How do you organize your travel photos?
 

I'm just curious...

Do you have a travel website? Do you upload your photos to an online site (such as snapfish, kodak etc.)? Do you store them on your computer as well? Do you create backup cds?

Any clever things you do with your pics?

:)

I use 2 for different purposes. Here is an example of a short gallery of 35 pics by topic---this one is Sicily---that I put onto worldisround.com for online viewing.
http://www.worldisround.com/articles/169372/index.html

But, to upload to my computer, and to organize my photos into files, I use the wonderful PICASA2 SOFTWARE from Google. It is free and very good.

I use Picassa too, then from there download the improved photos to Kodak Gallery and from there I make my photo book. no scrapping for me, much easier and the book arrives in the mail, it's looks great and professional

Personal websites can be thought of as digital scrapbooks. They provide convenient access to your travel (and other) photos for family and co-workers. No need to drag around a photo album or slide projector. Once, when a hotel receptionist in rural Germany mentioned an interest in Arches National Park, we brought up my website on his computer and looked a few of my pictures of the area.

Rather than use a communal photo gallery, I prefer to manage my own website content, although this does involve nominal fees and requires a minimal amount of technical knowledge (html/php, ftp, etc.).

I back up all of my photos on CD or DVD. For digital photos, I make several copies before purging my memory chips. Website photos are reduced in size, which makes them ideal for viewing, but not for print creation (I'd hate to find one of my photos hanging in the Louvre one day).

I number my photos sequentially based on camera and year. For example, my digitals are numbered something like d052334.jpg and slides might be s052314, where the slide numbers indicate year (2005), roll for that year (23), and frame (14). Nowadays, I have all my slides scanned during development, which costs an additional $12 per roll.

For travel photography, I often include and additional indicator of the trip. European trips will include an 'e' after the 'd' or 's', so my first digital shot on a European trip might be de050001.jpg.

Finally, it is important to me that the travel portion of my website should consist of more than just pictures. I try to write brief travelogues of all trips (even the short ones).

I keep all my photos on my pc using a windows folder hierarchy that looks something like this. Picassa sorts by filename, ignoring any windows file structure, so every picture name starts with the year-mo for future sorting. I've tried various pc library programs over the years and have never been 100% happy with any of them.

My folder structure looks like this - different folder for each decade (I have pix scanned into digital format dating back to 1890s.), sub folder for each year, sub folder for each mo, and sometimes another sub-folder for a big trip or other event.

My Pictures
2000s
2005
2005-09 Sept
2005-09 descriptive_filename.jpg

I like having the year/mo at the start of each filename, so that when I dump a bunch of pix onto a CD to send to someone, they can be sorted by date easily.

For online sharing, I use shutterfly.com. I like the indefinite storage, unlimited (or so it seems) space, and the easy upload tool.

For printouts, I use either Sams club at ~19c/photo or a local photo shop at 15c (new special rate I just started using).

And, most importantly, I BACKUP all my files with a DVD writer ~1x/quarter, and store the DVD at work, outside of my house!

I still use slides. But Photoworks also stores the images on their web site. For individual trips, I edit and keep the slides and web images pretty much in sequential order. When I repeat visits, e.g. multiple visits to Paris, or the Dordogne, I combine and reorganize the images according to an order that I think would make sense.

I do pretty much like J62--folders with dates. But I add a subject like "beach", "christmas", "kids' visit", "ski trip". I combine years into a whole album and save on an alternate hard disk, as well as MANY CD/DVD backups that will go to the safe deposit box. When the next technical breakthrough comes (beyond DVDs) don't forget to transfer your pics to that media.

I don't use a digital camera yet, though on a couple of trips I have had the conventional film also processed into a CD so that I could share some pics on line.

I still keep conventional photo albums, in my experience, people (and I) still prefer to thumb through an album, while comfortably seated in an easy chair, rather than gather people around a computer screen. In the album, which is really more of a scrapbook, I also include maps, restaurant cards and menus, brochures, etc.

Recently as a gift to family I traveled with, I had 50 or so conventional photos scanned, and turned into a DVD with music of my choice, a couple of titles added. I and they were SO pleased with the results. With special effects like page-turning, pans from side to side, close ups, etc, the pictures seem to have movement, yet there was no lugging around a video camera, and the DVD in total length is about 7 minutes, so not too onerous to watch. A couple of the photos I included were actually free stock shots from the internet, where I felt that my own photo didn't do the sight justice.

None of the above ;-)

I take regular old fashioned color snapshots, print them 4x6, rubber band them together behind a dated postcard from the country I was traveling. Then I file them in wicker shoebox shaped baskets.

Clever-ish things: I have scanned, digitized, and enlarged good shots, framed 'em to hang in my apartment. I have color xeroxed and hand-made postcards or greeting cards.

Our trip reports, with some photos included, are all saved at our web site:

onelittleworld.com

Around 30 albums worth of full-size image files from our trips are stored here:

http://community.webshots.com/user/go_family

I'm an avid fan of photography, so I make a lot of photographs during my travels. Some of the photographs get edited in Photoshop for printing and some for displaying on the Web - there are different profiles and adjustments for each case.

The unedited photographs are organized on my HD in directories by date (year-month-day) and then name of the event or place. This scheme proved to be very convenient for finding old photographs. All the photographs are stored on backup DVDs as well (I really should make one more set of backup to store it some place else).

BTW, my travel gallery is at http://www.pbase.com/olegis/places , please drop by and have a look :-)

Because I love to play with Mac, I get my photos put onto CD's, download 'em into iPhoto, take them into iMovie, and make a DVD complete with transitions, titles, and music. Projected on screen (DVD projector) it beats the slide shows six ways to Sunday, at least as far as my students are concerned.
(I haven't done photo albums since I started teaching, as I use my trip pix mostly in school.)

I also do some webshot storage, like this:
http://community.webshots.com/user/missalg

Such great photographers we have here on this site. All this info is great.

I've had a chance to look at bobthenavigator's photos, and I've been slowly reading mr_go's trip reports on their family website. I'll look at some of these other ones tomorrow.

:)

Topping...
I'm an idiot when it comes to storing photos, but if I decide to learn, I'll have to find this thread again! :-)

amp- don't feel bad, that's why my rubberband method was invented... for the scrapbook challenged among us.

I'm still very low-tech and non-digital. Bought a set of dressers at IKEA. Drawer 1 = Greece. Drawer 2 =Ireland. Drawer 3 = Scotland. Drawer 4 = Germany. Not to mention the 4 trips a year to Grand Cayman, and a trip each of the last 2 to Belize!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amy: I am going to try to do what you are already doing with iMovie. The digital camera I recently bought takes great movies in low light, so I hope to take a bunch of shots and then string them together into a story of the trip. Any suggestions or tips on how you use iMovie and your camera?

Hi, Tinling!

I actually use a Nikon SLR and take still photos which are then put onto photo CD (I don't get the prints, just CD's.) I load them from there into the eMac and then add the titles, special effects, and transitions; the music generally comes last for me, as the timing can change, of course. Usually I load the still photos for about an 8.5 second speed, which ends up being 4-5 seconds of each photo taking the transitions into account. (I realize this doesn't help much for movies, but if anyone is doing stills, this is what 's worked for me ;) ) My brother has done the movies, and the editing has been easy for him. (hint to everybody: Edit, edit, edit!!!)

I find iMovie (and all of the Mac stuff) to be extremely simple and intuitive to use; of course, don't forget, even with a Mac, to keep saving your work. (Oh, do I know whereof I speak. Two hours of work on the Peruvian Amazon...)

To me the hugest advantage of this is that I can work on it for ten minutes or two hours, whatever time I have, and not have to put anything away--and not have to store anything more than a DVD case. The photos are stored on the computer in iPhoto library and backed up as well, as are the DVD finished projects.

Happy Mac-ing!!

I started keeping travel journals with photographs about ten years ago due to my terrible memory and because it was easy to direct people to my website when they asked about my trip. If they are really interested, they will look online; otherwise, they were probably just trying to be polite.

As I sell my photographs, it has become important to back them up. In addition to keeping them on my hard drive, I save to CD, and back up to an external hard drive. My website is www.travelswithdiane.com. (I don't sell my photos on my website.) At the bottom of the page is a link to my journals. Off the topic, I had a booth at a Greek Festival this past weekend and it was great fun.

As far as naming my files, I keep the original digital camera number and add a word or two. And, for me, it's very important to add the year. I break the photos into files for ease of locating.

Here's what I do.
I travel with an Olympus film camera, a rugged but high-quality point-and-shoot, and 1 or 2 digital cameras which are Nikons. I shoot digital with crazy abandon, memory is cheap and plentiful. I'm a little more conservative with the film shots. Once I am back home I immediately send the film off for processing, glossy 4x6, and order the CD with the film scans on it. While that is happening I transfer the digital shots to the PC, back them all up on CDROM, then start making decisions as to which ones will be printed. I try to do as little touch up as possible. Next, I stock up on print cartridges and 4x6 premium photo paper for my Epson photo printer. Then, I spend an entire weekend and maybe 5 evenings printing at home. Cost works out to a smidge more than processing at the kiosk. I put my wife in charge of any uploading to the website. I don't like looking at photos on a screen, it simply doesn't do them justice. You lose so much color depth, detail and warmth on a standard monitor. Laptop screens are even worse for viewing.
Once everything is printed and in chronological order, its time to load the albums. I like the medium sized albums that you slide the photos inside the clear plastic, displaying 4 photos per page flip. There is also a space between photos to insert a paper caption label, which I do for every photo. Our last trip (to Iceland) netted us 400 *good* shots which loads 2 albums pretty full.
I am almost to the point of ditching the film camera altogether, maybe get a digital waterproof camera to go along with the main battle camera.
So, all this technology and bandwidth at our disposal and I still wind up with the same net result that my grandpa had; paper photos in cardboard albums. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The cleverest thing I do is shoot panoramas. ArcSoft has a panorama program called Panorama Maker and it works way better than any of the 4 other stitching programs I have tried. Once printed on 8" x 24" paper, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

I have a big shoe box on my closet shelf and they are all in there. LOL

As soon as I get home from any vacation, I download all my pics, choose the best ones, have them put on a CD (this replaces keeping negatives around) then print off the best ones from my CD and make a lovely scrapbook. If I don't do all this IMMEDIATELY when I get home, it just won't get done! I usually have to take an extra couple of days off work when I get home, just to take care of this task----which I enjoy!

Was there another thread comparing various photo-sharing sites? I'm looking ofr it to send to someone.

I do not recommend storing your photos on an independant web site. If you do, always keeps copies of the files yourself.

3-4 years ago, the biggest and best site went out of business overnight. No warning or anything. People lost all their files.

Also, if you changes e-mail address and fail to notify them, you will not get the renewl notice and they will delete the files.

Found this thread as I've been looking for choices to get my photos on a web site.

Wanted to say to Bob the Nav - I loved your Sicily photos. Beautiful and brought back great memories. Loved the Etna photos.

Thanks for sharing. SusanEva

Mille grazie !
You should know that my wife is named Susan---see her in the pics---and her mother was Eva. Interesting name to us.

Hello Bob,

I did see the lovely Mrs. Navigator in a few photos. Nice coincidence, my middle name comes from my grandmother.

I'm thinking that "Worldisround" might be the best place for me to put photos with short trip reports. I'm OK with computers, but not a whiz and feel a little intimidated to learn html to put my own web pages together.

How hard was it to get up to speed on that site? Are you pretty satisfied?

Thanks, SusanEva

I too am not a whiz but have been happy with that site. The only bad part is you can only upload 6 pics at a time. It does take time. Others swear by Pbase.com I suggest you edit down to only your best pics--I had more than 200 for Sicily but only used about 35. Ask yourself what others may want to see.

Thanks Bob. I agree about being selective. When I download my digitals, I keep them in an "original" file. They I edit, crop and delete to a "best of trip" file. (That way I always have the originals if I decide I cropped to much, etc.) I learned from showing my family that they really didn't want to see seven views of the church I really liked! For a web site, I was thinking about the "best of the best" and your ratio sounds about right.

Hey, this is great.

Just got back from vacation and have 720 photos! My two travelling companions have about 600 each!!! That's close to 2000 photos! Not to mention the little 5 second movies we took on our cameras.

We need to figure out how to make our photos and movies available to friends and family who want copies of their own. Plus, we met people on our trip who want copies.

What the heck should we do!!!! We don't want people to have to pay for prints. We would like them to be able to download jpeg's that they can photoshop for themselves. Is that possible????
With close to 2000 photos? (I know, who has the patience! But we figure we can divide them into folders.)

We looked at Shutterfly and Kodak Easy Share plus RitzPx and those all require the person to pay for prints.

Any other ideas? I see someone has mentioned Snapfish. Is that a good one?

Snapfish requires $$ for prints also though and is basically the same as Kodak (which used to be ofoto). (I don't understand how you would ever get prints for free)?

I really like www.flickr.com for organizing and displaying my pics online.

I don't think I'm really understanding what you want to do. Wouldn't the easiest thing be to put the pictures on disks and then give those to your friends? Emailing the pics would definitely take awhile with that number.

Ya, I will make CD sets for the friends that I travelled with, that's not a problem.

For the (many) people I met along the way, I would like to put the ball in their court, so to speak. I have all their emails so I can just do a mass email directing them to whatever service I decide to use.
I just didnt want them to pay too much. ( : And, I wanted the service to be easy to use with good quality prints.

Also, many of the people we met along the way live in other countries (Australia, Holland, e.g.). I am trying to figure out if they can order and have prints sent without any problems. Anyone know?

I think Shutterfly works internationally. I don't know if Snapfish or the others do. Anyone?

Thanks.

www.pbase.com not only works worldwide, but lots of outstanding photographers from all over use it. You can do a "search" to find photos of things such as "Iceland," "cassowary," "Puffin," "breadfruit..." Lots of out of the norm subjects as well as run of the mill.

Fantastic array of travel photographs. Check it out. PS, I do not work for them. I just pay them to park my photos.

PS.
Nix the rubberbands around the photos. They melt and stick to the photos. Also a "band of photos" may meld together over a decade or two.

I was totally dismade to find family photos had turned a muddy brown and clumped together because they hadn't been stored correctly in the 1980's.

If you listen to scrapbookers (I'm not one) you'll hear the only way to store photos is on special papers, non-acid, I believe.

ttt--in the last ten months we have actually taken and downloaded so many pictures to our computer that it is notably slower.

When I finally get around to fixing this, I'm sure I will need the insight (or entertainment) here!

Thanks! --MP :)

I try to get my pictures into a scrapbook as soon as possible. I find that scrapbooks are much more enjoyable to look at than just a bunch of pictures, and they are great keepsakes of our trips. My kids love helping me design the pages and write descriptions.

I have my own web site and wrote the selection/display program my self.

Unfortunately I upload more and more photos with each successive trip.

Our last trip to Prague, Budapest, Brugge and Amsterdam was the first that I went digital. Rather than fewer photos I had many more.

I took over 600 in two weeks and got fed up with filtering out at about 125.

My web site is:

www.travelwalks.com

All trips before 2006 are cheap scans of 4x6 photos and the quality is definitely nowhere near as good as the last trip.

My wife takes a quick look at all the photos and picks which she wants for an album to show. What's in her album and what's on the web site may not be the same.

I try to tell the story. She leans more towards photos that include us.

I back up the photos to DVD and store them off-site with other irreplacable valuables.

I use a photo website, called photosite. I lived abroad (in Asia) for a year and found it was the easiest way for my friends and family to check in when they wanted to see what new pictures I posted. It was also so much easier than emailing them and clogging everyone's emails. I continue to use it now that I am back home, since I travel often.

I usually print some of my favourites and blow them up and frame them for my own little art gallery at home. Why buy art, when you can showcase the world, right in your own living room.

Recently i've been using both snapfish and yahoo photo sites. I like the yahoo since that's my normal email account, but I like snapfish for the low cost prints, frequent special offers (recently 9c/print sale), etc.