Create your own personal Keyword list

Look through your old photos. Thinks about the types of pictures you take. Think about how you would go about describing and finding photos you’ve taken. Start writing.

Think about Keyword Groups. Lightroom uses this principle. I have a group called Flowers and it includes keywords like rose, tulip, orchid, etc. Make one for family members. Another for Birds or Trees. Whatever suits your needs.

Short and sweet

Keep your keywords to no more than a 2 word phrase. Christmas party Ed’s house 2007 is a Caption. Break it down to party, Christmas, ed’s house. Don’t worry about the year since it’s in the EXIF data or the filename if you include it there.

Being able to search by the word Christmas means you’ll get all the photos from previous years. If you’re looking for that "great shot of the snowman we built a few years ago" you’ll find it.

Print your Keyword list and put it next to your computer if that helps. You don’t want to misspell anything, although some software pops up a list of currently used keyword as you type. (Thanks Lightroom for making my life easier)

Set up IPTC Templates

Both Bridge and Lightroom allow you to fill out a template with Copyright info, your website URL, captions, location data, and more. You can save these templates for future use. The next time you Import images you can call up one of your templates and apply that info to all the images. (If you include the year in your Copyright info be sure to change it at the beginning of the New Year)

Add Keywords Too

You can also add Keywords to all the Imported files. (PS Elements calls them Tags, and you have to add them after the import) Depending on what you’ve shot this may not be practical. If you have photos of birds, waterfalls, and flowers you’re better off assigning Keywords after the import is done. You can select a group of images and assign the same Keyword to them all.

Get in the habit of adding IPTC data and Keywords every time you Import a group of images. You’ll get the satisfaction of knowing it’s done and you’ll be able to easily find photos next month or next year.

2 Flavors of Metadata - EXIF and IPTC

EXIF data is all the camera specific info. White balance, exposure and flash info, date and time the shot was taken, and various camera settings like saturation and sharpening.

IPTC data is entered by you. Copyright info, captions, location and GPS data, and Keywords are among the many IPTC fields available.

Keywords give you Search Power

Every digital image can have multiple Keywords assigned to it. That beautiful photo of a rose in your backyard could contain all of these Keywords: flower, rose, red, morning, dew. Use single words or 2 word phrases at the most. You’re not writing a Caption, you’re assigning categories.

Most photo organizers let you search for multiple Keywords. Finding all your images containing "red", "rose" and "dew" is an easy task.

Organizing is Time Consuming

Granted, it will take some extra time to assign Keywords and other IPTC data. It will pay off in the long term. Being able to find images quickly makes the effort worthwhile.

My next post will discuss ways to quickly add IPTC data and Keywords. Stay tuned!

The creators of ScanCafe are out of California, but the facility and all the work is done in India. They use high end Nikon scanners, process the files with Digital ICE to correct for dust and scratches, and even manually color correct the images. And after all that, you actually get to go online to review your order and delete any images you don’t want.

How cheap are they?

• $.19 for negatives at 3000 dpi (that’s a 13 MP file from 35mm)
• $.24 for slides at 3000 dpi
• $.27 for photos at 600 dpi

If you want a higher resolution scan it’s available for a small upcharge. You can also have the final images stored as TIFF files instead of JPG and/or stored directly to a USB hard drive and have it shipped back to you. Turnaround time for any scan job is 4-6 weeks.

This sounds like a heck of a deal, especially if you have years of accumulated negatives and slides you’d like to digitize. It works out to under $7.00 to scan a 36 exposure roll of film and less than $5.00 to scan a slide page full of 20 slides.

Using this service is certainly better than paying $1000+ for a high end scanner and spending all the time to do the scans. Some jobs are just better to farm out to someone else.

Lightroom comes with a few standard Keyword sets and you can edit them, add new ones or delete them if they don’t apply to your type of photography. Each Keyword set allows 9 keywords in it. To add any keyword you can click on the word or use ALT-1 thru ALT-9. From the menu select Photo - Set Keyword to see which is which or just hold the ALT key for a bit and the numbers will appear next to the keyword.

If you do a lot of nature or landscape photography you could have sets like Flowers, Landscapes, Insects, Animals and so on. In each set you’d include keywords specific to those subjects. The Flowers group could include Rose, Hibiscus, Columbine, Cactus, Sunflower, Orchid etc. You see where I’m going.

Sit down and think through how you want to use the Keyword sets. Start with looking at your current Keyword Tags (left side of Library) and edit and revise from there. Have fun.

ViewNX is an upgrade from Nikon View that many of us have been using for years. ViewNX is for browsing and managing images, while Transfer (rather obvious name, huh?) is for moving files from your memory cards or camera to your hard drive. ViewNX can do basic editing and converting of NEF files and can show focus areas, histograms, and highlight and shadow info. They both support XMP/IPTC tagging, labels and rating stars, renaming upon download, and much more. The best feature of the new Transfer program is copying to two destinations, creating an immediate backup.

Nikon Transfer used to be part of the Nikon View program. It’s now a separate program and download. Nikon support does recommend that you use both programs together for a complete image download and management solution. The two Windows files are over 80 meg combined.

Go grab Nikon ViewNX Mac here and the Nikon ViewNX Windows version here.

You can get Nikon Transfer for Mac here and Nikon Transfer for Windows here. All downloads are from the NikonUSA site.

They have both soft and hard cover books in a few different sizes. Hard cover books are available in 5×5, 10×10 and 8.5×11 inches and start at $20 for 20 pages. Soft cover are available in 5.5×5.5, 8.5×8.5 and 7.75×10 and start at $15 for 12 pages. Additional pages are only 50 cents each.

Using the Book Wizard allows you to select a book style, add images, and the software builds your book. You can then go edit and change any page. Insert new pages, change the backgrounds or fade them, add more photos or resize them. It’s all under your control.

Without using the Wizard it’s a bit more work to layout your book, but having the ability to customize every bit of it is worth it.

1. Pick a page layout from the 30 or so available and add a background from the 80 or more patterns.
2. Add a text box or image anywhere on the page.
3. Rotate any image to any angle, or convert to B&W or Sepia.
4. Resize any image box, even the ones on the canned page templates.
5. Use any font installed on your system instead of being limited to certain fonts.

The MyPublisher software I talked about yesterday is quite nice, but not as flexible as the Mpix package. If you want total control over your photo book layout and design, give Mpix a shot.

Using the software is dead simple and you can change the style of each individual page if you want. The new Vintage style has that old time look and a variety of page formats, both with and without space for captions, for anywhere from 1-12 photos. Personally, I think anything more than 5 gets crowded. Use the 9 image version for a nice family tree page.

You can see some of the possibilities here. You could grab Grandma’s old album, scan all the photos and produce a nice photo book for family members. Wouldn’t that make a nice gift for Christmas? Or you could find all the old photos of your parents and make a nice anniversary album.

Be sure you visit the MyPublisher website. You’ll see a red button to get a Free Photobook. Click it and you’ll get an email with a special code to get a second book for free. What a deal.

If you haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet jump over to the signup form here. You’ll get a free mini report on the Top 10 Tips for Better Digital Pictures just for signing up and access to all the past issues.

The other part of the equation is software. Readers of this blog know I am a fan of Picasa 2 from Google. It’s a great freebie and version 2.7 includes backing up to CD or DVD. The coolest thing is that it remembers which files have not been backed up, so it’s easier to stay current.

That’s where most people stumble. It takes discipline to make sure you do regular and consistent backups. That’s why I suggest an external hard drive as your backup system. Most of them come with software to do the backups for you. Set a schedule in the software and tell it what folders to backup and you’re all set. Just be sure to verify that your scheduled items works.

You’ll never have to worry about backups again once you have a good system in place.

After some informal tests on my D70 NEF files I found the following:

1. Converted files showed about a 10% space saving in the DNG format
2. All metadata was preserved, including items added/changed in Lightroom. (used Lightroom for DNG conversions)
3. Lightroom gives options for changing filenames and whether or not to embed the original RAW file
4. Embedded RAW files in the DNG doubled the file size
5. Extracting the original RAW files was simple and quick
6. Extracted RAW files were easily read in Nikon View, all metadata intact
7. Same results using Olympus ORF files (from C5050), but the resulting DNG files were 15-20% smaller than the originals

Digital photographers will continue to struggle with compatibility issues every time a camera manufacturer puts out a new camera and new file format. Provided Adobe keeps it’s promise and continues to support DNG then we do have a standard file format that works across the board. You’ll have to decide for yourself as to whether this is the right solution for your image storage.