[Digikam-users] Organizing my RAW files

[David Rolph]

Hi Everybody,

I'm something of a photography, Linux and Digikam novice.  I've been using
Digikam for some time now and its made organizing my photos easier.
However, I still have some way to go till I can say I really have a photo
workflow.  Generally, I am taking more photos than I have time to properly
organize so I want to cut down on the number of photos and streamline my
management of them.

The first problem I have with my workflow is raw files.  I'd like to have
access to them if I need them (very rarely) and after that I want them out
of the way.  The ideal situation would be if DigiKam indexed the raw file
and any of multiple derived images as one image, then tags etc would all
apply to the group of images rather than one particular entity.  However, I
think thats a pretty fundamental change to the application (which might have
implications I haven't considered).  I'm not expecting it to happen soon or
perhaps ever.

I find myself bouncing backwards and forwards between displaying "no RAWS"
and "All Files" especially during my initial examination of photos for
deletion and then later when I move them to appropriate folders and if I
rename them.  Sometimes my wife renames JPEGs without renaming the RAWs
(which isn't really related to DigiKam, but is part of my workflow and makes
things much harder.

So anyway, now I get to the point of my post, which I'd like you to comment
on.  I think I'll write a small script to go through my library every now
and then and move all the RAW files to another location.  I'll sort them
into a directory structure tha looks like year/month/day.  The advantage is
no more switching between modes and worrying about moving, renaming or
deleting the raws to match the jpegs.

On the rare occassion that I do need a raw I'll find it by date/time.  I
might still cull the RAWs when I download the files from my camera, but I am
not going to worry about deleting every raw.  Having useless RAWs is the
downside of my idea, but I'll get over it.  Besides they won't look out of
place next to all the RAWs that do have matching jpegs, which are also
untouched ;-)

I'll probably also rename all the jpegs by date/time.

Does anybody have a better method?  Does anybody think this method might
make problems for me later?

cheers,
david
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