Here’s an immutable, irrefutable, incontestable, indisputable, indubitable, undeniable consequence of becoming a digital photographer: you’re going to take many more photos than you did when you had to pay for film and developing and prints. And from the moment you take your second digital photo, you’ll need to have some method to distinguish it from the first (and so on). You may not envision it the day you transfer your first memory card full of pictures into your computer, but someday you’re going to have thousands, probably tens of thousands, of pristine digital images to keep track of.

So, we’re gonna spend some time talking about organizing your photos. I’ll throw out some ideas here and there, but you should use whatever scheme is most effective for you. The key is to have a plan and start early, before you have so many photos that going back and cataloging them becomes too daunting a task. To have a plan, you need to know what tools are available to you. Your first tool is the information within the digital image itself.

I’m not talking about the “picture” that you see. Although I’m sure they’re working on it, there’s currently no application available that can digitally analyze the image in your photo to determine, that it’s, say, a photo of your dog, Spot, on Popham Beach, two summers ago, frolicking in the tide pools. You have to put that data into the image yourself – I’ll get to that in a bit.

Back to organizing. Most people organize files on their computer by the filename. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, the filename your camera assigns to each digital image is less than descriptive. On most digital cameras, the photos are numbered sequentially from the very first photo taken, prefaced with text like “IMG” or perhaps other letters identifying the camera brand. Note that the camera will keep numbering sequentially unless you tell it to start back at “01” with each new roll, which you can do in your camera’s settings menu. I don’t recommend doing this, as you’ll end up with a bunch of photos with the same filenames, which can be confusing and maybe even cause you to inadvertently delete some of them. Plus, you can always change the image filename from “IMG_0023.jpg” to something more descriptive like “spot_beach.jpg”, if you wish.

Inside a digital photo file, “alongside” the image, is a space that contains text data, often referred to as “metadata”. This metadata is in two industry standard formats. The first is called EXIF, for Exchangeable Image File. EXIF data consists of information like the make/model of camera used, the date/time the photo was taken, the name given the photo by the camera, file size in pixels, physical file size, and very detailed information about the exposure settings used.

The other metadata format is IPTC, for International Press Telecommunications Council. I know, I know, not very descriptive. Flash back to the “DBD” (Days Before Digital). In the ‘70s (sounds kinda like “Middle Earth”, doesn’t it?), news wire services actually sent images via machines that were basically fancy fax machines. Each photo was accompanied by a “cover sheet” containing information about captioning, crediting, etc. Of course, if the cover sheet was misplaced, the editor had to scramble to find the data and possibly missed a deadline. So, the Council suggested another collection of descriptive data be added within the digital photo itself. IPTC data includes information like Caption, Keywords, Credit (photographer’s name), Date, Location, etc., and must be created and modified with a computer.

How do you get at this data? Find out next time!

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski