Adding recently discovered images to an existing catalogue

[ashleykaryl]

I used to be incredibly disorganised with my filing system, which was all thrown together with no standard for file naming. The funny thing is that when I shot film this was never a problem because it was all stored in one big bag in my studio and somehow I could always manage to find any image inside a minute. Then digital came along and messed up everything...

A couple years ago I read the book and then spent the best part of a couple weeks untangling the mess that had been created while shooting digital over the previous 7 years. Since then I have been following the system and keeping everything very neat, but yesterday I happened to find a couple boxes with some DVDs containing various series of images that had somehow not been present on my hard drives during the big clean up phase and therefore not included earlier when I was creating my folder structure and burning to DVDs.

Most of these images are family shots rather than work, which partially explains why they hadn't been found originally with the other files, however, I'd like to add them now to the archives. At present I have each main Raw folder so that it contains roughly 4 gigs of data and can be fitted onto a single DVD. It's no problem renaming these files but I am wondering if I should just dump them all in a new folder or will this only make sense if I place them into main folders from the time when they were shot e.g March 2003.

Obviously I would then have to shift lots of other files and ultimately burn a completely new set of DVDs for backup. Any thoughts? In theory I don't think it should be a huge problem if I add them all to a new 2011 folder and then label each sub folder with a year e.g Archive Files > Raw Files > Raw_127_11_04_20 > family holiday 2003 but it just slightly messes up the neat order by date for DVDs filing. 

[Roger Spencelayh]

I love seeing posts like this, because it just goes to emphasise my belief that no matter how good the system all it takes is 1 human to screw it all up. And I hope you take that in the very good natured way it was intended. All I can suggest is live with it. In the end, what matters is how good the cataloguing system is. If your cataloguing system can find the photographs you want using criteria held in the catalog (year taken, peoplin in the shot, locatation, whatever), just add them to the catalog, using whatever naming convention you currently use, and add the metadata to the catalog. If you are using a good cataloguing system, the filenames for your pictures don't matter. You're the only one who cares about that.

The only downside I see is that you will probably have to rely on the catalog to find the filename and hence the backup DVD it's stored on if you ever need to go to the archive for a picture. I am assuming that the DVDs are for archive and/or backup only, and that all your pictures are available on a directly accessible drive.

Roger.

[ashleykaryl]

Hi Roger,
You are absolutely right about the human element in all of this and I quite agree with your analysis. The greatest system in the world is only as good as the idiot running it, so show me a fool proof system and I'll show you the fool to prove you wrong

In reality I am very unlikely to start any search for images on DVD, not least because there is no useful outwardly identifiable data apart from the disc name, which would be something like Raw_014_07_06_07 and that doesn't tell me an awful lot unless I already know which images are likely to be on that particular DVD. The system I am using for files is pretty much taken exactly from the book e.g Karyl_Raw_070928_V5F6379.dng with all files including the date in which they were shot (extracted via the EXIF data) which allows for easy sorting. In that sense it doesn't matter which folder they are stored in because I can find them easily in Bridge or Lightroom through sort by name and then reveal in finder to show the enclosing folder, which matches the name of the DVD if needed.

It seems like a shame to break the nice order of things, but something like this could happen just as easily in the future if files were to be added that weren't mine for example, but covering a period from the past. I've also had to deal with early film images in the archived derivatives folder that were scanned and had odd names that only made sense to me but I haven't got a clue when they were actually shot because there is no EXIF data to tell me. Fortunately in those cases keyword searches save the day and have been particularly useful for a series of old family images from fifty to one hundred years ago that were scanned and ended up being dated according to when they were scanned rather than shot.

All my images are currently stored on hard drive with a cloned copy that is backed up daily and the DVDs are only for secondary backup purposes. Ultimately I'd be a lot happier if I had an off site back up but I have yet to find a simple way of doing that and online backups don't really seem practical at this stage.

Overall I think this mess up actually shows the strength of the system rather than any weakness, though I still think it has a long way to go before it can match that old bin bag in the studio for convenience and speed of filing all those film images. It may sound like I am joking but filing, managing and locating images is without doubt more time consuming now than it was in the past. Photographers talk about the various advantages of digital and I agree to an extent, but long lunches at a decent restaurant near the lab somehow seemed much more fun than key wording, converting to DNG, processing and making backups. 

Ashley

[Roger Spencelayh]

Overall I think this mess up actually shows the strength of the system rather than any weakness, though I still think it has a long way to go before it can match that old bin bag in the studio for convenience and speed of filing all those film images. It may sound like I am joking but filing, managing and locating images is without doubt more time consuming now than it was in the past. Photographers talk about the various advantages of digital and I agree to an extent, but long lunches at a decent restaurant near the lab somehow seemed much more fun than key wording, converting to DNG, processing and making backups. 

Hi Ashley,

I agree with the time comments, but isn't that as much to do with the number of shots we make now? In the days of film, every shot cost money. Sure you could do contact sheets, but they didn't show the detail to make a decision on the best shot, whereas now we can bang off 100 shots, look at them in Photoshop, find the one(s) most likely to provide the best result, tweak it and print or display on the web. Much cheaper in money terms, much more expensive in time, probably spending more time reviewing and cataloguing pictures which ultimately get discarded than used to be spent in the darkroom.

As an amateur, I've probably taken more digital pictures in the past 5 years than I took on film in the previous 30. Like your system, they are all neatly named and catalogued, but in the next few months the numbering system is going to get all screwed up when I start scanning some of my old film. But I see that as just another stage in the process.

Roger

[ashleykaryl]

Hi Roger,
For the vast majority of photographers, shooting film is just a distant memory and indeed there is a whole new generation who have never known anything other than digital. For better or for worse digital is the new standard and there is no sense in trying to change it. It's been many years now since I last shot a roll of film.

I can understand your feelings on digital and I know many people feel the same way. From a professional's standpoint it is a more nuanced issue and I don't shoot more pictures just because I am working in digital. In fact I may well shoot less because I can see fairly quickly whether or not the required image is safely in the bag, whereas with film I would work tend to work in a different manner. When shooting simple model shots in the studio for example, it would be fairly normal to shoot one roll on the Hasselblad per image and the first couple of frames might be lost to a clip test. Obviously with more risky images like a model in movement you'd be inclined to shoot more frames just to cover yourself.

Another point about shooting film, which is often not mentioned is that professional photographers generally made money from shooting film. Every roll of film was charged out with a small markup as was the processing and for many this would often represent a significant percentage of the overall earnings from a job. Editing medium and large format transparency on a lightbox was also a fast and relatively painless method of sifting through a large number of images. There were downsides of course such as battling sometimes with colour consistency on an E6 line and labs who didn't always play by the rules, so don't think I am defending film at all costs and wishing digital never existed. I am just trying to offer a balanced overview of the relative pros and cons.

One thing I like to keep from my film days is the same disciplined approach towards exposure, so I still use a handheld lightmeter when possible and I dislike the approach of thinking that everything can always be fixed in Photoshop. There is a lot to be said for shooting digital but remembering that the basic laws of photography still apply. A shotgun approach and hoping for a lucky winner is not the answer. 

Having gone through the process of scanning a large chunk of my old film archives I would suggest you take a fairly ruthless approach in your editing because it can be a remarkably time consuming exercise and your choice of scanner will be of fundamental importance if you are talking about archiving hundreds or even thousands of images. There is not that much point in my opinion of scanning large numbers of images that will only ever sit on your hard drive unless there is some historical motivation for doing so. Chances are you will still keep all that film filed away somewhere.

Ashley