Workflow with Multiple Family Cameras

[tlofft]

Hi all,

Relatively new member here -- have a quickly growing collection of digital photographs, especially over the last year as we've gone from a 1 camera household to a 3 camera household

Essentially, we now have a DSLR (my camera) and two point & shoots (wife and 5 yr old son)

Trying to work through the best workflow to deal with all three.  Trying to think this through a bit more then in the past -- so on my second more thoughtful read of the book now.

Here's a few initial questions:
1.  Do I put all three camera's into the same workflow/bucket system?  Or create separate 'pipelines' for each camera? 
      -- My thought here is everything goes through the same process with an identical workflow, and the photos from all 3 cameras are archived into buckets. 

2.  If using one workflow, do I consistently separate the two P&S cameras into separate sub-folders within the buckets?  Or mix all 3 cameras into sub-folders if all of us are shooting together?
    -- Looking at moving to Blu-Ray as the write-once media - used CD's at one point, then DVD's -- bigger here is definitely better.
    -- I'm thinking keeping the P&S separate folders may be worthwhile as generally the volume is much smaller.  And the 'standards' for keepers are slightly different

3.  In the future, I'm assuming there will come a day when my son will want to manage his own photos?  How best to prepare for that now?
    -- What are the considerations I should think about here??
    -- Should I consider a separate catalog of his photos?

Would appreciate any comments on what has worked for other's with several family camera's in play:)

Thanks
-- Tim

[Greg Koch]

Hi, Tim.

I'm by no means an expert, and may be rebutted rather vigorously by folks posting later, but...

I use multiple cameras and differentiate everything simply by synchronizing all their clocks, then cataloging the images according to their time stamp.  In cataloging, I re-title each image with its date/time, then the camera's serial number, then a good guess as to the shutter count.


*Thus, an example image from Camera One is titled "020317_120034_005007_00718."
(The Camera-One image was taken on March 17, 2002 by camera serial number 005007.)

*An image from Camera Two is titled "021219_153238_101504_00281."
(The Camera-Two image was taken on December 19, 2002 by camera serial number 101504.)


I've found that this naming convention allows me to sort very easily.

Hope that helps.

-Greg

[Massimo Novi]

Tim

Using different cameras from different manifacturer, I use to mix the shots (I save them in different "event" folders, so the only "real" mix is when we shhot with more cameras in the same event) and leave the browser/archiver filter function (Bridge or Expression Media) eventualli let me see only a specific camera shooting.

I also mix them (always mantaining event folders in buckets) in the same bucket, if it happens. I think that adding the camera serial or name can introduce an unnecessary complexity leve to the file naming. I use only metadata (EXIF) info to identify different cameras.

If You son will like to manage and keep his own images, You can of course filter the full catalog and export only Your son images into a separate catalog. This can be done at the moment Your son decide to do so. There's no need to do it now.

Hope it helps.

Massimo

[Sossity Corby]

So far, I have kept multiple family photos all in the same buckets, & use their initials in the prefix of the file name, so I can identify ones taken by them, ones taken by me; so for example, I shoot some photos, & mom shoots some on the same day, different cameras, my photos will have Sossity_date_4 number file name_CO(Camera Original for .jpg files).jpg  THen mom's photos; Jane_date_4 number file name_CO.jpg.

this helps me see who shot what

Sossity