In this series of posts, I’m going to explore some popular photo organization strategies. Everyone at enoetic has a digital camera (or two, or three), so the fact that our first application deals woth digital photos is not random. We’re all pretty well-organized geeks, too. But we’ve all struggled with the organization of our digital photos. And we’re not alone - there are several web posts dedicated to this task.

The problem isn’t the photos themselves, but the tools available for organizing them. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If that’s true, then organizing a collection of photos requires applying a fairly simple (so it’s usable by people) structure to a very complex bunch of data.

In this first part, I’ll examine organization through the use of File Names.

File Names

The idea of using file names is appealing. We tend to think of file names as handy labels for computer data, so it seems appropriate to use them as organization aids. Also, your computer has built-in ways of searching for pictures using the filename, so no additional software is required. And because file names are human-readable, you can even use them to search by hand.

Ideally, you’d come up with some fixed naming scheme you wanted to use for all your photos before you start. For example:

<date> - <persons/object> - <place>.jpg

This naming scheme has quite a bit of information in it that should be helpful in finding a particular photo. But there are limits to how long you can make a file name. When people run into this limit, they often resort to using abbreviations. Abbreviations are a problem because they can be hard to remember. And if an abbreviation is hard to remember, it’s also hard to search for by both computer and hand. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll leave aside file name length limitations for the rest of this discussion.

Let’s start with this picture:

That’s a pretty good label. But with digital cameras and large memory cards, you tend to dump batches of hundreds or even more onto your computer at once. Going through that many photos and renaming them based on their contents is tedious. And, the same process must be carried out on all your old, unorganized photos as well.

For the sake of discussion, let’s say the next photo that comes off your memory card is this one:

Now what? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably end up sticking a “2″ in there somewhere. As you continue your cataloging, things will quickly get messy, with larger and larger numbers. This is especially true if you take pictures in bursts. Even though this notion of adding numbers is unappetizing, it’s not a killer. So you continue on, and finish up cataloging your photos from Vegas with this photo:

Things will go along fine until you decide to add or modify the information captured in the filename. If you need to make any changes on your naming scheme, you’re in a world of hurt. For example, a couple of months later you need to put this photo into your library:

As you can see, you’ve got a problem with “Andy in Vegas” and “Andy in Indy”. They’re different people, but your naming scheme based on first names is not set up to handle this. This is an example of the limited scalability of filenames. At this point, you’ve got to change your naming scheme to be <FirstNameLastName>. Worst of all, you’ve got to go back through your catalog and apply this new scheme to all your photos.

Conclusion

From this short illustration, you can see how things progress if you use an organization scheme based on file names. File names simply aren’t designed to handle the complexity of data that a photo can contain (a picture is worth a thousand words, after all). And once you have more than a few photos, the scalability of file names cannot keep up with the growth of the information in your photo library. Worst of all, you as a human are left to deal with all these limitations manually.

Filename Pros:

• Personalized info
• No additional software required
• Search using your computer’s built-in utilities
• Human readable, so it’s searchable by hand

Filename Cons:

• File name length limitations can limit the usefulness
• Totally manual process
• Requires lots of work to stay on top of your photos
• Back catalog must be organized as well
• Does not handle similar photos elegantly
• Poor scaling/flexibility as time goes on