Photo Organization

After installing Leopard and playing with everything it's got, I got bored so I decided it might be time to take a look at Aperture.

For people who don't know, or who haven't had the latest updates, I've nowgot more than 12,000 total photos, not including versions. (That number does include one or two events that were accidentally duplicated when I started my Bridge-Photoshop organizing system last year. I am going to be working at some point on eliminating those.)

What this means is that photos are difficult to find, especially since I haven't been tagging or keywoarding them at all, so I can't exactly go through and search for "Megan" or "7300." Tonight I've just started surveying the damage, but as I have more free moments, I'm going to start finding the best photos and starring them, as well as creating smaller projects out of my initial two groupings. For those who don't know, when I first switched back to Aperture, I had one folder, with many smaller folders, totaling about 10,500 photos.

The maximum amount of images an Aperture project can hold is 10,000 images, so I just split the groups of photos down into "older" (Kodak-era) photos and "newer" (dSLR Era) photos. It was a good approximate grouping, and now I'm going through and taking out specific events, and seasons. Right now for example, I have a project for Fall 2007, for KHS Graduation, for the 2006 talent show, for 2007 summer in Kingman, plus my August trip to Flag, my October trip to Tucson, my Summer trip to Tucson, and I'm going to start putting some of my Real Estate adventures into a folder, and I'm sure as soon as I get done with seasons, I'm going to be making albums for individual events.

Another part of this project is to find more of my older photos that I'd like to share with the world. Believe it or not, there are good photos that I took either before I signed up for Flickr, or during periods where I was not paying attention to it.

Also worth mentioning is that I've given thought to getting a pro Flickr account. It's $25/year, and the bandwidth limit goes away, my photostream will show an unlimited number of photos, and I can show really big, archival-quality JPEGs. I'm currently at about 300 or 400 photos total on Flickr, and I have reached 97% of my bandwidth limit for October, uploading some of those nice archival-quality JPEGs that I do so love. I'll probably get Flickr for a year or two once I actually get that RAID1 hard disc for my Aperture library.