Andy Gapin

A couple of months ago, I posted about trying to figure how to organize all my photos, roughly 30k, I think. Even though I just got my first DSLR six months ago and got seriously into photography, I’ve always been a bit of a picture taker. But I never go back and look at pictures and even though my old organization technique wasn’t awful—usually a folder with the event name and some sort of date—I always had trouble finding the right picture for something when I didn’t have a specific one in mind. So I decided that one of my summer projects would be to figure this about and go through all of my pictures and tag them.

I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to do this and now that I’m about 8,500 pictures in, I think I’ve got it down pretty solid. Or at least it works and it’s already been useful for finding stuff (like pictures for the wedding site my fiancée and I are working on).

If this is the kind of thing that bores you, you should probably quit reading, but if you’re interested in photography, organization, and workflow, read on! Oh, and I’ll note that I am strictly a hobbyist when it comes to photography, so all of my photos are personal photos, nothing is professional or anything like that.

Software
What makes everything below possible is a bit of software that I was already really in love with. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom and it’s simply amazing. Even though it is just a single application, it provides both strong post-processing and strong library management features that are both good enough to almost entirely eliminate the need for a second piece of software.

For years, I was a big supporter of Google’s Picasa which is great for photo management, but the processing and editing side of things is practically useless. I also found that it was very slow and laggy on my Mac. The feature I liked the most was the face detection, but, as good as it is, I found that this left a lot to be desired. If someone in the photo wasn’t facing the camera, Picasa doesn’t pick it up as a person. So if you want to be able to tag everyone in every photo, you still end up going through every photo manually.

With Lightroom, I just tag everyone as keyword in each photo and it’s entirely manual since Lightroom doesn’t have face detection. This would probably be an annoyance, but since I am going through every single photo anyway and keywording other stuff, I’m already in there, I can do it myself.

Other than that, Lightroom does everything that Picasa does…better and snappier. I have plugins for Facebook and Picasaweb so those are covered and with more options.

Workflow
My workflow is simple in theory, but has a few steps. Whether photos are coming in fresh from my camera or I’m working on organizing older photos, every group of photos gets three passes. One for processing, one for keywording, and one for rating.

When I import the photos, I first import them to a local temporary folder in my Mac. Eventually, everything ends up on my file server, but I’ve found that when processing the RAWs things are much faster when they files are local rather than on a network drive. RAW files are converted to DNG during the import so this step can take a little while, but it’s easier to do it here than anywhere else. At this point, it seems that DNG has caught on enough that it’s a safe file format to use for archival and I really like the idea that all data is stored in a single file rather than needing to keep an XMP sidecar file with each photo. JPGs stay as JPGs which is fine because Lightroom can store all of its edits and info in the metadata in the file, making sure that the original photo data itself is untouched.

Each photo gets processed in my first pass through the bunch. Terrible shots that are either completely out of focus, so badly exposed that they can’t be saved, or pretty much useless for any other reason are marked as rejected in this step and I don’t bother doing any processing on them. Photos from my DSLR obviously take quite a bit longer to process, but even photos from my point and shoot and phone still get run through this step incase they need some tweaking.

Once the photos are processed and ready to go, I zip through them and keyword the hell out of them. I’m trying to be very thorough with this step and erring on the side of doing too much. I also make sure that all of the location fields are set for each photo and the timestamps are correct…or at least close.

The timestamps have been a little of a pain in the ass. I was surprised to find that only a handful of really old photos didn’t have timestamps that (I believe) are correct. I was afraid that that was going to be a problem. But there have been other problems. One issue is that some events, like my Disney trip this year, have photos from multiple cameras and the time isn’t exactly synced up on them. This leaves them sequenced oddly unless I fix them. That Disney trip has photos from my DSLR, point-and-shoot, my fiancée’s iPhone, and my iPhone. I had to adjust a lot of times.

The second issue is that my point-and-shoot was somehow off by 12 hours (am/pm wasn’t set correctly) for at least six months. I’m not sure how that happened or exactly when it started, but it’s something I’ve needed to keep an eye out for as I go back through my older photos and organize them. The third issue, and the one that seems to be the most annoying, is that a lot of times the timestamps from my iPhone photos don’t make it over to Lightroom properly. I’ve noticed this is especially so when I use third party camera apps. Lightroom imports them and names the files correctly, most of the time, but shows the wrong capture time. I’m not sure what causes this, but the capture time ends up getting set to the import time. It’s very annoying.

In the final pass, I assign each picture a rating of 0-5. Since I’ve already been through all the pictures at least twice at this point, I’ve got a general idea of how good each shot is in comparison to the rest of the group. A rating of 1 or higher means that it would at least be good enough to export and/or show other people. A 2 rating is generally a decent shot that would definitely make a slideshow or Facebook or whatever if it’s a larger group of photos where it wouldn’t make sense to show everything that’s a 1 or above. Rating a photo with a 3 means that it’s one of the best of the group. 4 and 5 are reserved only for my best shots that are really good in terms of content and quality. These are my favorites and if I pulled up all the pictures of a particular keyword, these would be the best.

Also during this step, I group shots if necessary. If I snap a bunch of the exact same thing from the same angle, I’ll usually group them together with the highest rated one on top.

After that, I make sure all the metadata is saved to the file and move the files over to my server for safe-keeping.

File organization
This was one of the toughest things to make a decision on. Like everything else, once you start down a path, you’re kind of stuck, but this would undoubtedly be the toughest to make changes to.

Each photo is named with the format of YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_O. I’ve never read of anyone naming their files like this, but I like it because even if this is all I have to go on, I can figure out very closely where a file should go. It also automatically keeps the files sorted chronologically when viewing them outside of Lightroom. The ‘O’ at the end stands for original. That’s my indication that a file is the most original version of a photo that I have and I should never make any destructive changes to it. Any other version of the file will get an ‘E’ for export or some other distinction.

My folder structure is a bit more standard. There are top-level folders for year and then folders within that for month. Within each month, I have a folder for each “event” or group of shots. Events that span days are broken into a folder for each day and if different groups of photos are taken on the same day, I break them up into their own folders. Once you’re in Lightroom, the folders don’t really matter, but at least I’ll always know where to find a particular photo I’m looking for outside of Lightroom as well.

The one issue I found with this structure was that I have tons of photos of a specific subject that are thrown in a single folder. For example, I have hundreds of pictures of my cat that I’ve randomly taken over the last couple of years. They’re all just thrown into a single folder because they’re pretty random. At first, I had a “XXXX” top-level folder with some subjects in there, but I decided that was going to end up being a bad idea, so everything gets to fit into the above structure. This means that if I take just one photo of my fiancée while she’s sitting on the couch, it gets it’s own folder (ex. “Danielle hanging out 2010-07-09″). I’ve ended up with a bunch of folders with just one photo in them, but at least it keeps everything in the same file structure.

Each event folder has at least one folder inside of it. All of the most original versions of each photo are in a folder called “original” and, again, originals do not get any destructive changes made to them. However, these originals are where all the metadata and edits are stored–the edits are saved as metadata by Lightroom, the image data isn’t touched. Exported versions would go in “processed,” but I haven’t been exporting processed versions of everything so many folders don’t have this. There may also be a “video” folder if video was taken and a “PSD” folder if I’ve done some work in Photoshop…which is extremely rare.

So an example of all that would be something like “2010/06/Father’s Day 2010-06-20/original/20100620_143523_O.dng.” You’ll notice that the event folder has the name before the day. I kind of screwed up and was way too far in when I realized I didn’t like it so I’m kind of stuck with it at this point. My only reasoning for this was that in the left sidebar in Lightroom, you can only see about 12 characters of the folder name at that level without expanding the width and taking up more workspace. I thought it would be more useful to be able to see a few letters than always being stuck seeing pretty much just the year and month. It wasn’t until too late that it hit me that I could just hide that pane altogether when I’m not actively looking for a folder and keep it fully expanded when I am. Fail.

Keywords
I’m trying to be very thorough with my keywording. I’ve got tons of them organized hierarchically in Lightroom, but they could use a little more organization at this point as some groups of keywords expanded way past what I thought they would. I’ll take care of this soon.

Every photo is tagged with the full names of every person in the photo (that I know, of course) and various other content is tagged as well. Anything that I think I could ever want to use to pull up a photo is tagged. Places and locations beyond the simple location fields, landmarks, things that are being done, things people are wearing, references to anything, ingredients for food pictures, objects. You get the idea.

One of the more odd things that I tag is the name of the t-shirt I’m wearing in pictures that include me. It sounds weird, but I’ve got a TON of t-shirts and every once in a while, I actually find a reason to pull up pictures with a certain t-shirt or brand/site/store. For example, Threadless has done contests involving pictures of people wearing their shirts. I can very simply pull up these photos by the “threadless” keyword. If I want a specific shirt, the name of the shirt is a keyword under the “threadless” keyword.

That’s it!
That’s really about it. I’m working on going through my entire collection and I’m making progress, but it’s very time consuming. Getting all my old pictures organized was supposed to be one of my summer projects, but this will definitely extend a bit past that.

If you’re into photography and have a method to all the madness, I’d love to hear about it!

Half decent show last night, nothing really special of note though.

In other news, Gaslight Anthem posted the video for “American Slang.” The video seems to filmed entirely in NYC, which isn’t horribly surprising since Brian lives in Brooklyn now, but this feels slightly like a slap in the face. I don’t think anyone expects them to constantly be “JERSEY! JERSEY! JERSEY!” but they’ve always been so proud of being from New Jersey and it was a very big part of who they are and what the music was about. To turnaround now and make a video that is so in-your-face NYC just doesn’t feel right.

Anyway, the video is below and the playlist from last night’s radio show is below that.

• Wolf Parade – Yulia – Expo 86
• Peggy Sue – The Shape We Made – Fossils And Other Phantoms
• Villagers – The Pact (I’ll Be Your Fever) – Becoming A Jacket
• Gemma Ray – Big Spender – It’s A Shame About Gemma Ray
• Jeremy Jay – Splash – Splash
• Gogol Bordello – Uma Menina – Trans-Continental Hustle
• Blitzen Trapper – Laughing Lover – Destroyer Of The Void
• Born Ruffians – Oh Man – Say It
• Kathryn Calder – If You Only Knew – Are You My Mother?
• Mates Of State – True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston) – Crushes (The Covers Mixtape)
• Careful – I Loved A Girl But She Loved Me – Oh, Light
• Like Bells – Sea Salt – Palma
• Cate Le Bon – Terror Of The Man – Me Oh My
• Vic Chesnutt – Dick Cheney – Skitter On Take-Off
• Band Of Horses – Laredo – Infinite Arms
• Devo – March On – Something For Everybody

Source: 90.3 The Core

First of all, getting into the city last night was way too easy. The drive from the office up to Hoboken during rush hour took an unfathomable 50 minutes, which is even less than Google says it should take with no traffic–their with-traffic estimate was 82 minutes, but I wasn’t expecting anything less than 90. I guess a lot of people took off of work for a four-day weekend. No complaints. Then, in Hoboken, there was available parking all over the place, my only mistake was taking the first spot I saw. Finally, there was a PATH train sitting there waiting for us and my MetroCard already had money on it. Wins all around.

Now, She & Him…were alright. Not great, not bad, just alright. I think I would say that the first time I saw them was better. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely their fault. The sound was rather inconsistent, sometimes too much on the high-end,  sometimes way too much on the low-end. Of all the shows I’ve ever attended at Terminal 5, this had the worst sound by far. On top of that, Zooey’s keyboard wasn’t in tune and this seriously frazzled her. On no less than three occasions, the band started to play a song only to stop a few seconds in for Zooey to try to figure out a way to play it with her keyboard.

The set was long, an hour and a half including the encore. Normally, that would be quite a bit more than I would like to see from a band, but it didn’t feel long at all. When M Ward and Zooey left the stage after the regular set, I looked down at my phone expecting it to only be 9:45ish (they went on promptly at 9), but I was surprised to see that it was already ten after ten. Those 90 minutes a pretty solid collection of almost everything the band has to offer across both volumes. 24 songs, to be exact. They included a few covers, as should probably be expected, and even played an M Ward song which was pretty sweet. In the end, there was nothing left that I wanted and didn’t get. (The setlist is at the bottom of this post).

Oddly, Zooey seemed a little out of her element on stage. Maybe it was just that she was thrown off by the keyboard problems, but she seemed to have to keep reminding herself to smile and look like she was having fun. At one point, she seemed somewhat annoyed with the crowd taking pictures and asked everyone to turn their flashes off. Apparently, there was a strict no pictures policy for the night even though when I had called the venue earlier in the afternoon, I was told that point and shoots were okay. Zooey seemed to not care that pictures were being taken and claimed that the flashes ruined the vibe, but also tried to frame it as a helpful advice that the pictures would come out better without a flash (which is true). I don’t know, it did feel a little bitchy which is very disappointing to someone with a crush on her as large as mine (you already know all about that, I’m sure). All around, it just seemed like she was having an off night, though her voice sounded right on throughout the show.

Sorry for the crappy picture above, it was the best I could get with my iPhone 4 from where I was. Even with the improved camera, there’s only so much you can do from halfway back at a venue the size of Terminal 5 with dim lighting throughout the entire set.

1. Change Is Hard
2. I Thought I Saw Your Face Today
3. I Was Made For You
4. Black Hole
5. Thieves
6. Lingering Still
7. Me and You
8. Take It Back
9. Home
10. Riding In My Car
11. Over It Over Again
12. You Really Got a Hold on Me
13. Brand New Shoes
14. You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio (Joni Mitchell cover)
15. Sentimental Heart
16. Rave On! (Buddy Holly cover)
17. Gonna Get Along Without You Now
18. In the Sun
19. Don’t Look Back
20. This Is Not a Test
21. Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?

Encore:

22. Magic Trick (M. Ward cover)
23. Fools Rush In (Ricky Nelson cover)
24. I Put a Spell on You (Nina Simone cover)

It’s a good thing Toy Story 3 was utterly fantastic because seeing it was a pain in the ass. The geniuses at AMC scheduled Twilight, The Last Airbender, and Toy Story 3 to start within a few minutes of each other on the same side of the theater. Twilight and The Last Airbender were both sold out so there were a lot of people waiting. This wouldn’t have been awful on its own except for the fact that the theater decided that all three movies should be sat at the same time. This caused a massive line for all three movies to form going outside and down the side of the building. Yes, one line for three movies and no one seemed to know what was going on. When they finally let everyone in, it was a mess. My fiancée and I were directed into the wrong theater and had no idea until The Last Airbender started to play. We freaked out at this point and were ready to raise some serious hell with management for how awful everything was handled, but first decided to check to see if Toy Story had actually started yet and what the seating situation was like. On a side note, my fiancée has a lazy eye so 3D movies don’t always work for her, but seem to be a little better if we get a decent seat in the middle of the theater so if we couldn’t find one, I didn’t want to stay and have her suffer through a blurry movie. We generally make sure to get there early enough to ensure we get a good enough seat, but apparently a half hour wasn’t early enough. Anyway, we walked into the theater and the animated short before the movie was playing and the theater was only half full so we were able to get a seat. So luckily, we were alright, but I think we’ll stick with our normal Saturday/Sunday morning trips to the theater.

All of that was a hassle and had us both in very bad moods before the movie even started. However, that didn’t last long, Toy Story 3 fixed everything.

Pixar keeps up the long line of awesomeness this time around and provides the hard-to-deliver solid third movie. Toy Story 3 revolves around a good story that puts our favorite toys in the difficult position of dealing with not being played with anymore now that Andy has grown up and is off to college. While Woody stays true to who he has always been and keeps his loyalty to Andy, the rest of the gang isn’t as optimistic. But, as always, Woody finds a way to keep the group together.

Toy Story 3 lands the title of being the saddest Pixar movie to date. Towards the end, things get really bleak for the gang and I even caught my fiancée practically bawling next to me (to be fair, I was seconds away from shedding a few tears myself). Yet, the sadness doesn’t stop there, Pixar delivers what may possibly be the saddest happy ending I’ve ever seen.

The original Toy Story came out when I was twelve, so I was nearing the end of the traditional toy phase, but I would still consider it to be a staple of my childhood. Looking back, Toy Story is the kind of movie that holds some sentimental value and to get such a solid ending to the story is really awesome. I highly recommend seeing this as soon as possible.

Rating: A+

I thought that it’d be a good idea to wait a full week after I got this thing to write a review, but here’s how I feel about the iPhone 4.

Actually obtaining this thing was a little annoying, but my experience was a lot better than what most people had. I was able to reserve one using the Apple Store iPhone app so I had one waiting for me at the Apple Store. My first trip there was around noon during my lunch break and the line was still about 100 people long so I turned around and went right back to work knowing I’d never make it in time if I stayed. When I went back after work at 5:30, there were 3 people in line. Awesome. I was in and out in under 15 minutes with no activation issues. Unfortunately, for my friend, his experience was much worse. The line was hundreds deep when he went at 7am so he returned at 7:30pm to find 400-500 people still in line and saw a guy that was there 12 hours earlier just getting his phone. The Apple Store employees ended up cutting the line off at the 125th person because the mall was going to close before they could do the rest of the line. They told him he would have to go back the next morning to get his phone. He did, but still had to wait a bit.

Anyway, about the phone itself. It’s a phone, but it’s an incredible gadget. The design of this thing is beautiful. It looks futuristic, yet timeless, and feels great to hold. The phone feels much smaller and compact in your hand than previous generations and the flat back makes holding it more comfortable, especially while typing. Even though it’s only slightly heavier than the 3G and 3GS, it feels much heftier, but in a good way. The phone feels extremely solid, more so than any other gadget I’ve ever held, but because of the glass on both sides, I’ve been terrified that I’m going to drop it and break it. I need to get a case ASAP. The buttons feel great to use and the removal of plastic makes the phone look and feel much more elegant. One notable annoyance though is that it’s difficult to feel which way the phone is facing. You almost have to look. When it’s in your pocket, you have to feel for the buttons or the slit for the receiver.

Using the phone feels slightly faster and smoother than the 3GS running iOS 3.1.3. It’s noticeable, but doesn’t blow you away. However, when compared to my 3GS after I upgraded it to iOS 4.0, the difference is a lot bigger. Everything is smooth and snappy. Loading apps and using them feels snappier and more fluid.

There has been a lot said about the display on this phone and everything you’ve read is probably an understatement. I don’t know where Apple put them, but there are no more pixels. I can’t see them. I can’t focus my eyes at a close enough distance to be able to make them out. It’s glorious. Text is crisp and clear. Factor this in with the new snappiness and the device starts to disappear, if that makes sense. This screen is incredible.

The camera is something else that has gotten a lot of attention. This thing is really, really good. The pictures are detailed and clear and they snap very quickly. Low light performance is definitely improved to the point where you get usable shots in conditions that would have produced nothing but blackness on a 3GS. However, I don’t know how I feel about the flash. It’s great for use as a flashlight–even if it is a pain to get to. It’s plenty bright and supplies a lot of light, but the white balance seems to be a bit off, everything seems to have a greenish tint. Maybe it’s something I’m doing, but it’s annoying. Still, it’s nice to know it’s there. The 720p video is great. This is a nice feature to have and is more than good enough to cancel out that FlipHD purchase I was going to make. Tap to focus during video capture has been very useful for me so far. I’ve posted a few pictures from the camera here, but there’s another one to the right. Overall, the camera is good enough that I’ll be able to leave the point-and-shoot home more often than not.

The front camera is just fine. It’s just the front camera, what do you need? It would be sweet if Apple put the same camera on the front and the back, but is that really necessary? That might be helpful for self portraits, but one thing I’ve noticed is a bonus of having an all glass back is that if you use the back camera, you can use the entire back of the phone as a mirror to see what should be in frame for your shot. Works decently well.

Battery life is much improved overall. Light to moderate use seems to drain the battery much more slowly. Yesterday, I used 26% of my battery to get through 15 hours of the day using the phone lightly with push mail turned on. Under heavy use, the life is better than my 3GS and I feel like I can get through an entire day without too much worry. I like this.

Now, as for that “death grip,” that’s real. I can reproduce the bars disappearing relatively easily, but I’ll be honest about the fact that it hasn’t seemed to cause me much of a problem functionally…yet. However, this is definitely a design flaw on Apple’s part that they need to own up to. Simply saying that we should hold the phone differently is ridiculous. All phones may be affected by how you hold them, but none lose reception like this. The worst part is, the position that causes the problem is one that I use a lot when I’m reading things on my phone. Most of my web browsing is down holding the phone cupped in my left hand. Apple’s arrogance on this subject has been extremely annoying and it’s made me question them as a company. It’s been enough to make me consider returning the phone despite all of the other improvements. I almost want to switch to Android out of principle, but AT&T’s Android selection kind of sucks.

If you take away the death grip issues, upgrading for $200 to the iPhone 4 is a no-brainer for any current or wannabe iPhone owner. I like it a lot.

A short iOS 4 follow up…
After using iOS 4 a bit more, I’ve found that the fast app switching is definitely well done and my issues of ending up with a tray full of dozens of apps isn’t too big of a problem. The app I want is usually in the first 8. However, I would really like a quick way to clear everything out of there in one shot.

The saved-state is really nice for the apps that have included it so far, but I find that sometimes I prefer to start fresh. I wish there was a way to quit an app entirely right away. The default camera app is one of those situations, I’ve accidentally taken a few videos when I wanted to take stills because the camera was still in video mode from the last time I used it. Having Twitter and Facebook start where I left off is nice, but I miss the auto-updating on load, you end up doing it manually now. These are small problems though and will probably get worked out.

The Playlist last night was a bit on the folkier/acousticy-er/chiller side of things, but it was a decent show. I wanted to do something more upbeat, but that didn’t really pan out. I wouldn’t really say that’s a bad thing though.

I always feel like missing a week kills me. There ends up being too much music to go through before the show and since I wasn’t able to do the show last week because I was at my fiancée’s sister’s high school graduation, it was one of those nights. I’ll spend the next couple of weeks still catching up.

• Walter Schreifels – Save The Saveables – An Open Letter To The Scene
• Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Beverly Kills – Before Today
• Light Pollution – Drunk Kids – Apparitions
• Everest – Let Go – On Approach
• Kathryn Calder – If You Only Knew – Are You My Mother?
• Vic Chesnutt – Dick Cheney – Skitter On Take-Off
• Christopher Smith – Middle Of The Night – The Beckon Call
• Annuals – Holler And Howl – Sweet Sister
• Peggy Sue – Watchmen – Fossils And Other Phantoms
• Cuff The Duke – Follow Me – Way Down Here
• Band Of Horses – Dilly – Infinite Arms
• Villagers – The Pact (I’ll Be Your Fever) – Becoming A Jacket
• Woods – Death Rattles – At Echo Lake
• Mates Of State – Sleep The Clock Around (Belle And Sebastian) – Crushes (The Covers Mixtape)
• Danger Mouse And Sparklehorse – Pain Feat. Iggy Pop – Dark Night Of The Soul

Source: 90.3 Core