The Photo Library

Your “Photo Library” is your permanent collection of photographic works from various sources. You’ll want to differentiate these images from your “Working” images, those images that are in a kind of “limbo”, awaiting rating, sorting and/or further processing. They may be stored in a special folder, or  on a special volume, or even on a series of optical disks or other media.

As you begin building your photo library, you’ll want to incorporate some structure and guidelines to assure that things will be easy to find.

Separate your work from the work of others.
As you collect images, you’ll undoubtedly acquire photos from friends and family, images that you have downloaded from the internet, images you may have manipulated, etc. Building an image reference library is one of the greatest advantages of the internet. You can easily download images (with the permission of their owners, of course) but you wouldn’t want them to get mixed up with your images. For example, you may have the right to download the image for reference (Actually, all the images you browse are downloaded temporarily into you image cache folder, whether you have the owner’s permission or not) but you may not have permission to post it to your blog. So the first level of organization should be by usage rights. Possible categories might include:

• Client Work
• Downloads
• My Work
• Stock Photography

Organize images into broad, logical categories.
Avoid having too many subfolders. It can make it difficult to spot duplicates and to find images in general. Instead of using a subfolder, use keywords to differentiate images within broad categories. These categories will vary widely depending on the type of work you do. As a consumer, you might organize images by date or by event. As an amateur, you might develop categories for the genres of images you take, such as portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. As a professional, you might use folders name by client and job number. And it’s very possible you might use all three systems.

For example:

• Client Work
• Braunschweiger
• New York Times
• Pirelli Tires
• Starbucks Coffee
• Time Inc.
• Vogue Magazine
• Downloads
• Cameras
• Celebrities
• Works
• My Work
• Abstract
• Landscapes
• Portraits
• Still Life
• Street
• Stock Photography
• Corbis
• Getty Images
• iStock Photo

Back up your images regularly.
Employ a separate drive and use back software, not the file copy function in your operating system. Backup software copies only modified versions, saving time and wear and tear on your backup hard drive. It can also preserve previous versions, so if you made a change last week, you can still recover the previous version from last month. And if you’ve accidentally deleted image files from the folders that are being backed up, they’ll still be there in you backup.

Archive your images to optical disk and catalog them.
No matter how large your hard disk, it will eventually fill up. And the greater your “online” storage space, the larger your backup volume will need to be. The solution is to archive your images to removable media and catalog them for easy retrieval. At the present time, the optical disk (Recordable or re-writable CD or DVD) is the most cost-effective, compatible and durable media.

Previously, re-writable MO disks and tape were used, but these were slow to record, and in the case of tape, even slower to retrieve. They also required special hardware. Recordable DVD and CD media are recognized by practically ever computer, and to a somewhat lesser extent, rewritable media as well. Flash memory is by far the most convenient, but it’s also prone to degradation, so it’s not a wise choice for long-term storage. Rewritable optical disk is also more prone to failure. But write-once disks are quite stable, and quite inexpensive.

A good rule to follow is once a category folder reaches the capacity of the volume you plan to archive to (4.6 GB for a single-layer DVD for example), archive its contents to optical disk and catalog it with a disk cataloging application. Store these catalogs on your hard drive for easy retrieval.

Develop logical, unique names for image files and volumes.
Naming volumes sequentially does not guarantee that duplicates won’t happen, but naming them chronologically does. For example, naming archive volumes “DVD20100531” and “DVD20110823” ensures that they’ll each have a unique name, they’ll be sorted chronologically, you’ll know what media you used, and you’ll know when they were archived. Plus, there’s no need to look to see what the last volume name was.

Different cameras use different naming conventions. You can use them as is, or you can develop your own. But whichever method you choose, make sure that each image’s name is unique. If you create a variation of an image, keep the same image number but append it with a version number. One of the reasons for this is that you can save the Camera Raw settings for a specific image as an .xmp file with the same name as the image, rather than save a second copy of the file itself. If the .xmp settings and the image file become separated, you can then re-import them.

Prepare images beforehand for archiving.
Because you’ll likely be archiving to JPEG, which is a lossy format, you’ll want to make sure your images are in a good state prior to the compression process employed in saving to the JPEG format. This means removing dust and scratches and cleaning up the image in general. However, it’s wise to avoid over-processing the image. If the image requires a white balance adjustment, that’s fine. But sharpening the image is a no-no. The additional contrast between adjacent pixels will actually increase the file size, and there may be better sharpening algorithms in the future.

Don’t be afraid to leave yourself notes.
Life is busy. It’s easy to forget the “standard operating procedures” you have established. Creating “readme” files directly in your folders, like those that often come with your operating system, will help to ensure consistency.