I’ve been taking pictures since I was a teenager now my kids have grown up an I have over 90k pics.

I’m also digitizing Slides, 8mm film, printed pic etc.

Any ideas on software , techniques, steps, cool ideas to organize this and maybe put them to some use ?

Thank you 🙏

  • suburbanbeatBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Hi! I’m going through the same process right now. Not quite 90k, but I’m cataloging about 25k photos that I took between the ages of 12 and 36. My process has been roughly thus:

    • Organize photos by year in individual folders for each year. This was a manual process that took forever. No way around it!
    • Organize by season within each annual folder - Winter, Spring, Summer Fall.
    • Use OSX batch rename function to rename all files according to year and season.
    • Use Lightroom to resize everything to 4x6 inches at 300 DPI. The early digital photos are way too low-res to be usable and the newer digital photos are unnecessarily high-res. Resizing everything this way makes them print-ready and at a size that makes them practical to post or share right away.
    • Use Photoshop + Dehancer to add light film emulation using the Image Processor function. Added Gaussian blur to older, low-res photos to mask digital artifacts. Those photos are blurry, but with heavier film emulation they could pass as super grainy 110 film shots or something.
    • From there I tagged the photos that I thought were the best within a given year. I was left with between 400-700 photos per year that I thought were better than others.
  • uprightanimalBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Simple folder structure by date taken: /yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/originalFilename.ext

    E.g Photo_Archive/2014/2014-12-24/DSC003_2769.NEF

    I put all contextual information in the keywords or exif/IPTc metadata.

    I like this format because I can easily drill down to a desired image if I know when it was taken, and it makes it easier to parse and traverse the tree if I have to script a tool to do something.

    Having said that, it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’re digital photos and not scanned. When I’m scanning batches of slides I number the boxes, then use the dates on the slides and similar format: /35mm_scans/yyyy/box#/IMG_yyyy-mm_nn.tif Where filename is the year/month on the slide, and nn is the slide number.

    • Correct_Signal_OPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Good ideas. The scanning is time consuming even though I bought a high speed scanner. But it’s cataloguing is easier since I can on the fly create folders for the event year etc.