OT - Sorting Photos

Jim H wrote on 10/25/2006, 9:08 PM

I've got a couple of thousand photos I need to go through and select the best ones for a video montage. Has anyone had any experience with a free (anyone notice a trend in my software requests?) software utility that allows simple viewing at a reasonable size and the ability to drag off select photos into another folder?
My current approach is to use ACDSee to view and then rename the ones I want with an x at the begining then sort the folders and move the x marked photos. I usually go through several iterations of this until I get the numbers down to an acceptable collection of the most appropriate images for my video. Quite time consuming.

Comments

Paul_Holmes wrote on 10/25/2006, 10:50 PM

I'd recommend Picassa. Just select the pictures you want, press hold, then when you have all the pictures in hold that you want to use, export to a new folder.

Picasa

darryl wrote on 10/25/2006, 11:39 PM

I love (free) Irfanview. You can designate 10 different folders in the move or copy dialogue... press F8 and then the number of the folder you want, and it's copied to a new location. This also works in thumbnail mode... you select your pictures, press F8 and the folder location, and they're copied.
http://www.irfanview.com/

darryl

Grazie wrote on 10/25/2006, 11:56 PM

I love Picasa. Very intuitive. But I have to say this - MEDIA MANAGER!

As you are going to eventually be using then in Vegas, why not NOW setup a Photo Library and go from there? And then straight into for your workflow? Audition them in MM and group as per what you want. This ways you are at the Coal-Face working, auditioning and setting many different ways of sorting and grouping.

And as you are getting audioti9on clips you can also be be auditioning music, using CineScore ( if you have it) garnering real-time ideas and then IMMEADIATLEY pursuing them? Seems a no-brainer to me.

But you just KNEW I was gonna say this!

TorS wrote on 10/26/2006, 12:17 AM

Irfanview is good and does not eat up your machine's resources. And it is free.

ACDSee has a more streamlined unser interface but crashes a lot. I only use it because of its elegant renaming capabilities. And it is not free.

Picasa looks good on paper (have not tried it) but I'm a little put off because it seems to assume I will want it to work with ALL my photos. I certainly will not.

Media Manager? Never thought about that as a photo manager. Interesting.
Tor

Al S wrote on 10/26/2006, 2:08 PM

I found FastStone Image Viewer to be very handy. It's a decent browser, supports RAW files, allows me to tag / move files, and a very decent quick/fast editor if I want to resize to a standard format to post out on the web.

Oh yeah - it's free.

Once you run it, and navigate to a folder of photos, the usual dbl click will display a photo full screen. Moving the cursor to the edge (top, bottom, left, right) of the screen will bring up different options....

www.faststone.org

Al

Former user wrote on 10/26/2006, 2:14 PM

Irfanview has my vote.

Dave T2

Jim H wrote on 10/26/2006, 5:17 PM

Thanks all. I think I'll give inranview a whirl due to the copy feature described above...would this also MOVE instead of copy? Mmmm we shall see. The other options seem to take as many keystrokes as my current ASDSee route.

Dan Sherman wrote on 10/26/2006, 6:02 PM

Using, (learning) Media Manager is time better spent than learning Irfanview. MM may even be easier juding by the Irfanview interface.

Jim H wrote on 10/26/2006, 9:20 PM

The one stipulation that I didn't make clear is that I need them in the same dir so that I can grab them all using Still Motion. So it's a moving them into a folder problem...I'm thinking of an interface that would show me the picture at a good size and let me drag it across the screen to a folder or folders of my choosing.

Grazie wrote on 10/26/2006, 9:39 PM

"The one stipulation that I didn't make clear is that I need them in the same dir so that I can grab them all using Still Motion." Media Manager doesn't care where you have them. One folder OR many folders. So yes MM is Folder Agnostic too! remember MM makes REPORTS on searches. It is these searches that become the "shelves" in the Libraries. Not the actual Events.

"So it's a moving them into a folder problem..." As MM is Folder Agnostic, it donl;t care where you got 'em! ! ! Now, if you/I/us want to then CATERGORIZE these searches then make TAGS for the type of picture you want categorized. It is the TAGS that become the actual groupings. It is reaeeeally easy peasy! Honest!

"I'm thinking of an interface that would show me the picture at a good size and let me drag it across the screen to a folder or folders of my choosing" Using MM you don't even HAVE to do this!!! Searches make collections and those collections you then drag to TAGS or even separate the searches out.

AND Y'KNOW WHAT?!?!?! You is already working within Vegas too! How neat is that!!?

ushere wrote on 10/27/2006, 3:06 AM

what's the relative ram overheads of using mm vs infra vs acdcee?

i use ps's bridge (80mb), which i really like, but am willing to be swayed to mm, as long as it doesn't do what the original release(s) did, which was truly f--k up vv6, and use inordinate amounts of memory.

leslie

Grazie wrote on 10/27/2006, 3:43 AM

Leslie, you're right.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/27/2006, 3:49 AM

> The one stipulation that I didn't make clear is that I need them in the same dir so that I can grab them all using Still Motion.

No you don’t! Still Motion works with images from the Timeline, Files system or Media Bin.

I think Gazie’s idea of using the Media Manager with StillMotion is the best solution. You DO NOT have to move them into a single directory to use StillMotion. Here is the workflow:

In the Media Manager:
1. Make a new tag for your project.
2. Tag the images that you want to use with that tag.
3. When you are done select images, check the tag so that only media with that tag is displayed.

In Vegas:
1. Create a new media bin
2. Drag all of the images from the Media Manager into this new media bin
3. Start Still Motion

In Still Motion:
1. Select the media Bin tab from the Image Source
2. Select the name of the media bin you placed the pictures in
3. Adjust other settings and Press OK

This is the easiest workflow for sorting through hundreds or even thousands of images. Best of all, the images don’t need to be moved and you can easily go back and see what images you used for a project because they are tagged. Alternately, you can skip creating a media bin and just drag all of the images from the media manager right onto the timeline and run StillMotion from there.

~jr

Jim H wrote on 10/27/2006, 6:07 PM

Grazie, JRoy,
I think I get it... I just need to figure out MM which I've never tried... if this tagging process means typing a key word in a field for each photo (like project name) then I have that many keystrokes in the tagging process to deal with right? I should stop asking questions and just try it once..

Thaks for the feedback, especially the bin trick with SM... I never knew what that was for.