Tim Grey’s Blog

I was browsing around on one of my external hard drives the other day, looking for some images to use at a workshop I was going to teach. I have always organized my images primarily with a folder structure, using other software (such as Adobe Lightroom) to take organization to the next level. However, at times I still find that I prefer to simply browse through my folders directly.

While browsing through the images, mostly looking into folders that I knew would contain images well-suited to the topics I would be covering in my presentations (I’ve always said the best photo database tends to be the photographer’s mind, as most photographers I know have an incredible ability to recall their images), I found a few folders I had completely forgotten about. But it got more interesting. As I opened up one of those “found” folders I had sort of forgotten about (but now remembered), I ran into images that I completely forgot were included in the folder.

I organize my folders based on “photo shoots”, in the sense that when I come back from taking pictures I’ll put them into a folder named based on where I was and when. Normally that works very well, but sometimes I find unexpected photos in one of those folders. They’re in the right place, I just forgot about a particular subject I photographed on a particular shoot (in this case, some cherry blossoms I ran across when I was at a local park photographing model airplanes in flight).

On the one hand, I think it is cool to have these “found photos” as a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, in an ideal world I’d always be able to browse all my images and have a way to be aware of all images in all categories from all photo shoots. With today’s software you could certainly do things like apply keywords to your images, making it easier to find a particular image when you need it. However, what I find I very often need is more of a “browsing” experience where I’m able to find images that I don’t even know I’m looking for. I want the “found photos” experience to be one I can experience on a regular basis without it being an accident. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I know I’d like to be less surprised by some of the images in some of the folders on my hard drives.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Digital. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.