I needed this!

I really had no idea the way to go about organizing my photographs. Now I do. I have hundreds of photographs I've taken and so far they are only organized by the date they were taken. 

Thanks

Hi Jack, As usual, you bring

Hi Jack,

As usual, you bring a method of order out of chaos.  Great primer on Elements, I think you've convinced me to upgrade from MSPhoto.  The tools, while similar, are far more elegant on the Adobe product.  Fiddletown & Copperopolis forever. 

Jack's Book

Your work is always the BEST. With 3000 photos sounds like you will be the one to write a really nice coffee table book on the Subject

.

Trains to Yosemite...

Thanks Ken...

My book on the Yosemite Valley Railroad was published in 2005 by Signature Press. It solid out in 2011 although copies occasionally show up on eBay but in the $200+ range! 

Jack

Interesting concept. Not sure

Interesting concept. Not sure if I will use it, it sounds like a lot of work and also like it could be a hobby with in a hobby. Also sounds like it might be more useful with a narrow scope like Jack has than with a broad and eclectic batch of photos and information like I have particularly when many of them are in books written by others.

Digital Image Organization

Nearly all of my photos are digital.  I have a folder for each railroad, with the railroad folder are folders such as RS3s, Boxcars, Cabooses, etc.  The equipment is then but number ie RS3 1234 1, RS3 1234 2, and so on.

...

One thing that saddens me is when Film Critics become the curators and fleece the photo archives [too many pictures, not enough space!] and toss all the 'this is not a "quality image," "This is not photogenic" or "this is just really bad photography AND it's not photogenic."

It's often these very pictures that have those rare details that are otherwise unseen or unknown.

With digital space, i do not believe there is such thing as "not enough space."  Scan them all.  And I further do not believe there's "Not enough space on the internet."  Scan them all and put the whole archive online!  And finally, I absolutely refuse to do business with archives who thing their public collections are worth a mint in publication upfront - the places that charge $25 and $50 Per Image if you choose to use their images in a published work.  At that point you had might as well say they are committed to ensuring the people who have the whole story ont aht image never get it printed where that picture can retain it's meaning!!

I went to school for this subject, it's fun keeping things in order... The better your metadata is, the more useful your collection is when you go back later.  The less work it is for your future curators to process your work, the more likely it is that the work will be saved!

Photo Collections

Another great article from Jack!

This time he has inspired me to upgrade to Photoshop Elements and start enhancing some of my own stored photos - both railroad and other topics.One of the things I love about our hobby is the wide (almost infinite) range of skills and crafts that can be engaged.

Thanks for exposing another one.

BruceS in Pikowai, NZ

Photo Collections...

Thanks for the nice complements Bruce! Feedback is always appreciated...

Jack Burgess

http://www.yosemitevalleyrr.com

Photo Collections

Great article, Jack.  I have been in the process of scanning 5000+ railroad slides using an Epson Scanner with a slide block for the 2 x 2 slides (can do 4 at a time).  It takes about 10 minutes to scan, clean up (adjust to make as realistic as possible), rename, write on the slide and file the four slides.  I have found that 600 dpi produces the best result from the slides based upon the final quality when projected on a 52 in TV, or printed 8 x 10 and keeping a reasonable file size.  I have about 1000 photos that will get scanned when the slides are complete.  

Btw, I organize by railroad, then date.  So far, I have completed B&M, CNR, NYC, NH scans, along with over a 1000 others and have donated the original slides to each railroad historical society along with a DVD of the corrected slides with digital identification.  I capture all of the digital files on a 3 TB Seagate external drive .  Eventually, when completed along with all of the family digital versions of slides, I will make additional copies on external drives and give them to my family for their use.  

I will try your recommendations for my photos.

Thanks!

Wes Brown

NICE WORK

Nice Work...

cnwcowboy/Rudolph...

That is a tough problem! While shooting digital these days, I throw away 75% of the photos I take as soon as I download them to my computer. (My wife doesn't and she has several hard drives full of photos of grandkids, etc.) But when something like a railroad is gone, it is tough to throw away anything!

I was going to suggest using a commercial service but one here in the Bay Area charges $0.35 per slide which would be $3,500!

Instead, I'd suggest that you first critically go through all of the slides and first scan those which would be "handy on a flash drive" and the ones that you want copies of in case of a fire. Then go back and work on the rest. After doing the first "culling" and scanning them, sort them by photographer so that you can add the metadata by copy/paste as much as possible. You could also have all of the fields in the metadata listed in a Word program and have both Word and your file manager program on the computer screen side-by-side. That way you copy/paste most of the data that you want to include for each slide.

I use Photoshop (rather than Photoshop Elements) and it has a custom action feature which I can't find in Elements. With Photoshop, you can record a series of actions such as Resize, Levels, Autocolor, Sharpen, Save and then replay this series of actions with a single click. You can't buy Photoshop anymore but you can pay per month and use it on all of the scans and then stop paying for it as soon as your project is done.

Good luck!

Jack Burgess

Photo Filing System

Excellent article but I must take exception to the use of Excel software.  As my colleague some 35 years ago said, 'Excel or any other spreadsheet software is for numbers crunching; not to be used as a database.'   As I understand it, Microsoft purchased FoxPro, an excellent database software product in its day, to be their engine for what is today known as Microsoft Access. I have used it since it came on the market.  The big advantage is that I can query the database sorting based on any keyword or subject I desire giving me the numeric location of that photo (slide, scanned slide, or digital photo) for subsequent acquisition.  But I will give you this - if you do not own Microsoft Access or Microsoft Office Pro, I guess Excel would be better than nothing. I did enjoy hte portion of Photoshop Elements, Thank You

scanning slides

I have conservatively got in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 50,000 slides and am in the process of scanning them.  Collecting railroad slides is one of my other expensive hobbies.  I would suggest that if you have 10,000 slides to do that you look at purchasing a dedicated slide scanner such as a Nikon Coolscan.  These are out of production except for the high end version, but used ones come up on Ebay or through photography stores quite often. 

I have a Coolscan 4000 with a stack loader that allows up to 50 slides at a time to be batch scanned. The stack loader is a separate attachement that is worth the extra cost.  I set up the scanner to scan 99 slides per batch, load the first 50 slides and fire up the scanner.  I check it once and a while and load the remaining slides part way through.  Assuming there are no jams to the stack loader (depends on how beat up the slide mounts are) you can scan roughly 50 slides per hour at 4000dpi, the highest resolution the scanner can do.  I do everything as a .tiff file.  If you scan at a lower resolution and as .jpeg files you will get the scanning done much more quickly.    

The biggest issue you may run into with an older scanner is that the software won't work with the latest Windows systems.  There are hacks and other programs available online to run the scanner on the new systems.

As far as post processing, as the article suggests Photoshop Elements is the way to go unless you are doing some serious work on you photos.  I primarily use the colour correction and dust and scratch removal features.  There are other ones that come into play occasionally, but much of what is available on Photoshop Elements has limited to no application when dealing with railroad slides. 

Marc Simpson

....

Excel has more than enough robustness to accomplish everything a database does without the strict rules of a database restricting what people want the data to do.  And you can build a fairly robust database using just Excel.

Databases are the last holdout of the Strict Computer Rules community who are still mad about GUI based computing displacing the world of the DOS prompt...the way I see it.

Wow

Sorry, Benny, but while I'll agree that Excel can be used as a pseudo-database for relatively simple data structures, when I have to build anything that is truly robust and REQUIRES those "Strict Computer Rules" it is much more efficient to have it in a real database.  You can do so much more with the data in less time than monkeying around in Excel to fake what a database does.  I'm guessing you've never supported such a system with end users.