One of my hobbies nowadays is photography, and I pretty much stink at it. That hasn’t stopped me from documenting my travels by taking lots and lots of photos which is what I want to talk about. I have way to man photos, both from a storage perspective and an organizational perspective. Every time I go off to some new place, I snap about 100 – 150 photos per day with each photo being about a meg. At this rate, I seriously have to think about getting a hard drive and enclosure to take my photos around; either that or invest in the 60GB iPod Photo.

The bigger problem is how do I organize all these photos? I used to name every file with the date taken and some attempt at describing the photo, that evolved into grouping photos into folders based on the “event”, but both solutions only organize the photos in terms of date or “film roll”. How do I tell what are (and where I’ve stored) my memorable photos, or how do I find all my photos of ducks? Even with Google’s Picasa, I can’t index all my photos and look them up by text.

So I did some digging around, I didn’t want to add keywords to photos in a specific program, because if I ever decide to switch programs I don’t want to have to enter all this metadata for 1000s of photos again. A photo’s EXIF data couldn’t hold this information because there was no place for it; but I eventually found another standard, IPTC, which supports adding keywords to photos. So now I’ve started tagging all my photos with what I think may be useful keywords to search on in the future. This is a huge pain in the ass but at least Picasa and other photo organization programs support it.

I’ve also added tagging to my photos online. I have the same problem online, I have at least 400 photos online so I don’t know how to sort them or let my visitors go through them intelligently. I think of tagging like keywords 2.0, so I’m basically applying the same solution to my photos both online and offline. Now if only I have some way to import my originals onto the web and automatically tag them based on their IPTC keywords…OK I’m not geeky enough to do that.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: orangefever, photography, tagging