How many images of each species to keep??

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Melboracis
Melboracis's picture
How many images of each species to keep??

I seem occasionally to have 3 lots of photos of each bird - a) the usual first fairly grotty one I keep just for ID; b) A fairly good sharp one in good light etc of the bird posed; c) the real 'action' 'keeper' of the bird in flight, a raptor with prey or a kooka swallowing a worm! My dream is to have only b's and c's and slowly delete all the others until I have 6-8 'keepers' of each bird.

How do other forum folk organise rationalise their bird images??

Many thanks in advance!

Steve

clif2
clif2's picture

Hi Steve, I keep the good ones that I like and the ones where the poses are similar I will keep the best of those and delete the rest. From time to time I like to go over earlier photos and review them and delete the ones I don't like anymore. The reason I do this, is that as I acquired newer and better equipment and my skills got better ( or I got luckier ) I have ended up with far better ones than I had originally and also I am more critical now than I used to be. I would like to have them set up into catergories one day, but that is a big job and at the moment I don't have any touble remembering where I took a particular photo, but it could be an issue in say 5 years time. With the price of external hard drives these days it doesn't matter if you keep more than you need.

Regards

               Shane

Owen1
Owen1's picture

Melboracis wrote:
How do other forum folk organise their bird images??

Not very well!

I keep all the shots I'm happy with or any crap shots if they are the only one of a species. I order my photos in folders of my outings, then choose the best ones to process. Backing all your photos up on an external hard drive is a must.

Cheers, Owen.

Bromo
Bromo's picture

Melboracis wrote:

I seem occasionally to have 3 lots of photos of each bird - a) the usual first fairly grotty one I keep just for ID; b) A fairly good sharp one in good light etc of the bird posed; c) the real 'action' 'keeper' of the bird in flight, a raptor with prey or a kooka swallowing a worm! My dream is to have only b's and c's and slowly delete all the others until I have 6-8 'keepers' of each bird.

How do other forum folk organise rationalise their bird images??

Many thanks in advance!

Steve

Gday Steve

I generally keep even quite a few of each bird.  As long as they are sharp, exposed well and have good content (ie. i can actually see the bird and not just its tail feathers) I keep them.  This can lead to having in some cases 20-40 of one bird.  It all depends upon how common the bird is too.

As for organising not just birds but all photos, I use a program called lightroom 4 (i will call it LR from now on).  Sorry, but this will be a long post :(

Its specifically developed for cameras that take not just jpeg images but also raw (kinda like the digital equiv of a film negative).  This is an incredibly powerful program and has the potential to consume a lot of time should you wish to use it to its full capacity.  I will exclude the raw capability of the program here and just concentrate on what it can do for image organisation. But having said that I will say that it is like a library of your photos.  Once you load then into LR you can edit and crop to your hearts content but the original image will NEVER be harmed.  They will stay original and untouched but naturally you can save the new edited shots. 

Organising is a bit different.  On the Hard drive I will organise my pics in folders being firstly Year (ie. 2012) then a standard set of sub-folders for each year like "Family and Friends", "Fun Stuff", "Photo trips" etc.  Within each of these folders is a folder with a brief description of the pics I am uploading from the camera like "Bundanoon" or "Toronga Zoo" in "Photo trips".  That gives a general folder description to allow me to find the original files.

In LR when I load the pics, its is completely different.  You can label photos in a variety of ways to make it easy to find your best pics.  For starters all my bird shots have the bird name as the image "Title" (not file name!) and where it was shot in the "Caption".  Using LR i can go through the images and give them "Coloured" labels.  There is Purple, Blue, Green, Red and Yellow. 

I use these colours in the following way:
Purple = I dont use this but you could say use it as a label to mark your pics that you would use to enter comps or for display
Blue = Stand out pics
Green = Editing finished.  A completed pic
Yellow = used for all HDR or panorama shots than need to be stitched together
Red = Need further touchup's/tweaking

Should you desire to do so, each pic can than be given a Star rating.  1 star for "ok" 5 stars for an outstanding image.  That way you can have your ok and outstanding images in ech of the coloured labels.

On top of that you can mark where the images were taken on a map system which will insert the GPS co-ordinates into the image's metadata (along side the details a digital camera records like date, time, aperture, shutter speed etc).

If that was not enough you can also create "collections" in this library/database.  I created a collection called "Birds", so i can click on the "Birds" collection and every bird shot I have taken will come up on the screen in thumbnails.

Again to take this even further, you can search or narrow down what you see. Lets say you only want to see images that you have not printed (which would be a Green label) but where you have givena  rating of 3 or more stars.  Easy done.  You can also search all the metadata so i can search for a cuckoo and it will bring up all images of a cuckoo assuming of course that i put this word into a keyword, caption, title or a folder named cuckoo.

It can very complex if you were to use it to its full extent, at least till you get used to it, but it is amazingly handy for managing images.  What does it look like?  Re below.

How much is it?  It is expensive compared to the "Windows Explorer" thats comes free with Windows, but for less than $200 Aussie from www.adobe.com as a download it is very much worthwhile for organising. your images from the Ok ones to the excellent.  You will get the most out of it if you shoot raw as opposed to jpeg only.

sparrow
sparrow's picture

Hi, I use   picasa   to organise my photos its free to download and very easy to use ,as for my bird photos I have 3 levels first is unedited birds and like the name says is where I put all the photos I like for future editing ,this file is huge and is kept on a seperate hard drive (I'll get to them later ,no really I will !) the second I keep 3 or 4 of my favorites of each bird and the last is for the rest of my edited photos .

might not be a perfect system but it works for me.

Araminta
Araminta's picture

blush, I like your way sparrow, one day I'm going to take a holiday in the PC room, I will sort them out one day.Up until then I  sort them by Date taken, the place I took them at, and some names of the birds in the folder. I still do remember where I was at the time, should I not remember things anymore one day.........well it won't matter then, will it. I I burn CDs from time to time, because I have lost photos when my PC crashed . But right now I know where all my photos are, all 20 000 of them.enlightened

M-L

Bromo
Bromo's picture

Yeh Picasa is certainly a good one to use and its free which is a bonus!  My primarly use of LR is for the raw editing which is amazingly powerful.

Araminta, i hear ya about backing up.  I keep two backups lol.  One external HDD attached to my pc which does the auto backup thing when i startup the pc and the other is an external HDD held at a friends place that i update every month or so.

sparrow
sparrow's picture

I  also still back up onto disk and keep them else where ,I lost my house to fire a few years back and lost all my photos with evrythihg else I was insured but you cant replace the photos

kathiemt
kathiemt's picture

I ditch the horrible ones and keep all the rest. I really should go back through them. I know I've improved heaps over the past 4 years and I have thousands of photos (probably around 40+) on my computer.  I do have the very best ones uploaded to dropbox and also on a smugmug site where they are full resolution and available for sale.  I upload all of the others (good ones) at flickr.com and have them all keyword tagged so it's easy to find them and share them online at sites, like this one.

Kathiemt
Selby, Victoria
 

pacman
pacman's picture

Melboracis wrote:
How many images of each species to keep??  How do other forum folk organise rationalise their bird images??

How many images - I have a 500Gb HDD in my notebook and a ?3Tb HDD, the cost of external HDD is relatively cheap and therefore I keep too many pics as I do not have the time to do a 2nd cull

How to organise images - I started a thread on this in August or September and detailed my system, it may seem complicated to set out in writing but I can locate the directory of a particular species within 4 mouse clicks

http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/forum/Filing-directory-or-where-ic-bird 

Peter

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