I Need Advice on Organizing Large Photo Collection with Photo Supreme

[komyash]

Hello there,

I have recently started using Photo Supreme to organize my growing photo collection; and I could use some guidance from the community. My collection spans over a decade; with more than 30,000 images ranging from casual family photos to professional shots taken for work. As you can imagine; things have gotten a bit chaotic; and I am determined to bring some order to it.

How do you recommend organizing folders? Should I keep it by date; event; or some other system? Currently, I have a basic year/month folder system; but it is not working well when I need to locate photos from specific events or categories.

I have begun tagging photos but am unsure about best practices for long-term maintenance. Should I focus on broad tags like family or go into detail with names; locations; and other specifics? Also; is there a way to apply tags to multiple photos simultaneously to speed up the process?

My collection has a lot of duplicate and similar images; especially with burst shots. Does Photo Supreme have a reliable way to find and delete these in bulk? Any advice on handling this without losing important variations would be helpful.

Also, I have gone through this post; https://forum.idimager.com/viewtopic.php?minitab=23786 which definitely helped me out a lot.

I am also open to any resources or tutorials that might make the process smoother.

Thank you in advance for your help and assistance.

[G8DHE]

Think you will find as many different opinions as there are answers
I use a Year/Month/YYYYMMDD format for storage of images, but then also have events organised under just YYYY/MM/Event/ below these are some other divisions that suit the event etc. However that is usually the simplest part!
The tagging with all the Labels is the meat of the system, as then any image can be found by relevant details like Peoples Names, Event Titles, Locations, Objects in the pictures, Style of image. I've created a set that suits my ideas and then they get added to as new aspects appear

[gcorbin]

komyash, You are asking the right questions, but not really understanding the usage of a DAM.

The purpose of a DAM is to allow you to find and manage your digital assets, photos in your case. If you have a good DAM like PhotoSupreme, it doesn’t matter where your photos are located or the folder structure. My recommendation is just keep it simple and either just continue using your current structure or just do a simple photo date (YMD) based folder structure. As I said, it doesn’t really matter the folder structure as PhotoSupreme knows where your photos are located and manages this and you generally don’t need to know.

For example, my PhotoSupreme is managing just over 430,000 images taking just under 5TB of storage split over an external spinning USB drive (seldom plugged in) and an internal SSD drive. The images are generally in image date based folders (YMD) but not always but I can still find, view and catalogue my images irrespective to whether the USB drive is plugged in and irrespective of what folder or folder structure is used. This post give more detail to how this works. viewtopic.php?p=137569#p137569

In my opinion, the main thing the folder structure impacts is your backup method. I store my photos in a folder based on the image date (YMD) so when importing new images, I just need to backup the new folder for todays date. If I used some other system, it would make knowing what to backup potentially more difficult.

Anyway, the bottom line for me is the folder naming system is not very important. The way you catalogue is however critical. Firstly, PhotoSupreme imports the existing image metadata automatically, so it already knows the date/time the image was taken, the camera used and all its settings. Thus, without doing any additional cataloging, you can find your images by camera, date taken, lens used, zoom length, aperture or any combination of these items. This is not enough and you now need to look into your crystal ball and think about how you want to search your photos. You will then need to tag your photos with labels suiting how you will search.

Using me as an example, my main interest is nature and I photograph a lot of plants, insects, birds, etc. I also photograph family and friends as well as miscellaneous stuff like important financial receipts. While I am not a professional, I do talks about nature using my photos and get regular requests for photos of a particular species. Thus, for me, I mostly need to be able to find photos of individual people, events (someones 50th birthday party), a particular species or location where the photo was taken. While sometimes I just want to see all images for a single label, eg. all the photos of a particular butterfly species, I mostly want to see images from two or more labels, for example, photos of my mum from her 50th birthday party, or photos of a particular plant species taken in a particular national park. I can get even more specific and want to see all the photos containing my mum and my brother but not including my brothers first wife and not taken at anyones wedding. I can easily do that with my existing cataloging and I certainly never considered this requirement when I started cataloguing. This is the power of a DAM and in particular PhotoSupreme.

I don’t care about other things which others do care about like the predominant image colour, style of photo, model, client, etc so I personally don’t catalogue this information. As cataloging takes time, you just want to catalogue the things which are important to you and not the stuff which is unimportant to you. What is important to you is not be the same as for me so you will need to work out your label hierarchy for yourself. Just don’t reinvent the wheel and use the existing standards such are Darwin Core, IPTC etc already defined in PhotoSupreme (Details Tab) where appropriate. Your labels can automatically populate the fields of these standards, so make use of this where appropriate.

People are generally important everyone so PhotoSupreme has build in face recognition. Use this as it automatically creates an area for the face and attaches the persons label to that area. Thus, if you have a photo of six people, you will get six areas defined in the photo with a person label assigned to each face area. Thus, PhotoSupreme knows the six people in the photo and even which face is which person. This is brilliant for old family photos where I am not familiar with some of the people. Read the AI manual for more info. For me, I have made a basic family hierarchy within the family catalogue category. This allows me to search on an individual like Fred Nerk or a higher level category like the Nerk family (Nerk category including all its children categories). This is extremely simple but extremely powerful.

Similarly, I generally care where my photos were taken so I catalogue this. In the Places tag, I create a location hierarchy of Country, State, Town, and then suburb, national park or what ever lower level areas make sense and are useful to me. I even have a lower level label for my house in this hierarchy so I can find the photos taken in my backyard. Again, this allows me to find photos taken at a particular location with or without its sublocations. Extremely powerful.

Again, Events are important to me, so I create an event for someones birthday, a conference, a wedding, a holiday, etc. You get the idea so I won’t go on. I will just reinforce that you should use the power of hierarchies in your categories as PhotoSupreme allows you to search on a particular category or that category and its children categories, very powerful. The existing high level categories defined by PhotoSupreme are probably all you will need and is a great prompt to assist you to think about what is important to you and what labels you should create within these labels.

Now, once you have added all the categories of interest to you to your photos, you can then find photos of interest very easily. For example, finding all the photos containing both my mum and dad at my brothers wedding is trivial for me. Similarly, finding all the photos of a particular plant taken in a particular country photographed in the year 2000 is also trivial for me. Now that I can find my photos of interest, I can create a portfolio (a virtual folder) and add some or all of the photos from my search into the portfolio. I can repeat the search and add process to build up a set of photos of interest to me for some reason in a portfolio. For example, this might be for a talk I am doing on orchids of a particular region, a photo book commemorating an event such as birthdays of my mum, etc. I can then review the photos in the portfolio and cull them as required to get to the final set of images I require.

Now that I have my set of images, I need to export them in the size/format I need for this project. The share function provides the export ability and is extremely powerful, so read the manual how to do the share. The end result is I have a set of image files in the folder of my choice in the required format which I can print, add to a powerpoint or use however I require. Note that nowhere in this process did I care or need to know where the original image is located. Your DAM manages image location so the folder structure is not critical. The bit which is critical is having the correct set of category labels to allow you to find the photos which interest you.

The only time I use the folder structure is after importing new photos. I display the newly imported folder images and add cataloguing, mostly by labels, to all the photos. Once this is completed, I rarely use the folder view again. I search in PhotoSupreme to find the photos of interest irrespective of where they are located.

You did ask about adding multiple categories (labels) to your images. PhotoSupreme supports this as Label Sets. I use this feature but not that much. When cataloguing, I just select one or more images and in the label tab, type the first few letters of the label I wish to apply and select the required label from the drop down. If I have used the label recently, the label is in the recently used list or I have some labels in my Favourites. I generally don’t add multiple labels simultaneously, but I do have some situations where I definitely do this so I have label sets defined for this situation.

Bottom line is don’t worry too much about the folder structure but think very hard about what labels (categories) you require so you can easily find the photos you need. You can always change your category system later if you get it wrong, but it is takes much less time if you can get it right or fairly right first time. The labels you require are fairly easy to determine. Just ask yourself, do I care about people? If so, I need to add a label for each person of interest so you can find them again. For each person, do you care how they relate? If you care they are a family so you can find photos of family members, you will need to create a family hierarchy. If not, don’t. Do you care whether a person is family or a friend? If so, have a family hierarchy separate to a friend hierarchy. You get the idea. It is not hard but takes some thought. Don’t stress too much as you can rearrange your labels later if you get it wrong.

Also, don’t think you need to catalogue everything. Only catalogue the things of interest to you. While I am interested in people such as my family, not everyone is of interest. There are plenty of people I do not catalogue as they are just not of interest to me. For example, I have plenty of photos of people at weddings I have not catalogued as they are guests and not of interest to me. While I could catalogue them, I have not as it is just now worth my time as I know I will never want to find photos of these people.

I hope this very long missive helps your thoughts. Welcome to the wonderful world of DAMs and PhotoSupreme.

[snowman1]

The one thing I would add to that excellent post is - keep it simple. Don't break your categories down too small at first - if you do find you need to divide a category into sub-categories you can always do this later. So using gcorbin's example let's say you had pictures of butterflies. If you only had, say, 50 pictures of butterflies you would only be making work for yourself to break those down into species, as you can easily scroll through 50 to find what you want. But once you got to, say, 1000, it would be worth splitting butterflies into individual species so you could find a species immediately. And that subdividing is an easy step to make once you get to that point.

PSU has an amazing amount of functionality that takes time to find out which features are of use to your particular needs, so ease yourself in with the fundamentals of organising with labels - enjoy!