[KPhotoAlbum] Cataloging workflow

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Hi Angel,


Am Dienstag, 30. April 2019, 16:30:08 CEST schrieb Angel Lopez:
> Copy photographs to computer, in direfferent folders:
> 
> /Photographs/
> /Photographs/2018/
>   /Photographs/2018/2018-01-01_New Year
>   /Photographs/2018/2018-02-14_Ana Bithday
>  ...
> /Photographs/2019 /
>   /Photographs/2019/2019-03-19_Trip to Rusia
>  ...
> 
> And kphotoalbum database is inside /Photographs.

So far, so good. I guess this is quite a common way of organizing files on 
disk. My own setup is not very different.

> The first 4 years of use, I tagged pictures with People, Places, Events...
> But nowadays What I were doing was to use the Tokens for select pictures to
> keep which ones to delete, which ones to send to a friend...

Tagging pictures is quite a time consuming task, and it can be frustrating to 
fall behind with it.
Depending on your personality, one of several approaches to this problem might 
help:

a. Let the images pile up until you have the energy to tag them. When the pile 
of untagged images gets too big, tag all photos with a "TODO" tag and mark 
them as tagged.

b. Do some basic tagging (Event, Location, ...) right away. Optionally mark 
the best few images as "selection" and do full tagging on those (People, 
Keywords)

You might say that solution "a" is not a real solution, but at least it is a 
way to manage expectations and to keep the level of frustration low. Generally 
speaking, I would say that approach "b" is a better approach, but whatever 
works for you is right.

> Now I started to catalog all of them, But I would like to now what
> categories and keywords do other people use. I now this is not a problem
> with a single solution, but some tips would be useful.

Basically, my advice to you is: what things do you search for? You've been 
using kphotoalbum for a long time: did you ever wish to search for some 
specific category or tag?
These two questions should be a good guide whether something is a good tag for 
your usage of kphotoalbum.

> Yesterday, I tagged a some pictures with Keyword="river", and several
> photographs later, I started to tag a set of photographs of a trip to a
> river source, where some of them do not have the river itself in the
> photograph. So, how to deal with this?

Personally, I encounter this problem most often when tagging people: is a 
person in the image if the face is clearly visible, or only if the person is 
the focus of the image, or even when the person is only partially visible?

This is a genuinely hard problem. You might want to take a two-pass approach 
and go over your images a second time, with the goal of making tags 
consistent. For some categories this may be worthwhile, for others it may be a 
waste of time.

One thing to keep in mind, though: Once you found *some* river image of your 
trip, it is usually easy to find more images of the same trip. So you don't 
have to be perfect all the time...

> How do you use label, and descriptions fields?

Personally, I use the description field sparingly, basically for context that 
I know I would not remember in ten years time. Also, I misuse it as a way to 
add information to tags: I have blanket-tags for "animal" and "plant", and use 
the description field to write the species name of the animal or plant.
If I were serious about tagging animals or plants, the superior approach would 
be to have separate tags for each species of animal or plant, though.

> I found this place:
> https://lightroom-keyword-list-project.blogspot.com/p/get-list.html
> But I found that list really huge.

Looking at such a list for inspiration can be a good starting point. In the 
end the only thing that matters is your individual needs, though.

E.g. my own categories are:
Keywords
Places
People
Source (copyright holder)
Status (untagged, done, todo, published, ...)
Film ID (to find the negative strips of analog images)


Within the keywords category, I always tag the event/topic/trip title (this 
should really be done as a separate "Events" category but hindsight is 20:20).
Apart from this, it is quite a random assortment of tags, somewhat structured 
by using tag groups. It works for me, but I could not give you any advice on 
what works for you...


I also use ratings, but unfortunately I'm not very consistent about it...

> As a side question, I could not find an option fix the Zoom level while
> viewing images. Could be a nice feature to compare to or three photographs
> in a series for the sharpest of them. Is this possible?

Not really. You can change the default image size / zoom level in the settings 
(Full viewer size, Natural image size, Natural image size if <= viewer size). 
Maybe this is enough for you?

Cheers,
  Johannes