Batch resizing photos and how *YOU* handle storing them

M

Mathemabeat

Gawd
Joined
Apr 28, 2006
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835
Got a question for the peeps.

I am starting to get a sizable amount of digitial photos and for the most part they are taken with an 8 megapixel point and shoot. Storing the original files (around 4 megs each) isn't so much a problem, but do you also keep a resized version for more "everyday" use?

Sometimes my gf will ask me to send her an email with a couple photos attached. Then I have to take the time to downsize them to something more reasonable and then email. 4 meg 3624x2448 rez photos are a bit much to email.

So, I am wondering if I should just resize all my photos down to like 1600x1200 and keep those around for easy access and just backup all my original high res photos to like dvdr or external hd. If we want to print something I have the originals, otherwise the down sampled photos will do.


So, any advice on how best to attack the situation? For those of you with sizable photo collections, how do you handle it? Keep the originals or not?


Also, any photo software you can recommend for this? Either OS X or Windows. Free or open source preferred.
 
Picasa.

Easily the best free photo library management app, especially if you use Gmail.
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Read "Digital Asset Management for Photographers" by Peter Krogh. It'll change the way you think about storing your photos.

To keep it short, I shoot in .jpg (Canon Point 'n Shoot) and Raw (Canon DSLR). Everything is renamed to XXX_YYMMDD_0000.jpg/.cr2 where XXX is my initials or the initials of the photographer that took the picture. 0000 is the last 4 of the original number suffix given by the camera. This format insures there are no duplicates.

All photos are immediately rated 1-5 stars and/or given a label (Outtakes, HDR, Pano, etc). Photos are then retouched if necessary.
Keywords are applied (this takes a while) and a copyright is also applied to all photos. .JPG originals are stored away, .cr2 originals are converted to .DNG files with full-size preview and stored.

Resized photos are placed in a different folder structure from the Archive.
Archive = Originals
Derivatives = resizes, comps, finished HDR, etc.

I use Adobe Lightroom for all of this, which makes it fairly seamless. The keywords are extremely important. If I want to find all pictures of food, for example, I just do a keyword search for "food" and all the pictures come up, regardless of where they might be stored, when they were taken, the photographer, etc. Of course, you can get narrower, but this gives you the idea.

Lightroom also makes it pretty easy to resize a bunch, as you just select the photos and use the resize option in the export dialog.

I hear Microsoft Expression media is also very good, but haven't tried it yet.

Yeah, it's a lot of work to set up, but it's worth it if you are going to build up a sizable collection.
 
If you have access to a web server, even a local one, you could use an application like Gallery2 (PHP/MySQL)

I use Gallery2 on my personal web site and it has the option to store masters and automatically create several different custom sized versions of each photo added. Good backup and convenient access.

Another option, I think Flicker has similar features. for something like $25/year you can access your original sized images too.
 
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