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[nila]

Hiya,

Started the HUGE task of sorting and tagging my 9000 images yesterday.

It's obviously going to be a LONG and painful process and a VERY good way for me to find things that work great and things that are awkward.


One thing I found already - I have a bunch of images - I want to put them in the correct order for the trip then use 'fill track numbers from list order'.

It is impossible however to re-sort the images in the view scheme I am in. I figured it would be the same as ACDSee and I would be able to simply drag and drop the images into the order I wanted them and then use the tool to fill in the info but I cant move them??

Is there any way to sort the images how I want them manually? Preferably by dragging and dropping. (Must be in thumbnail mode as I need to be able to see the pictures).


Also - an ability for MC to fill in a sequence using a template of:  #,  ##, ### would be GREAT where MC replaces the # with the sequence number (two #'s = pad to two spaces, ### = padd to three - ie. 001. etc).


Any chance of anything along these lines?

Also, any tips on how to sort and manage images would be HUGELY appreciated.

One thing I found works GREAT is to do:  Date (year), date(month), date (day) - and then to tag using each day as this usually breaks down the photo's into events, places pretty well so I can do group tagging
Thanks!

[nila]

Bumpidy Bumpidy Bump!

I need some way to be able to change the order of these files - any suggestions?

Failing this I'll have to go to ACDSee to order all my files - use it to re-name them, then use MC to import them when they're already ordered and lose all my tagging work done so far.

Hardly a good solution

[Matt]

It is impossible however to re-sort the images in the view scheme I am in. I figured it would be the same as ACDSee and I would be able to simply drag and drop the images into the order I wanted them and then use the tool to fill in the info but I cant move them??

Is there any way to sort the images how I want them manually? Preferably by dragging and dropping. (Must be in thumbnail mode as I need to be able to see the pictures).

Create a playlist.

[Tinnitus]

Hi Nila
What kind of scheme are you using for filenaming and tagging?

Ad some point this winter I'm planning to give my photo collection the complete overhaul for comfortable viewing at my new HTPC setup  

Currently I have all the files folders with desciptive names eg: Christmas 2000, Miami 1999, Birthdays etc.

It would be nice to have a setup where it's possible to do a search/smartlist for a person and having all the pictures shown where this person is included.
I just don't know what the best way is to accomplish this. I dont like tagging files with tags that is not saved inside the file.
I don't do it with my music and i don't wanna take the chance with my photos either (I just know that someday im gonna install a new beta and forget to backup the library... you get the picture).

So I'm thinking that i have to use a filenaming scheme containing the information that i want. Is this your approach or are you doing it differently?

...Oh - and happy organizing  

[nila]

well so far I've been doing them all just in groups for the folders like:


Year - Month (numeric) (month (full word)) - Country - Event


For my view scheme I then have:  

hard disk Location (set to have root in my photo dir so that each 'logical' set of photo's appears as a group in MC (makes it easy to tag with))
Date Year
Country (eg. England)
Places (eg. London)
Events (eg. Justin Timberlake Concert, Wedding, Snowboarding)
People


Events and People are fast getting out of control and way too big - they desperately need grouping - fingers crossed for v10.


Using the first one (location on hard drive) I can easily tag groups of pictures FAST except for the people tag.
People is still a long painful process.


Whenever I've finally managed to get them all tagged though I'm then going to rename the files probably with:

Folder:  Year - Month (Month Name) - Day - Country - Event
File: Track # (sort order for the pictures) - People

That should keep the file names pretty well organised for using that for keeping track of the images.
Putting year - month (numeric) first helps to organise the images well in explorer so they follow a logical heirarchy.


If you use a digital camera - one view scheme I made last week after trying Adobe Photoshop Album 2 which has a 'calendar' which shows all dates and highlights ones with pictures in - is:   Year/Month/Day/Country/People/Places/Events

This one works GREAT for totally untagged and un-organised images as it'll break them up into when they were taken and obviously on holliday that will group them together with where you were - also works quite well for people as your normally only with certain people on specific days and they'll likely be in most of the photos from that day.



You'd have to have a pretty high resolution though to squeeze in that many fields - Even though day and year etc are small fields they still take up a lot of space.


The non tag saving inside images does suck but it saves them with jpeg which is what I mainly use. Also, I'm probably going to make a plugin to export all the data to an external file at some point as I dont want to take ANY chances with all that data - I'll make it export the tags to a file in each folder for that group of pictures.


I'm REALLY hoping MC will see support for jpeg2000 soon so I can start using that for my images.
Right now though jpeg works fine as it's what most cameras use on a low setting.


Also - remind me next week or something - I plan to try to make a plugin that'll do automatic backup's every so often for us for exactly the scenario you talk about - I always forget to back up.


Any images tips and tricks you have too would be welcomed.

I'm trying to plan what I'm going to do thoroughly with this as it's 10,000 files all fully untagged - it's a lot of work and I wanna make sure I chose the best method/program etc so it's not wasted work due to the incompatibility of tagging between different programs.

My website creator plugin is my first step towards setting up MC for images

[kiwi]

Just a thought... you might want to use the filename friendly date version.  Also, I find that using "~" as a delimiter instead of "-" to be easier, as sometime I want to have a "-" in my text.  It is very seldom that "~"s appear in text.

kiwi

[nila]

Good idea about the ~'s

I think I'll use them once I've got it all  tagged - I was trying to work out what would be a good delimiter and that one is perfect.


As for the date filename friendly - I might just make a quick plugin once they're all tagged to allow me to write the dates in my own format so i can actually specify how I want it to appear (ie.  Y-mm(M)-dd day to give me:   2002-12(December)-04 Saturday) etc. - the built in MC date handling is a bit ridgid for me right now - hopefully v10 dates will be sorted more

[Tinnitus]

So when you add information to the "people" tag how do you format that is it like: Marge, Homer, Lisa, Bart, etc.?

I also tried Adobe Photoshop Album and i really liked the idea of adding the tag to the picture instead of the other way around.
This approach works better with photos than the "MC Way" (wich is more suitheable for music than video and photos, in my opinion, but it's probably gonna improve so fingers crossed for v10 like you say).
I still prefer MC to APA because of the easy TV interface so I'm not going anywhere.

You say that the tag info is saved with jpeg's? I didn't know that - all of it, every tag?

As for your request

Any images tips and tricks you have too would be welcomed.

Well i guess you allready did more thinking on the subject than me (and i will keep a link to this thread) but please: DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP!

[nila]

For the People tag and all the other tags for photos - I just tag using Panes only. So I presume it's saved as:  Bart; Marge; Hilary; Bill; etc.

Right now it's the only way to tag list types properly (v10 hopefully will add some method of doing so in the AW so we can do it for files in playlists, playing now etc.)


Yeah - for jpeg's the data is saved IN the photo's but MC is the only program that can read this tag info at present.

Have a look at File Type Info for some images and it'll show you how it saves it.


To me it doesn't make much difference the MC way or the APA way because for both programs I select all the images containing say 'Marge' (ctrl+click) and once I have all the images with that person in I then just click on their name in the panes - or in APA I'd drag and release it on one of the images.

The grouping is the only thing that MC needs.

I do LOVE the calendar feature of APA thou - it's great
Pity the tags cant be shared between both programs.

[Tinnitus]

How did you get 9000 images anyway? I mean I've had a digital cam since about '97 and i only have about a thousand ~ jesus! (notice i used tilde)

[nila]

Did I mention I LOVE to travel?

Some people like to go down to the pub for a beer - I prefer saving that cash and going down to India for a Lassi, America for a 7 layer, etc!

And to be fair - it's : 9329 photo's

And I have to get a few hundred off of a friend as well - these date back to 1997 (I used to scan in my pictures with a scanner - thank god for Digital Cameras!)