How do you organize your photos?

[jessicaleighallen]

@emjtca

I shrunk the preview size of my Lightroom files to make the Lightroom catalog a more reasonable size on my laptop and to allow the previews to load faster.

Please tell me how to change the preview size; I didn’t know it could be done!

@emjtca

Recommendation: hard drives are fairly cheap these days - replace your occasionally unrecognized sooner rather then later!

YES, thank you…I agree this needs to happen ASAP.

@ellen5

Once I’ve given the observations to the world, I’m done with them. I’m sometimes asked for permission to publish a photo, and can retrieve copies from that external drive if needed.

I really like this philosophy. I’ve only once or twice needed to share an image for use elsewhere and I think a simply external HD may suffice for me.

@trscavo

When I upload a photo to iNat, I tag it (and any additional photos of the same organism) on my laptop with the keyword “iNaturalist” so I don’t upload the same photo later on.

I think I’ll adopt this method - I add no keywords on import b/c they sometimes interfere with the iNat upload identification being wonky (if I’ve misidentified my image prior to upload), but adding simply iNaturalist will aid in finding those I’ve added and also avoiding duplication.

@trscavo

…how do you attach a location to each photo?

This is tricky. I’ve never had a geotagging option (b/c Nikon no longer makes its gps device and I do not use my phone for photography). So, I’ve begun using an old Magellen GPS unit to manually record the latitude/longitude and I am able to manually add it to observations - or, in Lightroom.

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Thank you to everyone for sharing your current setup with me. You gave me a lot of good advice and some things to think about - I hope more people share their thoughts…and @fffffffff has a good point, maybe we can re-open the previous thread to include these current ideas!