Hi Ivan,
This question is almost a shill! An excuse for us to start on a direction we want to go anyway.
So I'll do that, assuming no knowledge if I may.
Given: Hard disks with many disorganized folders with images of various importance, purpose, friends, family, needed for an art project, potential for stock photography, a project you have yet to deliver etc.
Needed:
1 spare hard drive with capacity for your files, get to this later. This is for backup.
1 Copy of a cataloging software. We'll choose iview Media Pro. So good that Microsoft ate it!
Open iview and go to preferences and set the program to auto save every 2-10 minutes as you wish so that if your computer crashes, iview can go from where you left off.
Set the preferences so that it uses the built in jpgs in RAW fiels if present. You can change that later.
Drag in all your folders. Don't do all at once if your computer doesnt have a lot of RAM or space or tends to crash.
Now go to the symbol for the categories under Organize and open the drop down box to choose the categories under which your pics will be classified.
Check the fields you want. A start is Date, Copyright, Use rights, People, Events, File Type and so forth.
COLORS: Decide what color code could be useful to you.
As Peter Krogh suggest, I use
Red (key is 1 on the keyboard) to mark all files to be discarded. That's my first step.
Brown is Friends and Family
Cyan is for images I may use for an Art project or graphic composition
You, should read Peter Krogh's Book
The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management and the posts of
John Beardsworth (Also search for Beardsy) for their approaches to classifying things.
STARS *****
I use zero stars for images I'm keeping but are not great exposures/composition.
* worthy of considering for more work.
** 1 in 10 of the 1 stars images having extra potential.
*** exceptional from those that were **
**** you might find one of these every 1-3 months/years or maybe never!
***** forget it or die and be reinacarnated as Henry Bresson!
Dates Your pictures have embedded in them dates in a hiddenEXIF file which has the date, camera and details of the shot.
So when you dump in images, they are recognized and you just click on the Date category on the left of Organize list of fields and then it will open to the year and theat to the month and thence to the date with an empty circle and next to it the number of posts for that day.
Just click on the circle, it will fill in and voila, all the posts of htat day will be chosen.
Now you can select those which were one event.
Go to the + sign at the top of the list offields and click on it and from the drop down menu choose Event and then Enter for example Bloomingdales Fashion Show_New York_01_27_06" or "Aunt Annie's Wedding" using names that are obvious to youj.
Any future pictures, say that you processed and lost the EXIF data but you spot, later on, simply highlight and drag to that date and also to that event to remake that data field. That way you get the orphans!
Here's an example of a recent shoot of mine with Brian Lowe.
Now you can save the catalog:
Save as
2006_01_25 LA Art Show and put it in a place you will find such as a folder named
iView Catalogs
Are we done?
Absolutely not!
We forgot that we need to make sure that all the new classifications are embedded with the files. Why? If the files are put into another compatable filing software, the tags will be there for the new program to recognize and so sort your files for you.
This is the Synchorinize function and now all the hard work is embedded in the original files.
Finished? Nope!
Two more things.
1. Save the catalog and then save another copy as backup!
2. Get prepared to deal with other items we can discuss later, but you can search OPF for existing and ongoing discussions.
a.
Keywords
b.
safeguard your files from the outset by having
a backup system.
c.
Rename files so your naming system is logical to you.
d.
Bulk move your files to another drive
e.
Process Files in say CS2, Lightroom, Aperture, Lightzone or some other software.
This is a fair start. You could easily take a number of other routes but this will work and is pretty robust.
Good luck,
Asher