Organizing 6 Years of Digital Pictures
Penguin May 14th, 2008
This is by no means a comprehensive guide to organizing digital pictures, it’s just what I do.
I have a Perl script that copies all the pictures from my compact flash to my HDD. Why a Perl script? Because my Canon XT splits up the pictures into different folders in sets of 100. When you have a 4 GB CF card, that’s a lot of folders to look through. The script looks in each folder and each file and sorts them by date. It creates a folder on the HDD for each day in the format YYYYMMDD.
Once the card is dumped to my HDD, I go through and rotate all the pictures by opening the folder in thumbnail view. This gives me a good idea of what I shot on that day and if they need to be subcategorized. Example: If a shot a park, then my friend dancing, then a waterfall, each of those would get their own folders. These folders are prefixed by the date and then a letter and then the subject of the pictures.
Over the years, I’ve taken about 50 GB worth of pictures. Archiving them becomes an issue. How do I retrieve the pictures from the 50 or so CDs (now I’ve moved to DVDs)? I physically metatagged each CD with the date and the folder structure. I then put this same information into a spread sheet and numbered each disc, essentially creating an index.
Why not use software? Because most software creates its own database of the pictures. I’m also not looking to tag each individual picture. This solution also makes backing up things a lot easier because it’s application independent.
You can download my simple script. ***Note: You have to have Perl installed on your machine.
Download the Perl script
-Penguin
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LMK if you need some help getting it set up. When I wrote the script, it wasn't intended for public consumption.
-Penguin