More Fun and Faster Cataloging...

[Lars]

This is an of topic coming from here:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=13626&p=75501#p75501

Back to cataloging (what a bore - so time consuming - but also how easy it is with this software).

Hi Tony

I have cataloged the major part of ~15k images during the last 5 month and I realised that it's much more fun and much faster to focus on a limited number of labels at a time.

Eg. I ran through all images the first month and assigned labels in the People group.
Next month I did animals. Then places and later botany...more top levels to come.

In this way I could start using the database after the first month finding people...What a great experience!

If I had taken one image and assigned all possible labels (Now coming close to 1000 different labels) It would probably take several years to finish, and in the meantime I would not get real benefit of all my images.

New images I will of course try to assign all relevant labels first time they are downloaded.

Hope this can inspire your work-flow and make it more fun.

[Edit: Also related to an of-topic here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13662#p75694 ]

[george]

Thanks very much for that Lars. I'm going to give it a try.

[Lars]

To further investigate this way of cataloging I have made this status graph after ½ year with cataloging with IdImager :

Label_Count_Distribution.png (12.48 KiB) Viewed 399 times

To Mike Buckley : Thanks for your interest - As you can see, 3 labels is the most common Label Count in my Catalog (also a surprise to me ). Highest count is one image with 19 labels.

As cataloging goes on the peak at 3 labels will likely shift a bit towards a higher Label count.

I could imagine that if I had made the cataloging by taking one images at a time and assigned as many labels as possible, the graph would have had a big peak at 0 and a smaller flat hill at about 10-20 labels(?) - Meaning I would have a lot of images that I would be blind to...and a few I would know too well.

I like this statement from the Helpfile under "Cataloging, Versioning, and Stacking":

Don't try to come up with catalog labels to describe the whole world, but start with just a few catalog labels and only for those things, events, places, or persons you find interesting.

Ok i ended up with a lot of different labels, but my focus where still limitted to one main-topic at a time.

[Tonyyd]

Hi Lars,

Your tip was most helpful and I am cataloging the way you suggested, It certainly speeds up the process doing it that way,

Having said that I imagine that I am a quarter way through my collection and I am already finding the search capabilities of the software very intersting. Wish I had stumble upon this package a few years ago.

Cheers,

Tony

[Mike Buckley]

If Ctrl+G was not already assigned to the grid toggle, I would put in a request that it be used to togggle that graph on and off.

[Lars]

The really interesting point is that the graph with proper scaling is almost identical to:

Planck's law of spectral radiance of an object at a given temperature, as function of frequency
(Black body radiation as function of frequency (not wavelength!))

- Likely because this cataloging process has similarities to a random quantified process?
(No I'm not a physicist, but ran into some formulas on the internet: http://physics.info/planck/)

Could be interesting to see if others following this strategy have similar distributions .

...so Mike, maybe your "Ctrl+G" have to be turned into a big button

[george]

Nice, Lars! I thought the distribution was familiar, but couldn't quite place it. Are you a physicist? I'm not (I'm a physician with an abiding interest in math & science).

[Mike Buckley]

Could be interesting to see if others following this strategy have similar distributions

The graph of my data will surely not look like yours. My workflow requires assigning a minimum of three catalog labels and my guess is that no image is assigned fewer than 5.

You could obtain the data from the IDimager community and produce the graph. Hert could include the graph in the next update. In the next version, Hert could include a graph that automatically captures the user's data and compares it with the IDimager community data.

From this point going forward, the acronym LG no longer makes me think of the international Korean consumer products company. Instead, it makes me think of the Lars Graph.

[Lars]

Thanks Tony, George and Mike - Back to cataloging I sure have something to catch up on to come close to Mikes counts

Lars Graph

...and a vacation to get down to ground again

[snowman1]

Lars,

That's a great tip, thanks for sharing your successful experience here. I've been struggling with my back catalog for ages, the result being most of them are still at 0 keywords! I will now definitle take this approach.

The other great approach I've found is to use the calendar/timeline to split the task into one day's photos at a time. I find this good because it
(a) gives good breakpoints in your work whereby you can easily break off and come back knowing where you're up to;
(b) focuses the mind on what that day was all about (a day out, an event, or whatever) and who was there;
(c) allows you to easily apply any global labels to the whole shoot (e.g. Mabel's wedding, Day at the Zoo)

All the best

[Mike Buckley]

(a) gives good breakpoints in your work whereby you can easily break off and come back knowing where you're up to;

If you are using the Pro Edition, Version 5 now has nine colors that can be used to mark folders. (Version 4 has only five colors.) When I have to conclude a cataloging session before I have fully cataloged a particular set of images, I mark that folder so I know the point in my workflow that I need to return to.

The colors that mark my folders indicate the following:

Intial culling done
Post-processing done or in progress
Versions created
Global metadata done
Global catalog labels done
Image-specific catalog labels done
Star ratings done
"Versioning" done
Completed

[Lars]

Hi snowman1

Thanks for you feedback and your contribution:

The other great approach I've found is to use the calendar/timeline to split the task into one day's photos at a time. I find this good because it
(a) gives good breakpoints in your work whereby you can easily break off and come back knowing where you're up to;
(b) focuses the mind on what that day was all about (a day out, an event, or whatever) and who was there;
(c) allows you to easily apply any global labels to the whole shoot (e.g. Mabel's wedding, Day at the Zoo)

I definitely agree with you on this point...I like the timeline and organizing things from that and I did that as the first thing for 2/3 of my images, where I had a photo date.

The rest are rather old scannings without any date for the moment, and generally one big mess. I'm now struggling to put them on the timeline, and here the label search functions helps me because I can now collect relevant images and establish a time-series and finally assign individual (approximate) photo-dates for them.

Some old images are simply very difficult to classify and I have to consult the older generations in my family...and here it's a very useful feature to add color-labels, to remember which one need more attention. (A bit similar to the also useful folder color marks noted by Mike Buckley, but on a images level rather than folder-level)