[KPhotoAlbum] Cataloging workflow

Tue Apr 30 23:13:53 BST 2019

Hi Angel,

tagging and cataloging can be made into a science (e.g.
http://dublincore.org/). But this is overkill for private pictures.
Everyone has her or his own preferences and these preferences may change
over time. If you want to become a professional photographer, you might
dig quite a bit deeper and start learning about digital asset management
and the best tags to choose for marketable stock photos. But this is not
for me.

I use 3 primary categories:
* People
* Places
* Keywords
These are the defaults in KPA.

My most important one is "People". I try to tag all people in my
pictures. This is tremendously useful for me: find a name and then boil
down with the timeline an within 2 minutes you find the image of XY at
event Z.
Then "Places" - I have places like "Rhine Valley" or "Italy" or "Milano"
(being a sub tag for Italy). Nothing too specific except for places
where I or somebody significant for me lives. There is also a place "no
place" for things that are not really locatable, like screenshots or the
occasional document scan.
My "Keywords"-list is a jumble of unrelated tags like: "night shot",
"portrait", "panorama", "heaven and clouds", "street photography", "some
event name", "Christmas" - some pretty generic, some more specific.
These tags are only marginally useful, as I do not follow a strict
regime in most cases. You could do that a lot better. But ... see above
"science"...

Then I have 2 additional categories:
* "quality and selection"
- This is for tagging images as "OK" "good" "very good" (this is older
than the 1-5 stars) but also for "selection 2014 for grandpa's calendar"
or "rework needed", "desktop background" or "bad", "delete this"... This
list of tags is fairly short and tends to grow very slowly.
* "source"
- What camera? or "who is it from" (with a super tag: "other people") or
which program was used to generate the image (gimp, hugin, ...)

That's it. My images go into a similar folder structure as your's:
my_images / 2019 / 03_some_event_name (I have only 5 to 10 folders
within the same month)
There seems to be some consensus, as I have seen similar structures
quite often at other people's collections (and I have asked around too).

I use tokens (A-Z) a lot for temporary selections to speed up tagging:
Skip through the slideshow and tag all the good ones with "O", then
select images with token "O" and tag them in one go with "quality" =
"OK", and discard the token "O" right away.

In the beginning I started naming images. Now I leave the label as is
(=filename). Very rarely I add some description - for the select few
really important pictures.

If you take pictures about a special topic, you might add a new category
just for this purpose. If you are a sports photographer, you might need
a category "Teams" and so on...

In the end, the whole business is not about "right or wrong" but about
finding your images quickly. Find out, what is important to you, what
you remember easily and stick to that. Also, you can always add or edit
the tags at some later time - if or when necessary.

For the record: I started using KPA 3 years later than you. Isn't it
great to have a tool that is still prospering after so many years!

Cheers, Andreas

PS:
Setting a fixed zoom level that does not change when switching images in
viewer mode sounds like an interesting idea ... then the visible frame
should be static for each of the images and probably the same for all
images in the range. Right now, I see that the focus lies more on
modernizing/stabilizing the code than on adding new features as Johannes
has mentioned a few times.
However, I have a workaround for You:
* select the images you want to compare and open all of them in Gimp
(should not be more than a handful)
* in Gimp go to the zoom level and spot you want and switch with "alt-1"
/ "alt-2" ... between the images.
* the zoom stays the same and the frame also
Second workaround: Darktable (I use it for raw processing, but it can
work with jpegs as well): in darkroom mode the zoom level is kept
constant between images. I check my focus there and discard the bad ones
right here before developing them into my KPA folder structure as jpegs
for keeping. I even delete all the bad raw files after a while. There is
enough stuff on my disk anyway.

Am 30.04.19 um 16:30 schrieb Angel Lopez:
> Hello,
>
> I've been using kphotoalbum since 2002, but not really "properly".
> They I use is:
> 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.
>
> 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...
> Even I do not know which would be the right old database.xml file.
>
> 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.
> 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?
> How do you use label, and descriptions fields?
>
> I found this place:
> https://lightroom-keyword-list-project.blogspot.com/p/get-list.html
> But I found that list really huge.
>
> 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?
>
> Thank you all.
>
> ______________________________
> ----------- Angel ------------
>
>
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