I want a new Digital Photo Management System!

One of my favorite hobbies is taking pictures. Once the Internet was available I enjoyed the Polaroid-esque awesomeness of posting pictures to the web shortly after they were taken. I’ve been sharing pictures with friends digitally since 1997 and after over a decade, I still haven’t found a great system for managing those shots from snap to show.

At first I viewed digital pictures as something ephemeral and they got tossed into random folders and sometimes tossed out when I upgraded computers. Later on I realized that these were precious items that I wanted to save forever, passing them on to future generation like I had received tin types of my relatives.

Unlike old photographs, digital pictures seem to arrive in a volume that makes them less than precious and hard to store. I take twenty shots for every decent one and have a strict “no delete” policy. You never know if that one shot with someone’s eyes closed also captured some historic moment in the background. So I have lots. I want them organized. I also want them backed up at another location as they are the only thing in my apartment that are irreplaceable (other than my wife). I want to organize them, label them, and share them on my blog, email, and any other place I want to show them. I want all this work to last for ever as well, so the system I use must have data portability. And the pics must be stored in the original format. Ideally, they should show the version that best suits my monitor. When I first started my blog, I had a tiny laptop. The pics I sized those days now look like postage stamps.

I’ve tried a variety of tools for all of this, including: iPhoto, Snapfish, SmugMug, Picasa, Flickr, Eye-fi, imports software of Canon, Nikon, and Pentax, Handy Backup, and various other free or paid utilities, CMS software, or photo hosting sites (Note: I have not tried Adobe Lightroom). Nothing has stood out as the ideal single-source choice. So, what follows is draft of a camera-to-publishing system that I’m planning on using. It’s overly detailed and demonstrates not just a touch of OCD. I’m hoping that fellow photo nuts out their can offer some suggestions on ways of streamlining the process.

Sean’s Digital Photo Management System v 1.0

• Storing Photos – I’ve consolidated all of my photos to one folder on my living room PC using DIM Digital Image Mover by Alan Light to organize them in year and date folders by shooting date. I also corrected the shooting date of old photos or from friends who had their camera clock set to 1972 using Exifer. Both DIM and Exifer are free, but not designed for the technology neophyte.
  

  NOTE: PLEASE GO AND SET THE DATE CORRECTLY ON YOUR DIGITAL CAMERA(S) NOW. Years from now when you have thousands of pictures you will thank me. I recently found some wedding photos amidst a party that was five years prior, creating a very confusing slide show.

• Getting Photos Off The Camera – Now that I will have all the old photos neat and tidy in one directory, how do I add the new shots? Currently, I’m using the Eye-fi wireless memory card to automatically download them to the folder, organized by shooting date. The Eye-fi is a fantastic product and relatively inexpensive. The only flaw so far is that it names the folders like “January 1, 2008.” This means the chronological order is not in alphabetical order, and trust this anal-retentive programmer, that’s annoying when you browse through a ton of files.
• Backing Up The Photos – The Eye-fi card also has a nice feature where it will automatically upload your photos to the photo sharing site of your choice. I strongly considered uploading the entire backlog to Flickr and letting the Eye-fi upload the new ones to have a carefree back up system. I even shelled out $25 for the Pro account. However, after I got just a few hundred photos, the browsing interface at Flickr became prohibitively cumbersome. Especially when compared with desktop software like Picasa or iPhone. I was really disappointed because when I started this project I hoped Flickr could be the end to end solution.So how do I back up? I bought a piece of software called Handy Backup for $30. It’s the only one I found that does incremental back ups to remote servers via FTP. Incremental is very important because it takes over three days to upload my total photo set. Most other FTP back up software are designed to upload the entire data set during every back-up and won’t work for such a large collection. Handy Backup runs at midnight and syncs my latest photos to a web directory at my blog hosting company. Using Single File PHP Gallery by Kenny Svalgaard I can even view the entire collection if I want.Yes, I realize that I could just burn a few DVD and keep them at the office.
• Editing the Photos – If there is some hard core work to be done, I use Adobe Photoshop and save the results beside the original. For small tweaks, red eye fixes, cropping and such Flickr has a great online tool called Picnik. I’m using Picasa though because of it’s also the current solution for the next two tasks. Picasa is a desktop application AND a web gallery product owned by Google.
• Viewing the Photos – To few the photos in the apartment, we use Picasa on a media center PC hooked up to the HDTV and let me tell you, it’s awesome. Even the crappiest shots look artistic when blown up to gigantic sizes. Picasa automatically sorts them by shooting date and does slide shows. I seldom have guests over and we don’t end up going through old photos. People love photos of themselves. I put up a slide show of our honeymoon when I’m tired and I want the guests to leave.
• Sharing the Photos – Picasa makes it easy to email or burn the photos to a DVD. Most of my sharing is done from my blog, though. For individual shots or just a few, I upload them using my CMS. For blog galleries I have tried an dozens of methods. I want the galleries to be integrated with my site. Even more important, I want the to be portable to other systems. If I take the time to organize an album, I hope I can move it to whatever photo site I’m using in 2047. I think a lot of hard work is currently going into Facebook albums that will be orphaned when the user moves on to a newer social network. My current plane is to redo the 50 or so albums on my personal blog as Picasa web albums. This might seem nuts, but those albums are important to me and I want them all in one format. Hopefully, it’s a one time task. I’m hoping that because Picasa is such a prevalent solution that future competitors will provide a seamless way for transferring all my pictures, descriptions, tags and albums to the new system. I don’t love how Picasa albums show up on the blog, but I convinces a decent WordPress plugin could solve that (none of the current batch work very well, yes I tried them all).This is an exhaustive look at how I store my photos, but I needed to do this to organize my thoughts before I improve the system. It’s clear that there currently is no simple solution. There’s also no ideal product for the technology novice out there who also wants to enjoy an organized, long term photo management solution. If pressed, to the novice I would recommend Picasa and DVD backups. I do think there is a business opportunity in providing a better solution marketed around the desire to have photos forever. Get on it, free market!Will I successfully organize all my photos, fix the shooting dates, back them up, and redo all my web albums in Picasa? I promise to post updates here and let you know the progress. I figure I can do 3 albums a week and I’ll be done by spring.On a side note, videos should seamlessly fit into this or the ideal system as well.