Organize old photos, digital photos, print and frame photos, etc.

My laptop died and I have been really hectic at work – I’ll maybe take some of these offshore with me and try and get some done in the evening but to be honest, I’d rather just watch some UFC and head to be.

So I have steps 1 and 2 out of the way. I have renamed all my photo’s and have decided on how I will tag them. I’m using a program called F-Spot which has quite a nice tagging utility; I can just drag and drop tags onto selections of photo’s or vice versa (photo’s onto the tag).

I haven’t worked out how to add multiple tags to multiple photo’s in one move yet but I’m working on it.

The tags are actually written into the photo’s metadata so if I decide to move programs or share my photo’s the tags go with them. This will be very useful if I use Flickr or an equivalent to share my photo’s as they will be automatically uploaded with the photo!

No sooner had I started renaming the files I hit problems. the script was falling over on the mv command. After some digging and an email to a close friend I found the problem was file paths with spaces in. The mv command was seeing an abridged file path which didn’t exist.

Simple solution: replace all occurances of $image and $inputDirectory with ”$image” and ”$inputDirectory”.

I’m now in renaming heaven…

My digital photo’s are fairly well organised. Individual folders for each event and group named files. For about the last year or so that has also included prefixing each folder (and sometimes picture) with the date in yyyymmdd format so the folders are chronological when sorted by name.

But what about all the pics before then which are just names? Well a guy called Todd Slater (in the pic) took the time to write a script which uses the exif data in the photo (you know, date, time, camera model, etc) to rename the picture for you! He also wrote an article on organising the pitures in Linux; which helps with one of my other goals.

So for my digital photos I need to –
Step 1: Rename all photos on a yyyymmdd-name.jpg basis.

Step 2: Write a list of tags I want to apply to the photos; such as location and any key people in the photo.

Step 3: Actually add the tags to each photo.

Step 4: Group folders by year.