I’ve started on a new means of cataloging my digital photos. Truth be told, as of this exact moment, I have exactly 27,300digital photos stored on my network drive. This occupies about 35GB of drive space. Now, with that many photos, it has become next to impossible to organize them in a means that makes sense. Especially with all of the photos we take of the kids, it has become a real nightmare in trying to find specific photos when you want them. The biggest problem is that sometimes you know you have a photo but don’t remember what folder it is in. If I have photos of the kids but we’re at the beach, do I put them under kids or beach? The problem gets to be bigger and bigger the more photos you have.
So, I decided to try something different. I snagged a copy of Adobe Lightroom which allows you to build a catalog of all your photos, but then you can tag each photo with keywords so you can simply do a search based on keyword, and it filters the photos accordingly. I tried both Picasa and ACDSee but neither of them seem to organize the way I like. Lightroom seems to be working pretty good.
The biggest hurdle I have come upon is that none of the photo library apps seem to allow you to share a single library between multiple computers. In this house, we have two desktops, and two laptops, so depending on what machine you are using, the method to find pictures gets worse. Lightroom does not do network libraries but for now, it seems to be doing the best job of letting me track what I have. The one thing I really like is that you can import a folder and tag every file in the folder with a default tag and then assign keywords to specific pictures afterwards. Makes importing folders far easier and saves on data input.
I think it is safe to say that the house is sick. We all have the sniffles and a mixture of sore throats and coughs. BLAH! I hate being sick. Hopefully it runs its course and goes away!
