Photo program

[Lori11]

Ok, I give. I need an editing program. I know I should have had one forever ago lol but really what I need it for is a good sorting ability. I take about 8 thousand photos an event, and I have to sort them by bike/car number to post individual files for the riders/drivers to see.
That being said, help.......

[EOSThree]

Well...if you want a way to organize photos, then ACDSee is a pretty good program for that, with some light editing abilities. Breeze Browser (my favorite, but since there isn't a Mac version I no longer use it) also does and excellent job at organizing and RAW conversion for Canon. Lightroom is a very good editor and a pretty darn good way of organizing. Then there is always Bridge and Photoshop, but big $$ there. I find most of what I need to do can be done in LR, and if I need more heavy hitting Photoshop Elements is plenty powerful for me.

[Lori11]

Thank you! I have tried the free trial of ACDSee, I will look into that again!

[Franglais]

Another vote for ACDSee. I use it to keep photos in folders then drill down, but there are other features that I use:

- powerful rename function with a template. I still work by "film number" though a "film" nowadays often has 500 frames on it
- classification by value 1-5. 1 = my best 2 = worth showing 3 = not bad but not for display etc.
- classification by category (people, travels, events, etc.)
- search by folder, hierarchy of folders or the whole database by multiple criteria including the EXIF data (display the photos I did on the Nikon D200 last year)
- sort by just about anything you like
- thumbnail images appear even if the original image is offline (external disk)
- and I particularly like the Calendar View. How many photos I did each year/month/day, click on the date and what I did that day appears in chronological sequence

The important thing to remember is once your photos are catalogues in ACDSee then ONLY use ACDSee to move them around. Otherwise it won't know you've moved them and any values and categories you've added to them will be lost

[SmartWombat]

I would recommend Lightroom - because I use it.
ACDSee Pro 3 looked comparable, but I haven't bought it having invested in LR.

But whatever you use, tagging that many photos by bike/car number would be a pain.
I think there may be a market for an add-in that will search every image and use text recognition to find the number on the vehicle and then put it in the EXIF comment.

[drg]

There are tools in Adobe Lightroom for marking, painting, tagging, etc. that for this many photos are the ticket.

You can sort the photos and then retag as needed for bike, car, race, entry bib, etc.

ACDsee doesn't have the underlying user training resource to set up various workflows (it may be capable but I find the interface annoying and it always locks up for me after a few thousand images).

I shoot thousands of photo's on different cameras for some events over different periods of time. With LR I can shoot more as I'm not spending so much time re-inventing the wheel for every shoot. A lot more automation and layers of organization. The learning curve for Lightroom can be a little steep and bit lengthy. Look for a class, preferably NOT Kelby oriented as his solutions are very trivial and you won't learn how LR works. Just how to do a lot of specific things that may not work for you. Adobe has training materials available for very reasonable rates up to 'certification' levels.

If you need more info please let me know. I'm really looking forward to the upcoming release of LR 3 now that I think I've figured out the new sorting tools and schemes!

[OldClicker]

drg - How would you go about key wording 8000 photos such as Lori would be looking at? - TF

[drg]

drg - How would you go about key wording 8000 photos such as Lori would be looking at? - TF

One at a time - not!

Certainly not one at a time or the coffee would run out first!

There are a few workflow decisions to be made first.

First a decision as how to load the images on to the computer via either Lightroom's built in facility or copying/moving them to a hard drive via a card reader. With a fast enough machine using the Lightroom facility is possible but carefully note where you put the files. This is a must. Else use a directory based approach of grouping the files in to subdirectories as needed or desired.

If you shoot on several flash cards ( I do for safety sake ) there is another natural division per race-heat-event. There is already then a physical separation of images and they aren't all jumbled up together like with a trade show or fair or even parts of a wedding reception.

Second a pre-determination of how to 'tag and bag' the work.

One good thing about competitive events is that they already have a that previously mentioned natural order such as heats, events, experience or gender categories, type (car or cycle in this case), off road, track, etc.

All of these can become part of the keyword scheme.

Time of day sorting also can be a big help and sorting by hour of the day. I always take notes about the days work. If there is a program/schedule I try to get one of those to make notes on especially if there is a change in sequence. Thus I know the order later of what happened when. If there's any change, make a note.

As each race or heat is added to the Lightroom directory a keyword set can be assigned that has the basics such as auto, IMSA-GTP, heat_1 and so on. This is a good place to mention for professional photographic work that is going to be submitted or is freelance or journalistic assignment add IPTC data to every photograph on import.

Note: In the custom Keyword panel you can hold down the Alt to see the keyword shortcuts once a set has been started.

Have these initial keywords sets ready to go before entering/importing work. Saves a bunch of time and keeps it all consistent.

Third Initial Sorting.

After all the images are in or all the images for a particular group are added I'd then sort out keepers, maybes, and rejects. If the rejects are really bad from focus, moving camera or sneezing (yes I've messed up a shot or two by sneezing at the wrong instant!) then removing from the LR catalog will save time later. The keepers and other savers could be grouped 1-5 or via a color scheme initially.

During this process it possible to add keywords to say all the Yamahas, Buells, Kawasakis, etc. Again a preset list or by using auto-completion of keyword(s). For very similar keywords such as names or different teams driving the same make of vehicle you might want to turn off Autocomplete to prevent accidentally tagging with the wrong data. There's another trick I'll come to in a moment.

A Temporary Collection is another consideration for sorting at this point and then sub tagging or assigning a numeric or color scheme and then deleting the Temp Collection.

A fourth decision is whether to then split these up into separate grouping via export. This can provide smaller catalogs of just motorcycle or just cars. Further subdivisions could be made to groups or race series.

Part of these decisions need to be decided before the process begins so that a consistent approach can be followed to have images that can be retrieved later. If you are never going to have to look at the pics again and all you are doing is sorting then I'd definitely use exported catalogs and just have one large master catalog per day/event(even a weekend) for archiving.

Fifth, workflow and operation. Individual photograph tagging and any other work. Good time to fix any rotation problems such as from landscape to portrait or vice-versa if auto-rotate wasn't set.

In order to set drivers, teams, car/entrant numbers, and other individual identifying information;

there is the method of appending that info one image at a time with auto-complete or by 'dragging' the information from a keyword list to the image! The other trick I promised, is to 'paint' photos that have the same added keyword information with that keyword set or enter it. There's a Painter Tool available either by menu selection or via Ctrl-Alt-K(PC). The Painter Tool can be used for a variety of different data types including keywords and IPTC data. You can even paint a new rotation to several images! There is also the ability to paint Develop settings to a group of images such as changing the white balance or boosting the overall exposure by the same amount. Thus after visually sorting all the Yamaha Team Blue in heat 4 ridden by Bob photos you can paint his name, bib number or whatever individual information is needed as keywords to the whole set of photos that needs this data.

After this is all done then it is easy to extract any driver, team, event/heat etc. The images can then be edited or virtualized for experimentation of treatment-cropping-or effects.

I've made this an overview but it is one start to the process. This doesn't address any of the special stuff like adding web links, or setting up for a web page, or pre-development (tone, exposure, sharpening, etc) that can be added to any set of images.

Some of this isn't real easy to figure out quickly on your own and Lightroom has many built in features to assist with this that I haven't even touched or only mentioned very briefly particularly regarding meta-data. If you know for example that from turn six of the GT race you only used the 24-70mm lens that information along with the time of the race (start-finish duration) can be used to extract all the turn six photos for that race. That's meta-data not keywords!

I hope this is more helpful than confusing and I'll detail parts of this if you want to know more.

[OldClicker]

I certainly don't have that kind of volume, but this is really helpful. - Thanks, TF

[freygr]

I use two programs to build my online site for sales. First I use Water mark plus to water mark all the photos and resize all the photos, it places all the resized and water marked photos where you tell it, it's a subscription based program so much every 6 months. Then I use Thumb's Plus to build the web pages, or I can print catalogs with what ever you wish file name, date, time..... With Thumb's Plus on letter size you can go from one per page up to postage stamp size, very small. If you are printing catalog sheets you don't need to water mark unless you are printing large size.

Thumb's Plus does have a thirty day trail: link: http://www.cerious.com/

[Lori11]

Wow! I didnt see these responses till now! Sorry! I am going to read them tomorrow, its 130 am and my brain is mush lol Lots of info, I cant thank you all enough!