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=How I organize my photos=
 
=How I organize my photos=

Revision as of 22:04, 7 September 2011

How I organize my photos

All of my photos are on one drive (V:) and they are backed up in multiple ways (discussed later.) The directory tree is organized like this:

  • Camera-buf top directory
    • cannon-elph jpeg files from Andrea's point and shoot camera
      • Exact copies of flash memory
        • 2010 06 21 ...example directory: pictures copied from the camera on June 21, 2010
    • fuji-m7000 jpeg files from my fuji camera
      • same structure as cannon-elph directory
    • nikon-d200 jpeg and raw files from my Nikon D200. I normally shoot both NEF raw files and jpg files
      • same structure as other camera directories above
    • Edit_work top level directory for editing
      • 2008c-antigua example edit area directory. One for each trip, event, season, etc, named to display in chronological order. To start, I copy pictures from the camera directories to here. As I go through pictures, they get deleted from here and edited versions go to done, below, or rejects. For my Nikon D200, I start only with NEF raw files and save both NEF and JPG
        • done complete edits get saved here
        • rejects pictures I don't use go here and eventually get deleted. The original camera versions never get deleted
        • other_pictures any event pictures from a source other than one of our cameras
        • print_groups copies or shortcuts to record pictures that got printed
        • sitesource (optional) working directory for generating an event web site using my old PERL tool. Not using this any more
        • batchsource (optional) used as temporary area for doing batch editing. Example is setting white balance and saturation enhancement on a bunch of outdoor shots
        • video (optional) used for video files from the same event, including originals and edited versions
      • 2009a-winter-spring another example event
    • nx2-settings-files place to store settings for the Capture NX2 editing software
    • Other Picures pictures from various sources, including web sites, friends and family, etc
      • Russia trip ship pics example. Pictures taken by crew members on our Volga cruise
    • rename work working directory for renaming camera picture files. Pictures get renamed with a timestamp in the form yyyymmdd-hhmmss_originalname. Example: img_2094.jpg got renamed 20071122-201712 because it was shot November 22, 2007 at 8:17:12 PM. This renaming happens as soon as possible after copying from the camera, and virtually eliminates duplicate file names across all of our pictures
    • jalbum top of the directory tree used by JAlbum, which I use for generating event web sites. This replaces my own Makesite.pl tool I used to use.
    • My Albums the real top of the JAlbum directory tree, generated by the program. Everything from here down is managed by JAlbum.
    • advantix-cds cd images from Andrea's old film camera
    • New Epson Scans scanned images from our Epson scanner
    • New HP Scans scanned images from our HP scanner. Not much here because that scanner was exchanged for the Epson."
    • Poloroid scans scans from our very old photo albums."
    • Program Sources sources for programs I have written for photography work"

Methods and Tools

Camera to computer

When I copy files to the computer, they go into a directory corresponding the the camera and a subdirectory named after the date of the copy. If more than one is one the same day, I add a, b, c, etc to distinguish them. This never happens anymore because of the size of the camera memory cards.

Renaming with timestamp

When I copy files from a camera, they get renamed with a prefix time stamp in the form yyyymmdd-hhmmss_originalname and set in the time zone where the picture was taken. Strictly speaking, it should probably be in UTC, but it is easier to keep track of things in the local time zone with any daylight time in force at the time. This renaming applies to all copies of the files, including the originals.

Rename tools

The main tool I use for renaming is a command line program called exiftool, available from this site. This tool works on all files of the target type in a given directory, so I use a work area called __rename work__ for this. A key point is that this tool works not only on jpeg files, but also on Nikon NEF raw files. Camera files to be processed are copied here and the appropriate batch file is run on them, then they are moved to the appropriate camera file area. exiftool has a bunch of features, but the ones I use are:

  • To add N hours to the files' EXIF time stamps
    • exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -AllDates+=N .
  • To subtract N hours from the files' EXIF time stamps
    • exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -AllDates-=N .
  • To rename the files based on the EXIF time stamps in the specified format
    • exiftool "-filemodifydate<createdate" "-filename<${CreateDate}_$filename" -d %%Y%%m%%d-%%H%%M%%S .

Because I post these files to my LINUX-based web site, I want all of the files to have lower case names, so I use a simple windows shell command to rename them:

  • For /F "tokens=*" %%F In ('Dir /B /L') Do Move "%%F" "%%F"

My rename work directory is populated with batch files that use combinations of the above commands to correct timestamps and rename files. I could get more fancy and use command line arguments, but instead, I have a batch file for each operation, which allows me to just move the files to the work area and double click on the appropriate script.

One script just lower cases the names. I often copy this to an event directory and run it there.

Editing

I use Nikon Capture NX2 for most of my editing, and occasionally supplement it with Photoshop Elements 5. There are later versions of Photoshop Elements, but I use it so infrequently that I have not upgraded.

Basic Editing Flow

As shown above, each event, trip, etc, has its own directory tree, and generally includes a done subdirectory and a reject subdirectory. To start editing for an event, I add a new directory named appropriately. At this writing, my working directory is 2009r-egypt-trip. For each travel day, I copy the renamed NEF files from the camera directories to the working directory, and edit with NX2 in chronological order. Each time I complete a file, I save it to ...\done directory both in NEF form and in JPG form. Then I delete the original from the working directory. The camera original is never deleted. For some pictures, there may be multiple crops, and the names are appended with -crop1, -crop2, etc. NEF enables keeping all of the crops in the same file as versions, and I may experiment with that, but up to now, I have saved a different NEF for each crop. Any picture I decide I do not want to edit or publish gets moved to ...\rejects just to keep track of them. Later, I empty out the rejects directory. If any of the pictures get edited by photoshop, say to remove an object, remove distortion, etc, the flow is to save them from NX2 in TIFF format, edit with photoshop, and save the file in photoshop format and jpg format with a -ps appended at the end of the name.

Typical NX2 edits

  • Camera settings - These are basic camera settings that control how the raw image is converted to JPG. These are the same controls that the camera allows you to make when shooting directly to JPG, but this gives you a chance to adjust this after the shot has been taken.
    • White Balance. I normally shoot with automatic white balance, but when I edit, I like to set it to a fixed value. NX2 has a wide range of pre-defined values, including fine tuning. It is also possible to set white balance by picking reference gray points on the picture.
    • Saturation enhancement. For most of my outdoor scenery pictures, I enhance saturation, but only at edit time. I leave this off on the camera.
    • Color Mode. Rather that fool with this at the time I take the shots, I leave the camera set for Mode III, which is good for general shots. At edit time, if the picture's main subject includes people's faces, I will often switch to Mode I or Ia, which has a lot more flesh tones in the gamut.
    • Sharpening. In some instances, I will turn on some level of sharpening in camera settings, but I generally like to do sharpening more selectively later in the flow.
    • Tone Compensation. This is a pre-defined set of light response curves mostly for adding and reducing contrast. I generally don't use this, but instead manipulate the curves further along in the adjustment phase, where I can get much more complete control.
    • Exposure Compensation. This allows you to adjust the effective exposure of the shot up or down by 2 EV, which is enough to save a lot of over exposed shots that have blown out highlights or underexposed shots that lose everything in shadow. I try to never lose any information when I use this, but I regularly adjust my exposure to eliminate bright blow-outs or brighten up a dark shot.
  • Lighting adjustments - These are adjustments that are made after the basic camera settings
    • D-Lighting compensates for shots where a bright section of the picture forces other parts to be much too dark. It adjusts dark areas to be lighter and light areas to be darker. If I use this, it is generally before any other adjustments.
    • Levels and Curves allows a great deal of control of which light levels have the most or least contrast. You can also use just the contrast and brightness controls, but these are just doing preset adjustments to the response curve in this tool. By making the adjustment in specific selected areas of the picture, you get a lot of control. Photoshop at other tools have this capability, but Adobe has steadfastly refused to add this to Photoshop Elements.
      • The Levels part of this tool allows you to cut stretch the lighting of the picture to fill up the available range. For example, if the overall contrast is too low and there are no very dark colors, you can make the shadows darker. Same thing for pictures where there are no very bright sections, but I normally compensate for this by increasing the exposure compensation at the camera settings level.
  • Color adjustments
    • Saturation/Warmth increases or decreases the saturation of the overall photo and allows a white balance shift toward red (warmer) or blue (cooler.) Because you can select the areas to be adjusted, this is good for making colorful objects more striking, or for toning down stuff that just seems to overwhelmingly colorful. The warmth adjustment is particularly useful for adjusting parts of a shot that are lit from different sources, like parts of a room that are sunlit versus other parts that are lit with incandescent lamps.
    • LCH allows adjustment of Lightness, Chroma and Hue on specific ranges of colors. For example, if I have a picture of a rainbow and I want the reds and oranges to be more saturated, I can set the LCH Chroma adjustment to increase chroma on that range by adjusting a simple curve. Using a combination of color range selection and selecting areas on the picture, there is a lot of control here. I typically use this to bring out the full range of color on areas of a picture I want to be particularly noticeable, like the tiles of a mosaic.
  • Focus - This is a general topic about blur and sharpness. I generally use these tools only on selected areas of the shot. For example, I will sharpen eyes and blur facial blemishes, but leave the rest of the shot alone.
    • Un-sharp Mask is the sharpness tool. This seems like a strange name, but what is really happening is that a blurred version of the image is combined with the original to increase or decrease contrast at edges in the picture. The main adjustments are threshold, radius and intensity. Check out this page for a great explanation of the unsharp mask
      • Threshold sets the amount of brightness change needs to be within the set radius distance for the tool to do any contrast adjustment. If this is set to a small number, then things that are not really edges may be enhance to look like edges.
      • Radius sets how wide a edge needs to be to be sharpen. For fine detail like eyelashes, this needs to be small, or the tool will concentrate on larger features like the edge of an eyelid.
      • Intensity simply specifies how much adjustment is made along the edges, including the amount of over compensation. If this is too high, especially in concert with too big a radius, you will get a halo effect around edges.
    • Gaussian Blur reduces detail by spreading out edges. The radius specifies how much to spread it. This is great for softening out rough skin, blurring out a distracting object in the shot, etc.
  • Auto-retouch is a tool that removes objects from the picture by copying the background over them. This one is not nearly as powerful as the one in photoshop, so I go to photoshop when I need this kind of thing to work really well. It is fine for removing pimples, specks of dust, etc, but not for removing power wires or fences.
    • Photoshop Elements 9 has a very powerful healing brush. Enough that I will probably buy it just for that.
  • Crop, Straighten are for cropping and tilting the picture. I use straighten a lot to level horizons and plumb up building edges and columns.
  • Control points are unique NIK software tools that allow you to make changes to parts of the shot just by dropping a dot onto a place, say a face, set a radius, and them make all kinds of adjustments like brightness, contrast, color balance, etc. The control point automatically selects the range of colors to adjust based on the color it is sitting on, provides a nice feathering edge, and makes the adjustments with no extra work. I use this a lot to brighten up a face or other features that are too dark, to shift the color of a light source to match the rest of the picture, etc.
    • There is a special control point for redeye. It works, but is not as easy to use as the redeye correction in some other tools. Note, however, that some animals, like cats, have green-eye or yellow-eye, and the control points in this tool handle these very well.
  • Selection tools. Unlike Photoshop's powerful but complicated layering scheme, NX2 does each adjustment on a selection, either the whole image or one that you create by brushing, creating a control point, or creating a selection gradient.

Backup

I'm pretty paranoid about backup of my photos and the work I have done on them, so I have multiple backup methods.

Off Site Backup

I use CrashPlan backup for my entire computer, which includes 300+ GB of photo files, the size of the Camera-buf directory tree. Mozy worked well, but the prices went out of sight at the beginning of 2011.

On Site Backup

CrashPlan provides a way to make a copy of their backup on a local disk. I have a dedicated external drive (X) for this.

Photos Only Short Term Backup

In addition to the overall system backup strategy, I keep a different copy (M:\Camera-buf) of Camera-buf that gets populated by running a batch script every 15 minutes using the Windows task scheduling facility. I also occasionally force this script to run during long editing sessions. The script uses robocopy, an advanced Windows command available at no cost from microsoft as part of the Resource Kit . I did not have to do this download for Windows 7 Home Premium, but I did for Windows XP Pro. I have two versions of the script, one that just adds new files (automatic scheduled script uses this one) and leave old ones alone, and one that makes an exact copy (run manually periodically to clean things up):

  • Keep old files
    • robocopy V:\Camera-buf M:\Camera-buf /E
  • Exact copy
    • robocopy V:\Camera-buf M:\Camera-buf /E /PURGE

The key thing that makes robocopy attractive is that it only copies files it needs to, so it can go through the 300GB pretty fast when only a few files have been added or changed. An interesting side note is that robocopy can deal with longer path names than most other windows tools, so if you have a very long path because of long file or folder names, it can copy them or delete them. See this maintenance topic for an interesting related story.