Organizing / Naming Photos if using 2 Cameras?

[scottbuckel]

David -

You may want to look at a book entitled, "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh. This book discusses many aspects of managing your image files. He gives background information and the logic to making managing your files and this allows one develop a solid method to developing a system to completely manage your digital assets. To me it sounds like many people are using much more complicated approaches than is necessary.

To rename my files I have been using a program called ImageIngester it has some very useful and flexible tools to rename and start managing your images.

Scott

[MT Stringer]

I keep all of my sports photos on a separate drive and don't have any trouble finding my shots. Hope tis helps.

[dbaldock]

Originally Posted by scottbuckel

David -

You may want to look at a book entitled, "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh. This book discusses many aspects of managing your image files. He gives background information and the logic to making managing your files and this allows one develop a solid method to developing a system to completely manage your digital assets. To me it sounds like many people are using much more complicated approaches than is necessary.

To rename my files I have been using a program called ImageIngester it has some very useful and flexible tools to rename and start managing your images.

Scott

That book looks interesting, but it's been a long time since I bought a $50 book (some programming / software books in the early 90's).

Now that so much info is available for free on the Internet, it's not easy to motivate myself to buy an expensive book.

[scottbuckel]

I know this is veering off your original post.

The book may retail for $50, but you can readily pick it up at

Amazon

Amazon

for about $31 and your purchase will help Able keep this site up and going. The free resources on the web are nice and well worth reading, but none of them look at the issue in a thorough manner. Although I feel the second edition of the book is better than the first edition, the first edition can be found rather cheaply as a used book.

ASMP has a free website Best Practices that has good recommendations. What you will miss from that site is the rationale of how it was developed, although, I think both Peter Krogh and David Reicks were very involved in setting up the site.

Another source for similar information is from Robert Edwards - he is an Australian photographer that has a web site DAMsimple that has a few tutorials as well.

What theses resources do, that the others that I have looked at do not do, is to emphasize all aspects of the workflow after capture, to transferring the files to the computer, naming files, managing the files, retrieving files, and archiving, and back up and recovery of your data. Each of them also discusses how one may vary ones approach depending on what type of photography you do. Stock photographers have different needs from portrait photographers as do sports photographers.

I have gotten on the bandwagon of this after helping a couple of professionals that had computer failures and I spent several very long days getting them back up and operating again. In both of these cases their clients did not know that anything happened and their albums were delivered on time although a few images were lost. I sometimes frequent stock photography forums and I am always amazed at the posting that a photographer has a hard drive crash and needs to down load his images from one of the agencies they submit to.

Scott