uploading to plant files is hard

Just because I can't find my pictures easily, I find I am uploading one that is inferior to another one I find later. I am going to stop until i can locate all my good pictures. if not, this would take days to accomplish when it should be easy.

Just curious............do you have a separate folder for each plant? how do you organize them where you have quick access to them? I have them under every category known to man.............

Example: I found this picture of 'Rob's Woomooloo' after I had uploaded a not so good photo........all this one needs is to be cropped...............

That's a good question!! Can't wait to hear answers...I have pictures all over the place, no rhyme or reason...takes me forever to find something.

good, let's sit and wait for good answers, threegardeners!!

I download photos from my camera straight into my photo editor. Usually, I take time right then to crop, fiddle with the exposure, etc. When I save the photo, I put it into an appropriate folder. The filing system for some of my photos (like various folders for family photos) is pretty erratic, but I have folders labeled "garden veggies," "garden flowers," "butterflies and bees," and of course "African Violets and gessies." So my AV photos go into their own folder.

I make the photos easier to find also by how I name them. All of my AV photo file names start with "AV." Then I put the cultivar name, and then I often include some little note so I know what the photo shows. So I have photos in my AV folder with file names like "AV 'Tiger Trail' first bloom.jpg" or "AV 'Tiger Trail' filling out bigger pot.jpg" and so forth.

I think the most important thing is to save files with a name other than the number that your digital camera gives them! Then, it's good to have a system for sorting them into groups/folders, whether it's some sort of album software or just a bunch of nested folders like I use.

hehe I might end up winning the prize for being the most crazy when it comes to digital pictures and organization. My structure is rather simple. I breakdown my pictures and have appropriate folders for all. To get to to let's say Rob's Madcat it goes like this

Digital Pictures>Unedited>Garden>Plants>Indoor>African Violet>Semi+Mini>Rob's Madcat Leaf.jpg

Now the reason I think I may be the most crazy is I have two folders. Unedited and Edited. All the originals are stored in Unedited. If I make changes they go to Edited and the original is kept in Unedited. The folders are duplicated in both so I know where to find things. It does mean you end up with a lot of pictures but I like storing original's for whatever reason.

Critter...............I might be able to pull your system off...............

westocast73, you are living in a world I know nothing about..............sometimes I edit the picture (which really means cropping) and sometimes no...............I am laughing at the thought of editing pictures (every one of them)................wouldn't know how anyway..........

thanks for your answers, both of you

I think I might start using a separate folder for unedited images also... I don't keep most of the images as they come off my camera, but there are times when I do want to keep the original, high-resolution, un-fooled-around-with photo.

I find with the insane amount of storage space computers have ( or can be added cheap ) that saving the originals doesn't cause me any problems and I enjoy being able to always go back to the original file if there was a part of the picture I need for a specific reason. I am sure many people do not have the need or desire to save all their original photo's. I think it is handy though and many of my photos ( because I take so many! ) remain unedited until I need them for an actual reason or am printing them. Currently I have 11 GB's of photo's or 27,717 ( When I go on vacation I typically take a few thousand ). I think though critter if you have the room it is nice to save the original. That being said in my case it does mean I have ton's of folders and ton's of photo's! =)

The only thing i do with my camera is take pictures of the gesneriad family or other flowers.............my adult kids have better cameras than i do, so when we gather they do the photography work................my grandchildren use it to take both photos and videos.........that is about it. I just know I could figure out a way to find them.

The computer tech can figure this out...................

I think that's probably good advice, and I'll start saving more of the originals. I still like to pull everything into the editor to look at it if I can, both so I'm not saving photos that just didn't turn out and so that I'm giving them a more useful name when I file them.

I think there's some good "photo album" software out there too, Gail. I'm using Jasc Paint Shop Pro for my photo editor, and they make some album software that I've been considering... looks like it would be easy to file and find photos with it.

I'll bet the folks in the photography forum would have some really good idea on this also. :-)

I have (believe it or not) several real good photo editing programs)
I just seem to like my own photos as they are.................it seems that everytime I use auto adjust or start tinkering with exposure, etc. it doesn't even look like the 'real thing'...............I think other than cropping I am not ready to start 'messing' with pictures................I agree that they look like better pictures than I took!!!!

You're right that it's easy to "over edit" photos. I do crop most of mine, because I've gotten into the habit of taking them from further back than what I want to end with (just lazy about framing, plus sometimes the autofocus works better that way). And if I'm taking photos on a sunny day, it helps to knock down the "brighness" (colors seem to stay the same, just less washed out).

I mentioned Jasc just because I figure they might also make a good album program since I like their editing software.

I used Adobe Photo Album previously. It was handy and the main feature I loved about it was that you could tag photos. This means for every photo that had an AV in it you could tag the photo AV and when you searched for AV it would bring them all up. Of course you can add as many tags as you want so you could tag a picture of Rob's Madcat like so Rob's>Semi>African Violet>Fantasy Bloom> Pink > Purple > Plant > Houseplant

As you can tell you can then find pictures very easily. This works very effectively when its family photos as you can add each family members name as a tag and then when looking for a picture of someone type their name in and it would bring every photo that they were in up front.

This feature was very handy but that being said I already had so many pictures I didn't want to be bothered going through them all and tagging them so I uninstalled the trial version that came with my Camera. Thats the only album type software I have had experience with though.

I tried the Adobe photo Album but found that my cell phone pictures came through awful. They looked better with the HP thingy that came with the computer...so I uninstalled it too....wonder why that was? You would think a picture would look the same no matter which program was viewing it.....

It probably didn't support the compression the cell phone took the pictures in. Photo's can be compressed in so many different ways that sometimes one viewer supports a compression whereas another doesn't get it quite right. I would imagine though that there would be a way to solve that problem but it would be an irritant and turn off most consumers pretty quick.

yup...which is why I removed it...thank you. : )