the core information falls within those (4) fields.

Now the problems that I’ve had to deal with regards each of these data sets:

Date: The date is normally assigned by the camera into the EXIF information, and timestamped onto the file itself (as creation date). But this information can be incorrect for a number of reasons:

  1. The date was incorrect inside the camera (date was never set within the camera, different timezone, etc).
  2. The file timestamp is modified when copied, resaved, or manipulated (via user or photo application error).
  3. There is no timestamp within the photo metadata (using a stitching program to bind together multiple photos into a new file creates a file with no EXIF data and the file timestamp is the point of file creation, not when the photo was taken).

One solution to this that I’m considering, is to rename all (my) photos to match [date]-[timestamp].jpg. (for example: a photo taken on October 21st, 2006, at 5:30:22pm would read 20061021-173022.jpg). The only problems I have to consider are:

  1. Filename length limitations (FAT16 is an 8.3 naming convention)
  2. Doing a shoot with multiple cameras (some photos might have the exact same timestamp)

To some level I have to make concessions, the likelihood that I’ll be using multiple cameras simultaneously is quite low, and I believe that when it does happen, those will be special projects. I believe those photos might have a project/job name or some other special naming convention and will not be included in my general photo catalogue.

Context: how descriptive to be: my vacation, my vacation at the zoo, my vacation at the zoo and the trainer is feeding the lions. etc

Keywords: how many, what range, how descriptive, how much information is inferred

Rating: what to rate, how much you like it or how well it represents the intended subject

Raw Steps

  1. Import -> Date Folders (2006-04-15) -> iView Media Pro
  2. Assign (creator, copyright)
  3. Assign (title “sets”)
  4. Assign (shared keywords)
  5. Assign (shared/generic descriptions)
  6. Delete Bad Photos
  7. Rotate Photos (left, right, etc)
    1. Rebuild Thumbnails
  8. Assign (specific keywords)
  9. Assign (specific descriptions)
  10. Assign (ratings)
  11. Syncronize Annotations
  12. Move files to home
  13. Upload to blog

Header Image Size: 720 x 182 pixels

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