Warning: Not for the sleepy-eyed or casually interested.....
Frank:
Yes, I do delete many shots. I take a lot of close-up and macro, and as you might know in such situations, the tiniest things that are insignificant in normal photos become major: the sun goes behind a cloud and it ruins the shot (or vice versa), you didn't notice until your 3rd try that a twig in the view is distracting, an unwanted ant crawls into view, an inch to the left is a completely different photo, etc. And rather than spending time editing photos to try to make them "perfect", I will often prefer to take multiple photos of the same at different settings for different effects, focus clarity (lots of macro shots), etc. So I have a lot of similar shots, and only the best ones make the grade.
Many of my photos are not only for my own documentation, but I need good detail as many are also destined for use in presentations viewed on large screens or walls. So I tend to be a pixel peeper. As you would expect, a photo of a poppy seed, for instance, needs all the definition a camera can muster for the big screen. And I only use a micro 4/3 sensor.
For file organization, I keep a smaller library, now consisting of 17,000 files and 860 folders, that is separate from my original photo file bank. These are ones that have likely received some editing (mostly cropping), but are also renamed according to subject (and/or Latin name if it is a plant), date, and the original file name is also retained. I add to this daily, or as photos are taken, as I know these particular photos I will want to go back and find or use them sometime in the future. (On some forums, I have a reputation for always having a relevant pic for the subject at hand, and this is why.)
So unlike most people who need to go looking for a pic in their original file bank - a big task, I have no long scrolling or laborious searching to find them. In fact most of the time, I don't even use the search function, because my folders are logically set up, and the file names in each folder are normally in alphabetical order, rather than file number or date. Of course, the native folder system of any OS (operating system) will have a built in chronological sort system. If I needed to search for a particular 2017 photo, I would search by the subject name I gave, then search within that group for the date, or vice versa.
Now lets say that particular photo is only in the original photo file bank, and not in my smaller library. Not a problem, as I can always find photos in my smaller library that associate chronologically with the photo I want. Since I retained the original file name, I use that to search for the area in the original file bank to find where it would approximately be, and it is not hard to find.
So for instance, the file name I gave for this pic is:
Phemeranthus sediformis seedsnm10Oct17 PA102030.jpg
I could find this photo easily through my own folder system, or by searching any permutation of "phemeranthus", "sediformis", "seeds", "seedsnm"(my designation for named and shown in millimeters), or the date.
The file structure itself is pretty subjective as it will change with the needs of every user. But for my plant stuffs, the basic divisions are first by:
- Seeds
- Seedlings
- Woody
- Herbaceous
- Conifer
- Miscellaneous
- ppt
then by:
- Genera
- Misc
The major key for my system is the file naming. Back when I started with windows 98, I thought hard about what I would need and the limitations of the OS, and came up with this. For me, it still works very well.
