[digiKam-users] high-level photo organization

[Frédéric Da Vitoria]

For more than 10 years, I have been using the same system to organize 
the files, so maybe I should change it, but here is what I use currently.

I completely abandoned using subjects for storing when I discovered tags 
a few years ago. I use tags exclusively, and I improved my way of using 
tags when I switched to Digikam, which was the first to offer me 
hierarchical tagging. I seldom use descriptions. I only use ratings to 
help me clean my images, from 1 star = [should probably be deleted], to 
5 stars = [I  am happy enough about it to use it as a screensaver or a 
desktop background] (0 stars means of course I haven't rated it yet). 4 
is good, but nothing to be proud about. 3 means I keep them for 
historical reasons (maybe to keep track of something or someone, maybe 
because the picture is part of a series...).

For the folder structure, I use something like Antti : one folder per 
year or year and period, depending on the number of files, for example 
"2005", "2009-08" and "2009-09..12". I could have used only folders at 
the first level and created subfolders for periods, I may change my mind 
some day. Some of these folders have subfolders, for the pictures in a 
series. All sorting, searching, classifying and so on is done in 
Digikam, I use the folders when I want to do backups or use another 
software on a specific image (I have yet to find out how to setup 
Digikam for this), so that the exact folder structure is not really 
meaningful, the only requirement is making files easy to find, which 
means having not too many folders and not too many files per folder. I 
break a folder in two or more when it contains too many files. "Too 
many" depends of course on your computer and your OS, in my situation 
the biggest folders have a little more 800 files, I set the splitting 
limit at around 500 photos.

Now that I think a bit, maybe lowering a little the number of files per 
folder (and creating the required folders) would improve things a bit, 
make the whole structure more balanced.  Anyhow, I don't see any reason 
to use a completely different system.

-- 
Frederic

Le 17/10/2022 à 11:52, Antti Ahonen a écrit :
> Personally I always arrange everything in year/month/day hierarchy. 
> Perhaps not mandatory regarding Digikam use, but makes life easier 
> with backups and stuff when the archive gets big.
>
> All information related to shoot, project, etc is added as metadata in 
> files and sidecar files.
>
> That is how I try to manage with my files.
>
> -Antti
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 6:41 AM Sheridan Price <sheridanmp at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>     Because of the built in date functions I've found it more useful
>     to store photos under descriptive folders as in:
>     year then a sub folder having a name that is some description for
>     that shoot. Hence I might have 2022/Experimental Farm/May. 
>      2022/Experimental Farm/July.
>
>     And why you might ask? Well I have found that mentally if I am
>     looking for a particular photo or set of photos I can usually
>     remember the year and event and hence can find it quickly in
>     digikam  by going directly to the folder - no search necessary. If
>     I only know part of the info then I can do proper searches via the
>     search tools and when displayed the folder path often helps jog my
>     memory to help zero in quickly to the correct folder without
>     having to actually consider each individual folder.
>
>     This does not preclude using useful tags on each photo. That
>     allows for real detailed and extensive searches. This just makes
>     some quick searches quicker.
>
>     Sher
>
>     On Sun., Oct. 16, 2022, 9:20 p.m. Tyler Smith,
>     <tyler at plantarum.ca> wrote:
>
>         Hi,
>
>         I've been doing a lot of work in Digikam over the past few
>         weeks, and the many features available for organizing and
>         tagging my photos. Now I wonder how experienced users take
>         advantage of all it offers.
>
>         Pre-Digikam, I stored my photos in nested folders by year,
>         month, date, with the dates sometimes labelled by location or
>         event. i.e.,
>
>         2022
>           10
>              09
>              10
>              31-halloween
>
>         Now with Digikam, it's trivially easy to view images by date
>         without sorting them myself. So now I wonder, how do you store
>         your images on file, and how do you approach
>         tagging/rating/annotating? So many options, I'd like to hear
>         about what workflows you find particularly useful.
>
>         Thanks,
>
>         Tyler
>
>         -- 
>         plantarum.ca <http://plantarum.ca>
>

-- 
Frédéric Da Vitoria
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