Cataloguing weddings and filenames

[Dylan & Marianne]

I wrote a blog post on how Marianne and I tackle the post-wedding sorting of images
The link to the post is here on our blog

http://wp.me/prucx-sd

Seeing as we literally developed this from trial and error, it would be good to know of any other tricks people would like to share to make things easier?
As with alot of nitty gritty things in photography, there isn't a great amount of material avaiable on the topic!
(ps. mods feel free to move this to the appropriate forum! I wasn't sure where to put it)

[MaHo]

Some good little tips there.

We had our first wedding a couple of weeks ago (paid one at least) and the one issue we suffered with was the file name duplication. A lesson learned for next time (especially with 3 bodies and oodles of CF cards!).

How do you find the action in regards to the first lot of processing on all files? If this works well then it would be invaluable to saving a heap of time in that initial phase!

[ricktas]

I moved it from the Weddings forum as that is a photo critique forum.

[Dylan & Marianne]

Thanks Rick
Matt - we make presets for WB, exposure, fill light, contrast, colour adjustments in lightroom for each scene. In Photoshop, we have an action that brings up multiple layers which we then adjust with masks (an imagenomic portraiture layer, soft light layer, dodge and burn layer etc) - For very routine scenes like family shots, often the 1 touch action is all we will do - for specific shots of b&G we would spend a lot longer refining it

[arthurking83]

About the only thing I'd have done differently is in the naming of files according to date, with the year and date reversed .. that is instead of '24032012', I do '20120324'.

The reason is, that if you want to do a search of files from all folders, you will have(or could have) a situation where you want to list all files in date order.

If you name them 24032012 then you will see a list for all the dates that may all be out of order.

eg. if you have a files named 23032011, 01012012, and 24032012 somewhere on your computer, and just want to find all images relating to weddings over the years the list order will be

01012012
23032011
24032012

which places them out of sync in relative terms according to date.

Best date file naming technique is to have year-month-day(and any other hour/min/sec info if you want too).

I used to create GPS tracklogs for years, and have accumulated a massive amount of track data, and used to name them only according to date, but not month or year .. I used to place all the files in a directory relating to Year/Month/ with the dates in sequential order.

But when someone asked me if they could have my tracklogs for the purpose of creating mapping info, having all the dates listed in a window had the files all out of date order.

It's not a super important aspect of file naming and you can always do a proper search based on date(file creation or last edit or whatever), but for simple searches with hundreds of thousands of files, a proper date based naming system may eventually become important.

I do this at work, and it drives the other guys that need to save or find files, absolutely bonkers. But once I showed them why(I do it this way) it then made sense to them too.
Super easy to find the appropriate files in order(according to date).

It's kind of awkward to get used to initially, but then once you're used to it, it makes sense and you know what to look for instantly and quickly.

The only thing I hate is when I have to find files made(by date) and someone hasn't set the PC to Australian standards and used the default US standard of date with the month and date reversed when doing a search according to date!
One of the work PCs had been setup with the default Windows region of the US, and not Australia, and searching file according to dates was a PITA.

Anyhow, just thought it may be helpful.