[bbales]

I freely admit my methodology of organizing digital photos stinks. I used to scan large numbers of photos (made a family calendar every year, using photos from that year), and simply organized them by year. That was easy -- plus they were already named, because obviously I named them as I scanned them.

But starting 2 years ago, when we got a digital camera, things began getting messy. It's a Canon, so the camera came with image browser. (I promptly quit using that, because I upgraded to OSX a few months later, and just used image capture and threw everything in one folder. Then iphoto came along, but I didn't really like that. I like to tweak photos and improve them with Photoshop, and somehow that didn't/doesn't seem to work well with Iphoto -- can never tell which photo (improved or original) was in the library.

I reinstalled image capture at one point and so now I have some photos in some places, some also in iphoto and some in Image Capture. So I need to figure out a cohesive strategy, obviously.

Anyone using iphoto and photoshop together -- and successfully? I'm using iphoto 4 now, but haven't really played around with it yet. Can I import into Iphoto, (and by the way, it drives me crazy that Iphoto won't let me just download SOME photos off a camera -- or at least it didn't used to), improve with photoshop and have the improved one be the one I see and use? What are other people's methods for organizing photos?

[Old Toad]

I use iView MediaPro. I have a card reader to upload from the memory stick and place each batch into a folder that's dated and has a brief description, 03/28/04-Ski trip. Then that folder goes into the 2004 folder. I import them into iView and it handles them in several ways. There's a folder window that shows you all of the folders that contain the images in the catalog. It also automatically catalogs the images by capture date or creation date in the case of scanned images. You can create keywords and categories and drag images to them for assignment. It will do everything that iPhoto does except create books and seamlessly interface with the other iApps. I just drag photos from the iView thumbnail window into iDVD or iMovie. Works like a champ. I use both applications but iView is my primary one. You can download a demo here: http://www.lightboxsoftware.com/.

Hope this has been of some help. Good luck.