For what this is worth…for duplicate storage, I have been happy using Google Photos, too. I’ve created albums for both nature-related images and my personal photos (family, etc.) and the Google search function makes it really easy to find images quickly. While this isn’t a super secure cloud storage option, it is organized and tidy-looking overall.
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Wow, I didn’t know the Photos app could do all that. I have it on my HP laptop and I’ve just been using the default settings - pictures organized by date, and you can try to use its image-searching feature but it doesn’t work very well. It’s a little annoying if I want a specific photo and can’t remember when I took it, but that doesn’t happen much. I keep all my old memory cards with pictures on them, and I think most of my photos are also stored on my dad’s Lightroom account.
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The Photos app I’m talking about it is from Apple and included with Macs as well as iPhones and iPads. I don’t think it is available in a form that would run on an HP computer, so I’m guessing you’ve got a different app with the same name (that is a quite generic name!).
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Can anyone offer me advice on the ideal size for images shared on iNaturalist? I am trying to set up export presets in Lightroom. I share images to Instagram, iNat, BAMONA, and Bug Guide – and my IG export settings make my images 1080 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi. They look fine on IG, would this same setting be ideal for iNat and other websites where users are helping me identify organisms?
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I would bump it up - iNaturalist resizes each photo so that it is no larger than 2048 pixels on the longer edge.
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This is a great thread with lots of excellent suggestions. I just installed Bulk Renaming Utility as that appears like it will be a good addition to my workflow.
My question for the group - is there anything similar for adding information (&/or editing) to the metadata area in a photo file? Bobmcd (I think) mentioned that Adobe Bridge can use customizable templates for this. Are there other programs that can do something similar (my preference would be to stay away from adding Adobe products to my system).
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Partly for my own record and reference, I wrote about my photo workflow in my iNat journal last month, in case anyone is interested.
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If you don’t mind command-line, Exiv2 (https://www.exiv2.org/) does this, but it takes a while to learn. Photo metadata is complicated, and a mess if you get the formats wrong.
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I have gone through a few approaches. Before iNaturalist I organized my photos through hierarchical tags in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Then organized my photos in folder organized by year, month and date with location specified. So a folder might have a path like this C:\My Pictures\2021\06\2021-06-07 Laurier Woods. When I was done uploading photos to iNaturalist I would add a D in the path to specify I was finished with it. Windows Live Photo Gallery was still used for cropping photos and deleting unusable photos.
My new method is nearly the same, but before I upload photos I go back to Windows Explorer. I have the Details pane enabled and add Title, Rating, and Comments in the View > Details view. I would select a number of photos of a specific observation. In the Details pane I would put a number in Title (1, 2, 3, …) and a quick rough ID in the Comments. After I attempt to upload the photos to iNaturalist, in the rating column I mark an observation 3 stars if ID is successful, 2 stars if more photos at a different time is required and 1 star if unidentifiable. 4 and 5 stars would be reserved for better and best photos in my collection. If I am feeling really ambitious, I can write details of observations on paper such as what camera angles I need next time and identification tips so I am more likely to remember next time.
Ultimately I would like to finish my software that would be even better than this system, but finding time and ambition is difficult.
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Two words needed here.
I don’t.
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Or at least I haven’t in the past 4 years…
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I have spent a few days (intermittently) recently sorting through photos and uploading older ones to iNaturalist that, for whatever reason, had not been uploaded previously.
Like many people have mentioned, I use YYYY-MM-DD in the file name to preserve the date it was taken, as I’ve had date stamps go wonky on occasion when copying files between my camera and another device. Unlike anyone I saw here, I back up my files to USB drives (two, so there’s a back-up of the back-up).
Filenames appear as some variation of YYYY-MM-DD [subject of photo] at [location, for nature photos usually a park] and the ID number assigned by default by the camera. The date and ID number are a must; the location highly recommended; the subject may not be used, especially if it’s something I’m uploading to iNat and I don’t know what it is.
Folders are labelled by location (again, mostly parks). Right now I have a group of folders that contain photos that have been uploaded to iNat and another group of photos that haven’t (yet) been. Someday I hope to get caught up enough that the “to be uploaded” folders aren’t necessary.
The occasional non-organism nature photos (scenery, signs, infrastructure) go straight to the folder of photos that have been uploaded, unless there are many of them in which case a subfolder is created. For example, two parks also contain historic houses that hosts events, so there are subfolders for events related to the house.
Oh, that’s my nature photos. There are also museum photos, which follow a similar format. Don’t ask about the transportation photos, which are a mix of advocacy events, examples of bad street design, and several other micro-categories that defy any system of organization I’ve yet tried.
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To maintain observation photos, I use a Windows application I wrote a while back. It’s called Photo Mud. Here’s a quick outline of the observation features:
- You can access observation photos in any (and multiple) folders and drives.
- Information on each photo is saved to a database (MariaDB). It saves the location (by GPS data on the jpg), dates, size (click 2 points with fixed focus photos), iNaturalist and Bugguide record numbers, links to other photos in the observation, and the location on the hard drive of the original photo. The photo is copied (optionally cropped) to a common folder.
- The taxa for IDs are in the database, and can be looked up by scientific name and sometimes common name.
- You can use Photo Mud to query the database for observation photos.
- Photo Mud can create a web page to query the photos in the database online, display random photos, etc. It’s pretty rudimentary compared to iNaturalist.
I also wrote an iNaturalist utility that I use with Photo Mud.
- It uploads observations by tagging (clicking) photos locally in Photo Mud (that have been added to the database).
- It downloads new IDs and IDs with comments or disagreements, and optionally updates the local IDs in the database.
- It will download a specific taxon from iNaturalist to the local database (with ancestors and optionally descendants).
Somehow I’ve managed to collect over 60K photos over the past 20 years, so I’ve concentrated on making these quick and easy to use.
If anybody would like a copy of these applications, I’d be glad to make them available, VB source code too if you want it. (I haven’t been overly diligent about debugging, since I’m the only one who uses this part of Photo Mud or any part of the iNaturalist utility. User beware! Also, I think using an app on iNaturalist requires prior permission.)
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Hello everyone.
After discussing this topic with a friend of mine, a long time ago, I was curious to know how do people keep their photos organized. I forgot to ask here until now.
I’ve been photographing for almost 3 years now, and I’ve taken thousands and thousands of photos. Over the period I’ve been photographing, I’ve tried different organization schemes for my wildlife photo database:
1- At first, I organized my photos in species folders. I’d have one big folder for “wildlife photos” and inside one folder for each species, without any taxonimic organization. This worked well because I mostly photographed birds in teh begining, but as soon as I started taking photos of other taxonomic groups, it became chaotic. Which led me to 2
2 - I separated my species folders by “big taxonomic groups”, more or less similar to those proposed by iNat (plants, mammals, insects, molluscs, birds, etc). Inside each of these folders I stored the species folders containing the photos of each species.
3 - Some things would never be ID to the species level (either because it is not possible through photos alone or because my photos were not good enough for a definitive ID), so inside each “big taxonomic group” folder, I created the folders for “species”, “genus” and “families”. Photos would be stored inside these folders in the corresponding folder. So for unidentified seagulls, photos would be stored in the folder “Larus” inside the “genus” folder.
A pic of my “Wildlife” folder (folder names in portuguese and Pokemon icons because why not):
I once tried a more taxonomic approach, and organized all my folders taxonomically: Kingdom, Phyllum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species (and some intermidiate levels). But it wasn’t practical or efficient at all, so I returned to the scheme I presented above.
I’m curious to know how other users organize their photos, so feel free to share or give your suggestions!
Hope this creates a good topic for conversation and to provide ideas to new users
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I organize photos according to the place, when outside Lithuania and according to the date (year/month) for Lithuania. And use iNat for search.
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Mine are all organized by year and then by location. Once they are uploaded to iNaturalist I use the website to look at them taxonomically when necessary.
Edited to add: At some point I will likely just start deleting the oldest images annually to save server space. I’ve only taken these images for iNaturalist and the site will (hopefully) outlive me.
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Order it by Dates. Folder for year, folder for month/pair of months (depending on the amount of photos). That’s it!
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I organize them into folders by dates as well, one folder per month, 12 monthly folders per year. I use tags to record additional info such as species and locations so I don’t forget. Location info in particular, since my pictures don’t have any GPS coordinates. I’m always way behind on tagging, but I tried organizing by species/location and found it quickly gets confusing particularly with multiple species in a picture. Which folder should I put that in? Multiple tags works fine if there are more than one species to note, and I can search my images for tags to find all the pictures I have for one particular species or location (as long as I have kept up with tagging, which I’m notoriously behind on).
I do a weekly hike = a folder.
Sort the photos for blog photos - and that way the good ones are easy to search for, and find.
Problem children come to iNat - and are again, easy to search and find.
But I would have a huge messy backlog, if I wanted to add ALL the species I have seen
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I thank you for your insight. In this old post about organizing photos, you mention using the calendar function. In my observations (list view), the only date I find is the upload date. If there is more, how can I see it? I would find the observation date more useful.
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