time when more photos I wanted to save were coming from friends cameras
(usually via facebook) than my own. But it was already crumbling
around about the time when the novelty of snapping photos with
my first digital camera wore off. Now I have a new system. It's tuned
for my specific priorities and setup (an ancient iMac and the free
iPhoto), but you may find things you can use with your system.
The central dilemma with regard to photos boils down to: keep or throw
away? Do you err on the side of having oceans of photos, gradually filling
up your hard drive and impossible to find anything in, or carefully
selecting the best? I do both. There are two tiers:
THE ARCHIVE
Basically a bucket for all the photos that have something to do with my
life to collect in. From my camera, facebook, email, etc. The only
winnowing that I do is to erase the worthless blurry ones, or the near
duplicates, or ones taken for special purposes (like a web page). I also
don't put in just cool or funny pictures off the net - these are photos to
do with my life.
Each photo is saved at its original size, more or less unretouched, as
uncompressed as possible (my camera saves them as jpegs, so whatever)
This would still work if it was just a huge list of files - photo
management software could sort through them. But to make things a little
bit easier to find, I put them into folders by term (4 month stretch), and
in those folders I have optional subfolders by the batch of photos - like
"Lindsay's Birthday"
The archive allays my fears of deleting a photo I might value later, gives
me a resource if I feel like wallowing in plentiful images from a
particular time in my life, and lets me indulge the fantasy that someday
something in the corner of one of my photos may be needed in a criminal
investigation, like in Blow Up. (and what if I had just deleted it??)
On the other end of the spectrum are:
SOUVENIR PHOTOS
Complementing my term souvenir system which I discussed in a previous
post, this is a file of photos, divided by term, which have been carefully
selected for maximum enjoyment and reminiscing. Exactly 50 photos per 4
months selected, each retouched, cropped, and exported at 1024x768. Also
ordered chronologically, by hand if necessary.
This gives me a way to get a quick blast of a term - people, places,
events - without having to page through hundreds of repetitive photos.
An organizational system only works if it also comes with processes to
maintain it. Here are the processes for my system:
- Over a term, collect all the photos that come my way to the archive.
- When the term is over, actually a few months after its over so that
those last few photos come in, start going through the archive for that
term and select the photos.
- Every year or so, have the souvenir photos for that year printed and
mailed to me. So 2 years will fit in a 300 photo album.
- When the photo archive gets to be the size of a DVD, burn it and delete
from hard drive.
That last point was the key to my system, when I realized that my whole
enormous glut of photos from my camera over 2 years was only about 3 gigs.
You may use your camera a lot more. But still, I think it makes sense to
keep *everything*. If a photo is 1 meg, then you can fit 4700 photos onto
a DVD. Whether that lasts you 2 years, a year, or 4 months, it's still a
tiny cost in terms of both money and time. DVDs are not the most stable
and long term medium in the world, but it wouldn't be a horrible loss to
lose part of my archive. I can save the heavy backup guns for my souvenir
photos - which will have a tiny size.
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