Photoshop CS5.
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The way my camera imports themā¦ LOL! ā¦I really need to sort it out :-)
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Basic folder structure by date with multiple folders for various categories. Some images placed in multiple folders, but all images have keywords/tags. Because the keywords become part of the EXIF the iNat bulk uploader automatically includes them, at least on the web. Donāt know whether the same holds true for phone apps.
Have only changed a camera-assigned file name to include binomial when a specific image is requested by a researcher.
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I joined iNat a couple years ago, but only began using it during the Spring 2020 lockdown-period. Since then I have learned SO much about not only the different organisms I have photographed over the years, but also about taxonomy, etc. My question today has been discussed in the past; I am wondering if I may revisit it, as photography methods, software and hardware and technology in general is constantly improving.
Personally, I have captured thousands of photographs since 2009 (when I was given my first point-and-shoot digital camera) and now use my Nikon D7200 almost exclusively. I own a pay-as-you-go LG Stylo 2 which includes a subpar cameraā¦but I sometimes use it with a macro clip and get halfway decent magnified images. I also use a Moultrie camera trap.
How do you capture your photos?
I use Lightroom Classic on a desktop computer to edit. I add my creator/copyright information upon import but no longer add titles, captions or keywording. Unfortunately Lr creates huge folders of large image files, bogging down virtually any storage device with original copies of images imported to the program.
How do you process (or, maybe you donāt) your photos?
Currently, my biggest quandary is storage. I have thousands of photos stored on two external hard drives, one of which is currently unrecognized by my PC unless I plug it into one specific USB port and wait ten minutes until it begins to blink after which I must unplug it and plug it back in and only then is it recognized. I duplicate some images in Google Photos, some images in Nikon Image Space and my most recent images on thumb drives (so I may quickly access them on my Chromebook).
In other wordsā¦everything is vulnerable. And, I donāt understand anything about setting up SSDs or RAID arrays or most anything techy. Simply put, I would like a system which allows me to store my images, find them quickly and share them digitally.
How do you store (or, maybe you donāt) your photos?
I have always stored my images in year-dated folders within month-dated subfolders. It works for me. And, it works especially nicely with iNaturalist. If I consult an image on iNat I cross-reference it in my personal folders and usually locate it quickly. For example: I have been trying to identify my lepidoptera obs. I found this female moth image from 2012 in my obs and was able to quickly find the original photograph on my external hard drive, in my āAugustā folder, within my ā2012ā folder. Butā¦what if I didnāt have access to iNaturalist? My 2012 moth probably would have remained undiscovered and lost in a folder from nearly a decade agoā¦because truth-be-told, I forgot I made the image and had no idea she was a moth until I rediscovered her and sought advice on iNat!
How do you organize your photos?
I would love to hear everyoneās most current thoughts on this subject. There are so many devices and programs and apps, online-, offline- and cloud-storage options itās dizzying.
I wonder if I am over-complicating this issue and there is a simple way to organize and store images. In the 1970s my dad had slides. Thousands of slides. With info written in Sharpie on their white frames. And a carouselā¦and a projector. Slides in little boxes organized by date or location. I suppose that was no different than my folder set-upā¦but my folders must be stored in duplicate or more because unlike my dadās slides, they can simply disappear (due to a hardware failure). And, the images in my folders are shared (in citizen science projects, via email, etc.) unlike my dadās slides, which were projected only if/when or where he was able to project/print them. So if youāre still with meā¦and youāre willing to share, tell me about your photographs.
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I feel like this is a constant question!! I am very interested to see the responses of others to find ways to improve. And lol, I wish there was something simple!! We all take way too many photos now that they are digital. Hereās my current setup:
I also use LightRoom for importing, organization, and most editing (ever since Aperture was abandoned). I store photos by date (I use year/year-month-day folders and occasionally add text for special events). I use the keywords for things I think I am particularly interested in (macro favorites, my cat, birds of prey, jumping spiders, etc). I have also used iNat to find a date to find an old photoā¦ I do photography for fun and for art as well, and I try to give photos that I really love some stars (an attribute) so that I can find them later. Depending on how big your library is though, all sorting/keyword/attribute methods become a bit overwhelmingā¦
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. I store only recent photos and photos I need to edit on my laptop and everything else on a 4TB external hard drive. (One day I would like to make my external drive solid state so that it is faster, but for now this works fine).
For backup, I use BackBlaze - an internet service that stores all my computer files. If any of my hard drives crash or anything is stolen, I can either download all my files again (slow, but doable) or pay for them to send me a hard drive with everything on it. It runs constantly in the background and reminds me to plug in my external hard drives and back them up on a monthly basis.
Recommendation: hard drives are fairly cheap these days - replace your occasionally unrecognized sooner rather then later! Pulling photos off a failed hard drive is a MISERABLE experience (I have been thereā¦)
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Nikon as well! Mine is a Coolpix A900. Itās a rugged, dependable field camera with very good macro and impressive zoom. I let it do all the decision-making about exposure and focus. It sometimes doesnāt succeed, but itās way better a photographer than I am. I hate the Wifi feature, and never turned it on.
Like you, I assort jpegs to folders by month and year, but I also create a subfolder for each outing, and inside that one for each observation. Because in a given month, there could be a lot of mallards or pintails or what have you.
Depending on season, there can be many Gigabytes worth of photo accumulated. I move each monthly folder to an external hard drive, theyāre quite inexpensive. I donāt keep originals on my laptop anymore. Once Iāve given the observations to the world, Iām done with them. Iām sometimes asked for permission to publish a photo, and can retrieve copies from that external drive if needed.
This system has kept my laptopās storage clean, free-running, and sanitary. It works for me because I prefer an uncluttered existence. But it requires letting go.
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I use the Photos desktop app on Mac OS. Apart from the metadata attached to each photo by my iPhone, I add a short description to each photo. This is automatically imported by iNat into the observationās āNotesā field. I find it much easier to create the description on my laptop.
When I upload a photo to iNat, I tag it (and any additional photos of the same organism) on my laptop with the keyword āiNaturalistā so I donāt upload the same photo later on.
Thereās one process you did not mentionā¦how do you attach a location to each photo? In my case, the iPhone does this for me automatically, which is a huge timesaver.
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I was so mad after Apple dropped Aperture that I never attempted to use Photos - glad that it is pretty decent for this!
I use both a Nikon Z6 and an iPhone (sometimes with a macro attachment). For location I batch upload from the computer so that I can set a general radius for a series of observations. Itās not as exact as the GPS and it is an extra step, but it is pretty easy.
I too was really mad about Apple dropping Aperture ā I really loved that program. I switched to using Photos, which was painful at first but in the years since then it has improved a lot. I still miss a few things from Aperture but mostly Iām happy dealing with my 600+ GB of photos in Photos. I find the organization and search features straightforward and powerful enough for my needs (though I definitely miss hierarchical keywords). The editing features are good enough for my uses, since I mostly just crop and adjust lighting & color across the entire photo, rather than editing specific areas of a photo differently.
I keep all of my photos on my MacBook Pro, and back up locally via Time Machine to an external hard drive. I also use iCloud Photo Library to keep all of my photos in iCloud. I have my iPad and iPhone set to not store the originals, since there wouldnāt be enough room. This way I do have all of my photos on my iPad and iPhone in a way that lets me browse & search, which is really handy.
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I have been using exclusively a HUAWEI P30 Pro for more than a year for all my photos. I chose it for its lightness (when hiking) and ability to take āmacroā photos.
About the storage, I would advise to have at least 1 backup on a separate external disk, but 2 backups would be better. I have been told about someone who got a failure with his computer and who then figured out that his backup disk was also out of order. He lost everything.
For all my data, I have 3 external backups (1 at home, 1 at the office, 1 at my fatherās place). Even if there is fire in 2 places, at least I would still have something leftā¦ Prevention takes time. Itās a choice. A choice that you can do only before.
A RAID may protect your data against the failure of 1 drive, but not against a virus overwriting the data. Better have 1 or 2 external simple backups than a RAID.
Next, we need to be sure that a backup is complete and that it is operational. (I use an AutoIt script to update my backups. Not very user friendly, but I am sure about what it does and this is the 1st important point. The 2nd important point is: if I delete by mistake a folder, I will figure it out before it is removed from my backup (when updating the backup), because this script shows me what it is going to do before it does it and I always check what is going to be added/updated/removed before proceeding).
For my photos files, I use the freeware āAnt Renamerā and I do as illustrated below.
1st step (automated):
2nd step (manual):
3rd step : upload to iNaturalist.
See this feature that helps for IDing automatically a new observation based on the file name:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/extract-species-name-from-photo-filename-upon-upload/6510/13
4th step (semi-automated): add the iNat observation ID and rename all photos belonging to the same observation:
Later, when one of my observations is IDed by someone else, I search for the files using the observation ID and I update the photo files names with the new ID.
I can browse my photos almost as if it were a database.
This seems too much work, but with adequate tools and practice, itās reasonable.
Does iCloud Photo Library cost $$$? Does it interface with iNaturalist directly or is it just another form of file backup?
@tiwane is it possible to merge these topics? Theyāre talking about same things, so it would be cool to have them as one.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-do-you-organize-your-photos/8217/54
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I take all my photos on my phone, I keep them on my phone, and Iām going to organise them tomorrow 
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Please tell me how to change the preview size; I didnāt know it could be done!
YES, thank youā¦I agree this needs to happen ASAP.
I really like this philosophy. Iāve only once or twice needed to share an image for use elsewhere and I think a simply external HD may suffice for me.
I think Iāll adopt this method - I add no keywords on import b/c they sometimes interfere with the iNat upload identification being wonky (if Iāve misidentified my image prior to upload), but adding simply iNaturalist will aid in finding those Iāve added and also avoiding duplication.
This is tricky. Iāve never had a geotagging option (b/c Nikon no longer makes its gps device and I do not use my phone for photography). So, Iāve 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.
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 thoughtsā¦and @fffffffff has a good point, maybe we can re-open the previous thread to include these current ideas!
This is something I need to improveā¦updating my ID once it has been confirmed!
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It does cost money. It has nothing to do with iNaturalist; it stores photos remotely in a way that can be accessed from Apple devices.
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Preview size in Lightroom makes a big difference! I havenāt updated my preview size for a bit, but this looks like a good reference on how to do it: https://petapixel.com/2020/05/23/how-to-rebuild-lightroom-previews-to-optimize-speed-space-and-integrity/
Iāve got about 3.5 TB worth of photos, so having small previews is absolutely necessary.
This is another good reference from Adobe on general optimization for LightRoom and also has some notes on previews and on hard drives: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html
Another thing that Iāve thought of doing is making multiple catalogs. If you donāt expect to access old photos regularly, you could make a separate catalog for every 5 years or so. Then you could store the entire catalog and previews on your external hard drive.
I should say I solely use Light Room Classic (no cloud-based Adobe for me)
The iNat tag is also really useful for finding the photos in your catalog, as you can then filter by the tag for a quick scroll through thousands of images versus hundreds of thousands (depending on your voraciousness for iNat and photographyā¦)
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Thanks for the suggestion, I opened up the original āHow do you organize your photosā topic and added these to it.
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