I use Lightroom to organize my photos and I add all of my photos in date based folders. I have also created a controlled vocabulary for a number of groups like birds, mammals and a few other groups. So all I need to do to add a scientific name is type part of the common name and I get both. My file names are a combination of my last name, date and sequential number.
The issue I have is that some names have changed and I have not found an easy way to correct my vocabulary.
On the hard drive my photos are organized by year.month.day. I have over 113,000 files in Lightroom 5 (not the cloud version). Within that I keyword “mushrooms” and have it automatically add them to a collection of all mushrooms. My field journal is still useful, a staple-bound notebook with lined paper: Each day I go spotting I head it with the date and place, and as I move to a new location note that location, what’s growing there, etc. Within a particular date each species I number in the order that it appears on my iPhone (that way if I fail to write in the journal until after the foray, I can reconstruct the photos that go with a particular iNaturalist spotting number. Under the day’s spotting number I leave room to describe it briefly, list the iNat. number and, once they’ve been downloaded to a computer where I can see the frame number, the image numbers that go with that spotting. If I do closeups with my Nikon later, I had those date & frame numbers to that spotting. It’s taken me years to get this system, but it seems to be working. On Lightroom, I keyword with the mushrooms species name in Latin if I know it. If you don’t work with Lightroom, you can also put keyword tags such as the Latin name in Explorer: right click on the picture, Properties, Details, Tags. I may have maxed out the Lightroom keywords; I can search by them if I know the name, but the keyword list only goes about to the S’s now. Not sure what to do about that.
The folder has the date (yyyy-mm-dd) with a note about what the contents are and what camera was used - eg: 2019-11-20 a6500 Santa Monica Mountains, sunset, hummingbird.
Each photo has the number assigned by the camera (without the letters) followed by a description. If it’s of a living thing then it’s usually common name and scientific name - eg: 02651 Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna), Santa Monica Mountains
Admittedly, it can vary depending on how lazy I’m being, but that’s what I aim for.
Bulk Rename Utility is a great piece of software, but you have to be careful using it… no undo.
На компьютере. Простая схема. К примеру: Canon\2019\11\2019_11_26
Исходники хранятся отдельно на флешке.
I like using scientific name as file name because when I export and send via email, recipient knows exactly what’s in the pic. Also, when I export dozens to desktop, I know, too.
Also still using Picasa to make collages.
FastStone to watermark and compress the file size for use on my blog.
I use Lightroom, and I organise my photos in folders by date. The exception is for my iPhone photos, which currently all get put into a single folder for the current year (they’re automatically backed up to my home network storage). If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d also tag photos of organisms with something like "organism" and also their species if known. If I was being really pedantic, I could see how it might be useful to tag a photo of an organism with its allocation at each level of the taxonomic hierarchy. I don’t currently do that.
I do not organise as it is a time waster. I transfer from my camera to my Macbook using Nikon transfer 2. In ViewNX-i I choose the ones I want and make changes if I want. I will sometimes add scientific name as a keyword. When I am done uploading to iNat I delete everything. When a SD card is full I get a new one and never overwrite.
Nested folders: Year➡Location➡Date
Once each observation is uploaded I move the photos to a folder called “iNaturalisted” within the lowest folder.
I have a year-month-date folder for every day I take photos. Since I upload all my iNaturalist photos to Flickr and then pull them into iNat that way, they’re “organized” on Flickr by the name of the organism. When new things get ID’d on iNat, I make sure to go update the filename on Flickr. That’s pretty much all the search function I need to go back and find anything.
In folders by date in format YYYY-MM-DD. I do not rename them unless I crop - then I save the cropped image as a separate file with _2, _1, _3 etc.
I do not completely organize. I upload from my SD card to my computer with the Nikon bundled Nikon Transfer 2 - it automatically creates a new file folder with each new transfer and remembers where it left off. I don’t overwrite my card when full - I just replace. I will crop and edit it for contrast/brightness/etc the picture in Nikon’s View NX 2 . This software saves the original in a subfile of the folder called Original. I will then convert all of the cropped images to a file size with a maximum resolution of 1200 on the long border - these are automatically renamed 1200origfilenamehere and placed in a new sub folder of the original (called sub). I will usually upload all of the 1200 files from the same geolocation in bulk. I feel the 1200 file size provides a reasonable end image while keeping my bandwidth and upload time reasonable. Once I have uploaded, I move those files from subfile sub to submitted. If I have to add more images later to support an observation I will just use date and time taken to find the kin on my computer.
I’d really appreciate knowing what software you use to backup. I’ve found many backup software programs limit number of image to 50K. Thanks.
Do you separate your natural observation images from other personal?
Вы отделяете свои естественные изображения наблюдения от других личных?
Thank you for all the responses, folks, it’s very interesting!
У меня подавляющее большинство фото - живые организмы и ландшафты. Относительно небольшой процент - архитектура, памятники и подобное.
не так много нужно отделять тогда. да?
Да. Если бы были более разноплановые фото - добавился бы уровень “тип фото” - а дальше стандартная схема по датам.
I store and organize my photos in Apple’s Photos app on my Mac + iPhone + iPad. I use the iCloud Photos feature so that all of my photos are also uploaded into iCloud storage as a backup, and are also available on all three devices for convenience.
When I’m traveling internationally, I often bring my iPad but not my Mac. I use a camera adapter doohickey to import from my SD card to the Photos app on the iPad. When I have down time I’ll cull the photos and do some minor editing on the iPad. Later when I’m connected to WiFi (typically not until I’m back home) the photos will automatically upload to iCloud and thus appear on my Mac and iPhone. If I’m not traveling internationally I usually go straight from the SD cards to the Mac.
On the Mac version of Photos I first do a pass at culling, and then run a script to set the title of each photo uniquely (based on a date + counter). Photos does a good job at grouping by date/time intervals, so I don’t worry about that aspect. I initially mark all of the animals & plants with a “needs ID” keyword. I then work out IDs as best I can and apply keywords for taxon levels (unfortunately Photos does not support hierarchical keywords the way Lightroom does, so I have to add separate keywords for “animal”, “reptile”, “lizard”, “skink”, etc.). Photos supports a “description” that’s distinct from the title; for the description I use the format “Common Name (Scientific name)” for taxa with a known common name, or “Scientific name” otherwise.
Once I’ve done a (reasonably) complete job of ID’ing all my latest batch of photos in this way, I then import them into iNaturalist. When corrections and more-specific IDs are made on iNaturalist, I go back and change the descriptions (and keywords if appropriate) in Photos to match. Often I remind myself to do this by emailing myself the URL of the iNaturalist observation page that has modified by original ID.
Photos on iOS doesn’t show the titles, descriptions, or keywords, but it does let you search for titles, descriptions, and keywords that were set on the Mac. I use this often when trying to find a particular photo to show someone when I’ve got my iPhone or iPad with me.