Rethinking Photo Organization

[zkarj]

Putting carefully (file)named photos into carefully named folders is great if you want carefully named folders of photos. Apple Photos will ignore all of that. What it won’t ignore is if the meta data you crave is inside the photo files.

Rather than have Hazel rename files and folders (or perhaps in addition), you could install ExifTool (easiest via HomeBrew) and get Hazel to embed keywords to the same specifications. Then when you load into Photos, you will be able to search on that information.

For my DSLR photos I add the keywords in Lightroom CC and, lately if I remember, add GPS coordinates to them. I then manually drag them into albums in Photos (as well as uploading to Flickr). Once they’re in Photos I can easily search for them by keywords or locate them on the map.

[Lars]

@zkarj

…lately if I remember, add GPS coordinates to them…

That’s why I have a GPS module on my DSLR and coordinates are embedded as I shoot. That saves hours or work.

[zkarj]

I’ve only done it a few times, using tracks from GPX Tracker that I run on my phone.

[zkarj]

Understand. I was just trying it out a few times… would have tried it more if I remembered more often… and just running GPX Tracker got me a fairly accurate looking track and when I gave it to LrC it was perfectly happy with what was in the file and instantly located my photos for me.

I have previously used HoudahGeo which ultimately worked, but I found the workflow odd every time I used it. The only minor oddity with LrC is where you go to load the track. I expected it to be more obvious in the Map module main interface rather than buried in a menu. (Heck, maybe it’s there and I didn’t see it.)

[Lars]

@zkarj

… (Heck, maybe it’s there and I didn’t see it.)

The “lighting bolt” under the preview screen is…a track.

[machei]

I know I’m super-late to this discussion, but I’m digging seeing what people are doing. For me, I think the problem is twofold:

1. I’ve been taking photos my whole life, which inconveniently spans a length of time where there were no digital photos, and a time where digital photos were still very much in their infancy and finding footing. As a result, many of my photos predate meta data and EXIF information (some historical photos still have people’s names, addresses or events written on the back), and more predate any kind of system like Apple Photos. This leaves a huge pool of photos that are/can be organized in disparate ways based on the technology available when they were created.
2. In the time I’ve been taking photos, I’ve fallen victim to the same sort of paradox of choice that is often discussed in this forum with regard to task managers or note taking applications. I started with folders and file names, went to Aperture and some renaming/meta data (all of these processes had their own learning curves, some of which I never understood fully), brief forays into Google Photos/Picasa and now finding a home in Apple Photos–somewhere in there everything went online as well. So in all of this shuffle, things acquired all manner of organization philosophy that isn’t always compatible with what comes after.

Also, there’s the need for backups because photos are precious, so where does that go? I need a duplicate Apple photos install so I can fall back on it like they did in Contact with that contraption they built for Jodie Foster. (for the record, I just let the photos app on my NAS scrape my iPhone’s photo library from time to time to make a copy)

Anyway, all this is to say that I think if I started today, with the technology of today, Apple Photos would be more than enough to keep me sorted. I find though what I’d need is a way to retroactively get all the metadata and EXIF to a place where everything is juggled into place correctly regardless of when it was taken. But that’s a monumental task that I don’t think anyone’s cracked yet. I feel like I keep looking for some kind of holy grail of automated photo discovery. We’re getting there with facial recognition and all the data captured to a given photo with each click, but it’s impossible so far to get it all.

I continue to watch this space for the solution. SOMEone must have it.

Sorry for the long, mostly unhelpful response… this stuff is interesting to me though.

[Luekutus]

I been an avid amateur photographer for about 40 years now, so I have about 100,000 images, not including the thousands of slides I have yet to scan. For me, Photos is just temporary storage for images I’ve taken in the last 12 months or so, particularly now that my primary camera is my iPhone.

Eventually all my pictures get migrated into Adobe Lightroom, which I like for the way it allows you to do file renaming on import, to sort images into file system folders by year and month, and actually write metadata to the image files themselves. A lot of people like Lightroom for its photo-editing abilities, but for me, generally, by the time my images get into Lightroom I’m pretty much done doing anything with them…

…other than eventually reminiscing.

[OogieM]

@Luekutus

by the time my images get into Lightroom I’m pretty much done doing anything with them

I have to admit that I think I’ve used Lightroom editing capabilities maybe 2-3 times if ever. I honestly can’t remember a time I used it but I probably tried it at least a bit early on . LightRoom to me is a superb cataloger.

[Lars]

@Luekutus

…Eventually all my pictures get migrated into Adobe Lightroom, which I like for the way it allows you to do file renaming on import, to sort images into file system folders by year and month, and actually write metadata to the image files themselves. A lot of people like Lightroom for its photo-editing abilities, but for me, generally, by the time my images get into Lightroom I’m pretty much done doing anything with them……

LR is an outstanding product. I use many other products, but LR is still at the center of my photography workflow. While PhotMechanic is faster, PhotoLab has better noise reduction,… everything ends in LR.
Using it since the first beta, looked at every competitor out there, still with LR.

[Luekutus]

I actually love Lightroom and when my primary camera wasn’t my iPhone it was the center of my workflow too. I still use it first on occasion when using my drone of my M43 camera, particularly with videos, as Photos sometimes seems to do wonky things with timestamps on videos (from non-iPhones)…haven’t figure that out yet.

[zkarj]

@machei

I’ve fallen victim to the same sort of paradox of choice

By the same token that a lot of people aim for plain text (a strong reason Markdown is gaining popularity) I have gravitated to writing (reasonably) standard metadata into the files. Within some limitations, a keyword/tag or title inserted into an image file can be read by hundreds of different software products, including Photos, (largely) regardless of how it got there. In fact, GPS coordinates are more reliable in the metadata than even keywords because there is a standard that no-one seems to be trying to fiddle with.

@machei

I feel like I keep looking for some kind of holy grail of automated photo discovery.

I have it. It’s called desire, sometimes known as inclination. Events of recent past have resulted in my having a huge desire to learn about and, where possible, view my history. Much of that involves old photos. Many of those can be researched, or gleaned from memories.

@machei

Also, there’s the need for backups because photos are precious, so where does that go?

Having already been a BackBlaze customer, I set up some B2 storage which I mostly use for photo archives. I had an incident many years ago, where I managed to lose 3 months worth of photos while transferring between systems. I didn’t discover this until years later! Thankfully I found them on an ad hoc backup I’d forgotten I had, but it lit a fire under me. I now have multi-level backups and also the B2 archive. Because I tend to tinker with old photos (reprocessing them with modern software) I keep finding poor keywords and improving them. This means I do replace photos in my archive, but I never, ever, delete anything from the archive.

[zkarj]

@Luekutus

Eventually all my pictures get migrated into Adobe Lightroom, which I like for the way it allows you to do file renaming on import, to sort images into file system folders by year and month, and actually write metadata to the image files themselves.

Lightroom’s organisational abilities are excellent. It has been soundly beaten as a photo processor, but none of its competitors can hold a candle to its Library module and, if that’s all you need, you can use it with a free Adobe account.

[PatrickHoulihan]

@MagicBrian

The primary “want” for Photos is the ability to browse the photos - it’s much easier than viewing photos through the finder.

I’ve tried using Apple Photos but like you, I don’t like the way it re-catalogs the photos in its “Photos Library” folder structure. I want the photos organized in a folder structure that I have used for years

This is precisely why I use Adobe Bridge. It’s excellent for browsing, tagging, and rating photos without the need to import photos, rename them, or reorganize them in any way. Based on everything you’ve written above, I highly recommend that you have a look at it. It’s free unless you want to store your photos in Adobe’s cloud.

[machei]

@zkarj

I have gravitated to writing (reasonably) standard metadata into the files. Within some limitations, a keyword/tag or title inserted into an image file can be read by hundreds of different software products, including Photos

Yes, I think things have gotten markedly better in the past few years. Standardization is the key. It’s still not there yet, so I keep worrying, perhaps needlessly? I don’t know, but one of the main reasons that I don’t use tags is because if I store my files online anywhere but iCloud, everything gets lost.

@zkarj

I have it. It’s called desire, sometimes known as inclination.

Yeah, but that’s not automated. Although I can see the desire to do this and it’s both informative and fun to go through photos to manually get all the info and work out all the metadata–as long as it goes nowhere, or doesn’t get stripped out somehow. I was bitten in iTunes with this many years ago. I added all kinds of album art and metadata to things and it all just sorta went away one day. Frustrating to invest a load of time and then get it taken away. That’s not been the case for photos though. Yet.

Regarding backups, yes. I don’t have B2, so I use iCloud plus my NAS to house everything in two places. So far, so good.

Thank you for your response.

[zkarj]

@machei

I was bitten in iTunes with this many years ago.

The trap here was adding metadata through iTunes. You had to trust it to do the right thing with the data. The reason I tell Lightroom to write my metadata into my RAW photos is so that it no longer has control of that data. Some software can update the metadata, but I have grown to trust Lightroom over many years on this task. Everything else only gets to read from the files, never write.

[machei]

So I guess the question is what can you trust? You trust lightroom, which is good to know. I was one of the folks who went all in on Aperture to have Apple disappoint me by discontinuing it. By the time they did that, I wasn’t shooting as much on my DSLR so I kinda gave up and just use Photos.

At the risk of taking this whole thing off topic, tags are a form of metadata, and I’d totally use them on my files, except again, you put those files anywhere but iCloud and you get hosed.

I’m sure I’ll figure this out someday, long after I no longer need the information.

[OogieM]

@machei

You trust lightroom, which is good to know. I was one of the folks who went all in on Aperture to have Apple disappoint me by discontinuing it.

OTOH the best thing about LightRoom is that it’s an SQLite Database. So you could recover all your data out of it, albeit with some effort, even if they discontinued it completely.

[zkarj]

Most of Lightroom’s data is able to be stored in the files themselves, and there is pretty good support beyond that, too. You can, for instance, export your keyword hierarchy, and there are numerous plugins available that can work with its data. If it had the best RAW conversion in the business, or at least something close, then I would use nothing else.

[MevetS]

@zkarj

If it had the best RAW conversion in the business …

Sorry if you have mentioned this elsewhere, but which RAW converter do you prefer?

Have you tried others?

I keep telling myself I’m going to evaluate some of the other converters, but never seem to get around to doing so. Thanks in advance.

[krocnyc]

I recently switched from Lightroom to DXO for raw conversion. The results I get with DXO are substantially better than those from using Lightroom, or, in the case of high ISO images, better than Lightroom, Lightroom + its built-in noise reduction tool, or Lightroom + Topaz AI Denoise.

I use a lot of tools in various combinations to process photos: Lightroom, Photoshop, DXO Photolab, and the Topaz AI suite (Denoise, Sharpen, and Gigpixel), depending on the image and what I want to do to it. But I always start with DXO for raw conversion and use Lightroom to manage my catalogue.

If you like working in Lightroom, a good option is to use DXO PureRAW2 for raw conversion.

DXO and Topaz both offer free 30 day trials for all of the products in their suites, so it’s possible to test them in conjunction with your current workflow.

One thing to keep in mind is the output format. With the Topaz suite in particular, processing will result in a DNG that may or may not allow you to work with Lightroom’s Adobe and camera-specific color rendering profiles. In some cases, the output is limited to a TIFF file. I’ve also found that when you use these tools in you workflow can make a big difference in the results. (And the order the developers suggest isn’t always the best one.)

An aside: If I had gotten DXO first, I might not have added the Topaz tools into the mix. I still use them in certain circumstances, and I’m glad they’re in my toolbox, but if I had to choose, I’d go with DXO. I’m giving Capture One a try at the moment; I’m not sure that its raw conversion is so much better than DXO’s that I’d be willing to shell out for it just for that, but some of the editing tools look interesting.

PS - I should have mentioned this at the outset: both DXO Photolab / PureRAW2 and the Topaz suite of tools are straightforward to incorporate into a Lightroom workflow. Capture One, less so.