At present I meticulously add metadata as EXIF tags to my photos using Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, which also lets me place them accurately on a map. The thing is I tend to leave photos in a folder based on the date I downloaded the image from the camera.
This is fine for finding shots taken in the last month, or for birthdays, but virtually impossible to remember months ago where I was in the second week of September -- what tips do you have for organising your files on disk? Are there good cataloguing programs out there that rely on the EXIF data so that I don't have to double enter? It'd be really cool if there was something that would let me poke at a map and say "what have I taken near here?"
Answer
The key is adding some specific tags every time you import.
I use Aperture (which is Mac-only,) but Lightroom has similar capabilities, as does iphoto.
What you need to tag depends on what you shoot, and what you think you might be looking for someday, but this works for me:
- The people in the pictures. I use Apple's "Faces" feature to tag people in the pictures (sometimes it recognizes them itself). This is key for me, so I can then pull up pics of my Mom, with me, but not with my brother, for example.
- The place the pictures were taken. Again, Aperture has a nice, pre-defined "places" tag that can read any associated GPS data, but you can also just manually add tags for this: (NYC, Our Lake House, Oz, whatever.)
- An event name. New Years 2008, Tom's 30th Birthday, Walking in NYC Mar 2010, etc.
- Any relevent themes or types you might look for someday. This one's optional, but if you sometimes want to find a picture of a flower, or animals, or you generally shoot in ways that are thematically bucketed, this can save some time.
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