Minor Milestone Yields Thoughts On Cataloging

I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop since before we started this endeavor but didn’t buy Lightroom 3 until December 2010. I purchased Lightroom to catalog and keep track of Nancy’s growing collection of photographs. I still do virtually all of our photo editing in Photoshop. At the time, Nancy already had about 15 thousand digital images. (We won’t even talk about all of her slides and negatives). After several unsuccessful campaigns, I can now report that virtually all THOSE photographs have been entered into Lightroom. In the process, I have also cataloged some of her more recent work. Altogether, I’ve now cataloged 29 thousand of her 64 thousand digital photographs (and counting). (This means I’ve actually lost ground.)

I’ve identified 360 species of birds, 45 species of butterflies and moths, and about 100 mammals (including eleven types of squirrels). In her digital era, we have made eleven trips out of the country to five different continents. (She hasn’t been to the other two continents since the days of film). So you are probably wondering what I learned about cataloging.

Well, I’m still learning. Part of the problem is that we cater to some discriminating classes of consumers, like birders (and others), who want to know about the specific type of bird or butterfly. Not being an expert, I’ve not always been successful at identifying those subjects, even after spending quite some time doing research. That is part of the reason I have lost ground so far. But I have learned a few things.

In The Beginning

First, some background. Before Lightroom, I put our photographs in folders based on content, as some experts had suggested. I think I had a folder (they may have called them directories back then) for dogs and another for people. Each of these had subfolders. It soon became apparent that some images had both dogs and people. The whole system became a bit of a mess before I realized a need to move on to a better system.

Our Workflow

Picture Day

Now, at the end of a day of photography, I upload the pictures into a folder labeled with the date. It is in another folder labeled with the year. It’s simpler this way. If we are away from home, they get uploaded onto the laptop. Then they are immediately backed up onto an external hard drive before formatting the camera’s memory card to be ready for the next day. Then when I get home, I transfer the laptop copies to my desktop. I also regularly back up our whole portfolio to one of our larger external hard drives on a basis that is never quite as regular as it should be. But that part is beyond the scope of this article.

Later

When I get around to it, I import the pictures into Lightroom one daily folder at a time. I already have a metadata preset giving Nancy’s contact information, but I update the preset’s location before each upload. We don’t religiously get GPS data, but at least I try to add sublocation, city, and state.

After importing, I go through and add keywords. It is the keywords I’m relying on to find the pictures I’m looking for years later. When I’m cataloging, I only cull the obvious – like the hopelessly out of focus or those with the cut-off (or missing) subject. There are good reasons for not being too aggressive with the delete button at this stage. I may get a chance to comment on those reasons soon. So stay tuned.

Not My Job

As far as the other parts of the workflow that people write about, like rating and weeding, that’s Nancy’s job. She will decide to look through a day’s work, and together we will evaluate how to handle each picture. She has “the eye”. Generally, I’m just there to remind her of what is possible and what isn’t feasible. Then I take notes on how or if she wants each one edited.

My Lessons On Keywording

So here are my current thoughts:

• Embrace hierarchical cataloging. If somebody is looking for just a butterfly picture, that’s fine; asking for ‘butterfly’ will bring up all subcategories. But if they specifically want a giant swallowtail, you can search for it directly.
• Your categories should follow your own needs, not official scientific classifications. I have seven different species under ‘woodpecker’ (which is under ‘bird’), but ‘northern yellow-shafted flicker’ is listed separately (under ‘bird’). If someone looking through the results of a search for ‘woodpecker’ could be expected to ask, “where are the flickers?” then I made a mistake. But it is easy to move things around. This brings us to the next point-
• Develop your hierarchy organically or as needed. Start with simple categories, like ‘amphibian’. Subdivide as the number of amphibians makes searching for your favorite frog species more time-consuming. Or if flowers are your specialty and you listed each individual species under ‘flower’ (or even if you didn’t start with the ‘flower’ keyword), combining all roses into their own subgroup of ‘flower’ (and/or supergroup of the individual varieties) might someday be appropriate. Being too detailed may be overkill at first. But those details can become more critical when searching through tens of thousands of pictures. Although we have a ‘bird’ category, which is well developed with many levels of subcategories, I don’t yet have ‘mammal’ as a separate category. As I mentioned, we have ‘squirrel,’ which has 11 subcategories, and other things like giraffes are also subdivided. But I don’t expect somebody to ask to see all of our mammal pictures. If it does happen, I can adjust.
• Not all of my subcategories of ‘bird’ are individual species (or genus, or family, etc.). Some subgroups are based on the type of bird or likely habitat. I group them with other birds they are likely to be confused with. For example, I have ‘shorebird,’ which to me means all those little birds that run back and forth at the beach just ahead of the waves to feed in the sand. This includes several scientific families. If I use up my allotted time without identifying the species in a particular picture, I can throw it in the ‘shorebird’ class and maybe identify it later (perhaps as a bonus when identifying another bird in that class). Things like moorhens or spoonbills that would never be confused with those guys would not be part of the class. Sometimes even when you cannot identify the particular species, it helps narrow it down.
• As another example of mixed classification types, under ‘people,’ I have individual names. If I have pictures of related people, I might throw them together in a group by their last or family name. Or I might add the last name as an intermediate group between ‘people’ and the individuals. But maybe more important for search purposes, I have other ‘people’ subclasses based on what they are doing, like ‘surfer,’ ‘cowboy,’ or ‘tourist.’
• Your strict hierarchy alone may not always be the best answer. You may well wind up with a hybrid scheme. Sometimes within a species, if I have a lot of pictures (or if I expect people to ask for a particular subset of the group), I may subclassify. For example, I have both ‘male Painted Bunting’ and ‘female Painted Bunting’ under ‘Painted Bunting.’ For some animals, we have another subgroup for ‘immature.’ But both butterflies and moths, which are separate classes in my scheme, have caterpillars. I could have ‘Species A caterpillar,’ ‘Species B caterpillar,’ etcetera as subcategories of every species for which I have caterpillar pictures. But this makes it difficult if someone wants to see all of my caterpillars. In this case, I made ‘caterpillar’ an independent category, and I add it to the keywords of both butterflies and moths.
  To see the Note click here.To hide the Note click here.
  Of course, to complicate things, the caterpillar of some moths, like the Carolina Sphinx Moth, have their own distinct name (e.g., Tobacco Hornworm). In those cases, I kept the hornworm keyword and still added ‘caterpillar’ to the picture’s keyword collection (even though it seemed redundant).
• Another nice thing about keywording is the synonym list for each keyword so that one can add scientific names, or other local/common names to all of your animals. You could add strange nicknames to crewmates. (Those are what you will most likely remember when you do try to dig them up later). Each of those synonyms is searchable.
• Keep in mind that the main purpose of cataloging/keywording is to be able to find that picture years later. The first secret would be to have a good idea of what characteristics you will need to search for. (And hope those requirements don’t change over the intervening years).
• A secondary purpose is to record notes that would be useful in those later years. For example, having a keyword for everyone on your cruise that happened to find their way in front of your camera might not seem important now (since you won’t likely be searching specifically for them later). But if they wind up in front of your favorite humpback whale, you may need their name later, and it’s best to get it down while it is still fresh.

Final Thoughts

These comments show my current method for this process. My scheme will probably continue to evolve. But even if it doesn’t, I give no guarantee that it is the best plan for you. I hope I’ve given some ideas that will be useful and maybe even save you the time of learning everything the hard way. But in the end, the most efficient cataloging scheme is probably the one that most closely matches the workings of your own brain. Whether you list individual species of plants under ‘purple flower’ or just add ‘purple flower’ as an independent subcategory of ‘flower’ (or ‘plant’) depends on how your brain normally processes these attributes. Thinking about and/or understanding how you think could be the most challenging part of this process.