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MANAGING YOUR IMAGES AND NAMING FILES
by
Heather Shimmin
NAMING FILES-click here for the Podcast
With film you could get away with being disorganized, of having that just-throw-them-in-the-shoebox attitude. When you needed to find an image you could just pull down the overflowing shoebox from the closet shelf and sift through the images until you found what you were looking for. This is not the case with digital photographs. In fact, if you have continued this practice of throwing your images into your digital shoebox, I call you to repentance. You penance, however, is not as simple as saying ten Hale Mary’s and an hour of community service. You have some work do. But you’ll thank me in the end (yes, Mother). When it comes down to it, there are really only two things you need to worry about when managing your digital images: editing and organization.
THE EDITING PROCESS
The editing process is taking a critical eye to your images and deleting the bad ones, the out takes, the out of focus shots, and anything else that is not worth keeping. What isn’t worth keeping are the shots with poor composition, poor lighting, bad exposure, or are just plain boring. Your first impulse to either keep it or delete it is usually accurate. The more you stew about it, the more you think that the shot isn’t so bad and you end up keeping crap. You cannot fall into the trap of being a digital pack rat, saving and hoarding every image you take. It’s about quality, not quantity. Delete, delete, delete. We don’t need more imagery. We need more creative, innovative, and inspiring imagery. When it doubt, delete it. Now, I know you think this is harsh, but really, do you need 500 images of your trip to Paris? Do your friends want to sit through a slide show of 500 pictures from Paris? (In case you’re wondering, the answer is no.)
MAKING SENSE OF CHAOS
Now that you’ve whittled down your 500 shots from your jaunt to Paris, you need to put them in their appropriate place. How you organize your images is up to you, but you do need to create a system and stick to it. Here is a snap shot of how I do it. This system works for me. Under the pictures folder I have categories as well as folders with the name of the shoot. These are the projects I’m still working on. They might still need to be edited, delivered to the client, or are awaiting a model release. Whatever the reason, I know that I’m not finished with them. This way I can see exactly what projects I need to work on: Alyssa, San Juan Island WA, and Xagave. When I am finished, they go into a category folder and then sub folder, or into another folder called finished projects, where it awaits being transferred to my external hard drive to be archived. The finished projects folder is for images I don’t need to access frequently (e.g. my portfolio or website) and therefore don’t need to be taking up valuable space on my hard drive. And speaking of backing up, you need to have a specific day (for me it’s Sunday) to back up your files.
The second part of organizing your images is to fill out the meta data for every image. Meta data makes an image or file more search able by you and the search engines. This information is invaluable and is a necessity. Your computer and search engines (when you upload images) crawls the meta data, archives it, and catalogs the information. Here is a snap shot of the meta data form in Adobe Bridge. This gives you an idea of the completeness of the information you can attach to a file. You can create a template with information that doesn’t change (creator, phone number, website, etc., and apply it to every image and then just fill in the fields which do change (keyword, description, location, etc.).
FILE NAMING
First of all, you can’t leave the name of your file IMG_245 because that does not tell you anything about the image. Renaming your files helps you know what the image is of and it helps your computer in its search for that image. Like the filing system you have created for your images, you also need to pick a system of naming your files, such as Disneyland 2008_003.tiff. Or can you get even more specific and name it Bryan_and_Mickey.tiff. It is a little tedious, but most software out there has a batch rename feature, so it’s no big deal.FREE Electronic Software Delivery at Adobe.com
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