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[RobOK]

I am trying to use MC 11 to organize my photos and have searched here on a number of topics, but have not found much information about how to effectively use MC.

I would love to hear from all of you that use MC extensively for photos on any or all of the following:

- do you use MC to take photos off the camera, if so how?  (what are your steps in actually moving files, organizing the photos into what directories,  tagging and so forth)

- do you use default view schemes or custom?

- what features of MC are most useful for photos?  do you use Albums?  Genres?


A couple MC 11 questions:

- where do you specify where images are to be stored and what the file naming scheme should be?  Can there (I hope) be a different file naming scheme for photos as compared to music files?

- I used albums in MC 10 and when I went to MC 11 I got a whole bunch of albums with a date for the name.  Can I turn off that behavioor?  Why is it doing that?  Does anyone want an album for every single day a picture is taken?  I have a guess that this is a default album name and then you move things into the albums you want, is that true?  Is there an "unassigned" folder or are these date folders the equivalent of "unassigned".   [EDIT:  I do think this is just a default behavior.  Since most of my photos were not in any album it was initially overwhelming, plus they are not sorted chronologicallly.  But if you keep up with sorting things into albums I guess this would be okay]



If there are threads on this, please point me to those threads.  Thanks!

I find the photo organization to be not so intuitive.  Considering whether to stay with MC for this or go to Picassa or Adoe Photo Album.  Thoughts on that?
Rob.

[RobOK]

by the way, i currently organize my physical file folders like this:

2001
2002
2003
-- 01 Party
-- 02 Football Game
-- 02 Trip to Zoo
2004

Where YYYY is the highest directory and then MM and a Topic are the nested directories.  Its by no means perfect.

[Matt]

As a start, click 'Camera' in the Action Window and play around a little.

[RobOK]

Thanks, I did do that.... I acquired 100+ photos off my camera using the Camera action and did see (after my original post) that you can control where the files are stored, so that question is answered.  I guess I am more interested in the *Process* people use -- do they use MC to do all steps, or do they aquire outside of MC first?  What schemes work best for people?

As a usability point, shouldn't all options be available under Tools-Options?  The "Acquire Images" options are not in the main options window where I was originally looking for them.

[edbro]

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=24045

[IanG]

I guess I am more interested in the *Process* people use -- do they use MC to do all steps, or do they aquire outside of MC first?  What schemes work best for people?

I use Windows Explorer to upload images from my card reader and DCE AutoEnhance to batch process them to apply general corrections.  After that I import the enhanced  images into MC and tag them via the People/Places/Events view scheme.  If I've managed to get a few decent shots I'll put them in a playlist, possibly with some music,  to make a slideshow.  If I want prints I put the enhanced / manipulated images back on the card and have it done at my local supermarket - it's cheaper than I can do it at home and the quality's better!

I've sometimes used an on-line lab to produce my prints - it would be nice if I could upload from MC to a Fuji lab rather than using Fuji's s/w.

Ian G.

[RobOK]

Thanks, that was the type of thing I was looking for.  I hope others post more.

I feel like there is more I could be doing with MC with my photos but I don't know how (or the alternative, that MC can't do very much with photos).

I did fool around with doing it the way JimH described in that other thread and it works reasonably well.  Except that the directory came out as "October" instead of "10", but I think that is a known bug in V 11 ?

[Neville]

My physical folder are organized like this:

My Pictures
  2003
  2004
    2004-10-03
    2004-10-09
      - 20041009-192518.jpg
      - 20041009-192602.jpg
      etc...

First I aquire images from cammera to root My Pictures folder, then I use "Rename files from properties" to get this folder structure and for filename I use tag Date(filename friendly).
After that I tag my pictures via People/Places/Events scheme. In addition I have one custom field called "Subject" where I put some informations about picture like how many persons are on picture, or what is on the picture. Some of the subject entries are "1 person, 2 persons... ...5+ persons, Garden, City, Signs, Animals, Sky... etc. This is working great for me, although I have some problems to get this folder structure (see another tread), because it's not easy to get numeric month in folders.

[park]

Personaly I have set up mc to work like this:

I have made fields: [country] [area] [places] [people] [trips][events] plus one for [subject] which has "people" "places" & "textures" as its' selectable fields.

My main view scheme, the images root one, has a pane for each of those fields and I use it to tag all my images.

Then I have a view scheme for "Places" "People" and "Events" which basically has fewer panes in it and they are arranged in different ways for easier viewing of that particular subject.

I also made a field called [quality] with values of "good" "reasonable" and "poor" and put it as the first and final panes in the view scheme so that i could filter out just the best photos at any point. But recently I've been moving towards using the ratings instead.

Where they are on the hd doesnt make much of a difference to me cos i only browse them in media center really. but my way is to name them starting with "subject" then "country" then "place" then "quality"

The result of this is that the [subject] field tends to split up the photos taken in the same place a bit (ie: a person is the main part of one photo but then the mountains are the subject in the next, but with my view schemes and folder naming method these photos get split up a bit). So I have also started using the "album" tag and made a special "photo album" view scheme, just for viewing all the good photos taken at one time or in one place. And I name the albums myself, not using the auto date entry and make some interesting mix albums. Might be worth making a new "album" field that is semicolon delimited just so that a photo can be put into multiple albums.

And finally, i also seperate photos aquired from other places (downloaded or from other peoples cameras etc) so that they dont 'pollute'  my own collection.

Bri