Re: Sorting photos, please

[George Talusan <george convolve ca>]

I'm getting a vague sense of how you organize your photographs and it's
a way, in my opinion, no one with a vast amount of photographs like me
would ever do.  HOWEVER at a point in the past I used to do exactly
this.

The biggest problem with copying images to some pre-ordained directory
is that there is a chance of a filename collision -- with Canon cameras
you'd be limited to 10,000 photographs per folder otherwise you'd be
overwriting old images.

Note this isn't a filesystem limitation.  It's a filename limitation
imposed on you by your camera.

Now the easy way to get around this is to write a script to uniquify the
image filename before moving it to its final resting place.  I used to
do this in the YYYY:MM:DD-HH:MM:SS-x time/date format where x is the
shot number within the second.  If you've ever shot sports then you know
what I mean.

F-Spot does this automatically by creating a YYYY/MM/DD directory
structure.  You're still limited to 10,000 photographs in this
directory.  HOWEVER with 24 hours in a day then you'd need to take 416
shots per hour to fill this directory.  I'd be blind and cripple if I
ever managed to do this.

So putting 10,000 images in a directory called "My Dogs" or "Seattle" is
out of the question.  Not only that, you lose the ability to quickly
determine WHEN the shot was taken unless you look at the EXIF header.
Why not just make a tag that can span any directory regardless of date
or time?  F-Spot does this.  If you need to search a date range then
F-Spot can do that too.

It seems to me that people who complain about F-Spot not working
correctly with Picasa, kDigiwhatever, blah blah workflow are spending
more time running different programs than taking pictures.

F-Spot is a great tool for organizing your photographs but if you
organize them BEFOREHAND then why bother using F-Spot at all?  Sounds
like you should be using Nautilus, EOG, or GThumb to thumb through your
directories.

I've posted my RAW workflow to this list before but here it goes again:

1.  Take loads of pictures.
2.  Import photographs into F-Spot.
3.  Tag photos individually.
4.  Tag any GOOD photos with the Favourite tag
5.  Export Favourite tagged photos from today to Bibble
6.  Use Bibble's work queue to further rank and post-process

This is where we're on thin ice since I need a seventh step to import a
new versioned JPEG for any given RAW file managed by F-Spot however
that's another thread.

I shoot with both a Canon 10D and 20D, a lot of the time simultaneously.

I use Linux and GNOME exclusively so booting to Windows is not an option
for me.

I do not consider myself a professional photographer HOWEVER I do get
paid to take photographs.  

Lots of them.


george





On Tue, 2007-27-03 at 23:47 -0400, Richard Bronosky wrote:
> Okay George, and if you want to add the 42 pictures on your camera
> right now to a folder 3 deep in your tree, how would you do it?
> There's been a lot of stress on this idea of "I must do it f-spot's
> way, or everyone else's way."  I don't see f-spot as being mutually
> exclusive as critics keep stating, but I do not have enough experience
> to give a detailed real world example.  May I please trouble you to
> share this with us?
> 
> (George, sorry for the the direct email from my another address, GMail
> really sucks at handling multi-accounts/reply-to-all for mailing
> lists.)
> 
> On 3/27/07, George Talusan <george convolve ca> wrote:
> > For what it's worth I recently imported 49,452 images into F-Spot after
> > a catastrophic hard disk failure.
> >
> > I re-tagged all of them within two hours and after fixing bug the memory
> > leak bug for RAWs.
> >
> > F-Spot already handles the condition where your images are organized by
> > folder.  Simply turn off the "copy image" checkbox when importing.  The
> > only thing missing is reflecting this fact in the UI.  However this is
> > solved with importing one folder at a time and creating the necessary
> > tag for it, and repeating for each folder.  No symlinks needed.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 2007-27-03 at 22:02 -0400, Harvey Stein wrote:
> > > I certainly agree with Jason on the usage of the file system.  I'm a new
> > > user of f-spot.  I just imported ~3,000 photos so that I could easily
> > > upload a few hundred to picasaweb without booting MS Windows & running
> > > picasa there (the linux version doesn't upload).
> > >
> > > I didn't want to spend all the time necessary to load up all the images.
> > > And I certainly didn't want to copy all of my photos into F-spot - I
> > > don't have the disk space for it & I don't need duplicate photos laying
> > > around.
> > >
> > > I got around the latter problem by importing links instead of copying
> > > the files.  And I did it because I needed the upload function.  But, I'd
> > > still like to view things as they are on my file system, potentially
> > > move certain things around, etc.
> > >
> > > It's certainly true that you can do everything you need from within
> > > f-spot via tags.  However, that doesn't make it convenient.  What's
> > > convenient is to treat the file location itself as another property of
> > > the photo, and allow the user to manipulate that as well.  Similarly,
> > > it'd be far more convenient if f-spot were able to automatically find
> > > and register new photos/changes (as do picasa & kphotoalbum).  If it did
> > > these things as well, it'd do pretty much everything I need in an image
> > > browser.  Without them, I need to be able to work directly with the file
> > > system and paradoxically, this makes being able to work with files by
> > > location even more important.  And if picasa or kphotoalbum handled
> > > uploading, I probably wouldn't have started using f-spot either.
> > >
> > > Given that it can work with links to the files instead of the files
> > > themselves, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to manipulate the
> > > links.  Maybe if I get some free time I'll try to do it...
> > >
> > > -- Harvey
> > >
> > >
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>