[kman42]

I'm curious what others use for organizing large numbers of photos in iPhoto. I am going back and scanning all of our old pictures and would like to organize them appropriately now so I can use them for future projects.

What keywords do you use? Do you just use broad organizing keywords like Vacation and Holidays or do you include people's names?

Do you put names of people in the title of each photo or do you use the Comments field?

[jasong]

First off, Keyword Assistant is your friend.

I use both methods you mention. While tagging photos with everyones name can be tedious (although Keyword Assistant makes it much, much easier), it is very rewarding to create a slideshow with all the pictures of my Dad, without any effort. I also tag with both generic and specific event tags, so a picture of my wife and I from our vacation this past summer to Yosemite will be tagged with: Jason, Sarah, Vacation, Yosemite. This way I can easily see all my vacation photos, all my photos from Yosemite, all my photos of my wife, and (when I'm feeling particularly narcissistic, photos of me). It sounds like a lot of work, but since you can apply tags to multiple photos at once, simple tags like vacation and Yosemite, are one step processes. Tagging with the names of people is made simpler by Keyword Assistant as you start typing the name of the person, and it looks them up in your Address Book, simplifying the process (unless all your pictures are of people who aren't in your address book).

The only drawback to this approach is that the scrolling mechanism for Keywords in iPhoto is so bad it defies words, so when you end up with a million keywords, scrolling through the list is a total PITA. But I think the benefits far outweigh this occasional annoyance.

As for titles, I use that as a name, such as "Jason and Sarah at Upper Falls". It may contain redundant information with the keywords, but that doesn't hurt anything. I see the main purpose of the title as a friendly name for the photo when I display it on the web. Comments, I use like our parents used the back of the photo, I describe what's happening or add some detail on why I took the photo "Sarah asked me to take this picture because the silhouette of the trees in the setting sun reminded her of her dog."

Have fun with all of this, getting all the photos in is a lot of work, but so worth it. iPhoto has really given new life to my photos and added to our enjoyment of them.

[kman42]

Thanks for the comments. Most helpful. It took me most of the day yesterday to scan in one photo album of 300 pictures. 1995-1996 done. Only five years to go. Ouch. But as you say, I think it will be worth it. I was starting to feel as though my life began in 2001 when I received my first digital camera. Looking through the old photos in the process of scanning them has been a blast.

I think your description of scrolling through Keywords is what has me on the fence for organizing. I don't know if I want to include every person I have ever taken a picture of in the keywords or just close friends and family and then relegate everyone else to the comments section. Furthering your analogy, my parents always wrote the names of every person on the back of the photo in the order they appear from left to right. This has helped tremendously in remembering old friends/acquaintences who were present at weddings of a cousin, etc. These are relations that to me would seem overkill to make a keyword out of so I am leaning toward keywords for close friends/family and then putting EVERYONE'S name in the comments field. This decision is being made easier since I figured out that smart albums can find pics based on comments. I haven't started tagging pics yet, so I am still weighing the pros and cons.

kman

[jasong]

Yeah, comments can make your life easier when you have pics with a lot of people in them. I shouldn't have made it sound like I have a keyword for each individual I have a photo of, just the people who A) happen to be in my address book, B) appear in a number of photos, and C) mean enough to me that I want to quickly find the photo.

What format and what resolution are you scanning in? Are you scanning photos or negatives? I am kicking myself as I threw out negatives from my trip to Israel just 3 years ago after holding on to them for 5 years. I wish I had the negatives to scan from instead of the prints. Oh well. I started off scanning in TIF format at a high resolution, but I am scaling back to jpg at 300 DPI. That gives me acceptable results (I've never owned an amazing camera, so it's not like I had amazing quality shots) at an acceptable files size, and it scans fairly quickly. School has forced me to put the whole project on hold, but I hope to finish this winter.

[quietjim]

if you take the time to do the keywords and comments though, it becomes so easy to extract groups of photos using the Smart Folders mechanism.

[kman42]

I have been scanning jpgs at 600dpi. I started at 300dpi, but I wasn't overly impressed with the quality. 600dpi doesn't take up that much disk space on a 250gig drive, so I just decided to go for it. Most of our pics are from point-and-shoot 35mm cameras, so the prints aren't of the highest quality, just the memories.

kman