Selecting Digital Camera Images: How do you?

[negg]

Hi XnView Lovers

I've been using XnView as long as I can think, and it works pretty good. There is only one thing that still feels a little "rough": my workflow when selecting digital camera images. So I would like to hear from other experienced users what workflow they use. One never stops learning!

• - I download the images from my cam to a temporary folder

• - I open that folder in XnViews Thumbnail/Preview mode and start looking through the images to see which ones are good, rotating where necessary. If I cannot see enough in preview I temporarily switch to fullscreen.

• - Now if I have a series of images of the same subject I check each one and delete the bad ones until I have my favorite. This is the most annoying part, because I have to "remember" which were the good ones and compare them to others. I would like to have a solution to temporarily "mark" the images I like, so I can easily compare them. I tried to use comment or IPTC Categories as a workaround, but that is way too complicated. Also I tried "description" Ctrl-D but there is no way to see which are "marked" that way in the thumbnail list.

• - When I selected my favorites I delete the other images of the series

• - Finally, when all images are checked, I add IPTC keywords and descriptions. This is still too much mouse clicking in XnView, and I (and other users) already proposed to Pierre how this could be done better...hoping so much that this will happen soon.

• - Even more finally I batch rename the images to carry the date in the filename and move them to my image storage harddrive in a "year" folder (2006).

So to make it short:

• - How do you select your favorite images from series of photographs?

• - How do you IPCT-tag your images?

Thanks so much for sharing you experience!
Martin

[Drahken]

1) I use view mode not browser mode, and I just go through the pics one by one (using the scrollwheel to go to the next image), and just make a mental note of the ones I like/don't like. (If you can't decide between 2 pics, you can always load them in seperate tabs and switch back&forth to compare.)
2) I don't. I never add any non-image information, and I frequently remove such info. It adds to the filesize (the text doesn't add much, but I like to squeeze every byte I can out of it, and the damned embedded thumbnails inflate the filesize way too much), and I simply have no use for it. I can tell all I need to know about a pic by simply looking at the content of it.

[negg]

1) I use view mode [...] make a mental note of the ones I like/don't like.

I often use the sequence shoot mode of my cam, resulting in sometimes 20 or 30 images of one subject (especially with fast moving targets like animals or children Making a mental note with such a bunch of images all looking nearly the same seems a little difficult to me...you don't write filenames or numbers down, or something like that?

2) I don't. I never add any non-image information, and I frequently remove such info. It adds to the filesize (the text doesn't add much, but I like to squeeze every byte I can out of it, and the damned embedded thumbnails inflate the filesize way too much), and I simply have no use for it. I can tell all I need to know about a pic by simply looking at the content of it.

I already thought you'd say so from your other posts in this forum...but I still can't imagine how you find that certain image "where Person X was standing near Person Y on...humm...whose wedding was it?" in your several-thousands-image-collection...do you look through all of the images really?

I still prefer to launch a search for IPTC-keywords and find that image in the blink of an eye, because the 10 bytes more don't really matter on my 300GB hard drive but thats just my way to see it I guess.

But thanks for sharing your thoughts anyway!

[Drahken]

I often use the sequence shoot mode of my cam, resulting in sometimes 20 or 30 images of one subject

Well... My camera doesn't have a sequence shoot mode, so I never have more than 4~5 of a particular shot to sort through. If you're dealing with 20~30, remembering would be much harder. What about simply deleting non-possibilities as you find them in order to get them out of the way? (ie, You decide that image #2 is better than image #1, therefore even if #3 is better than #2, there's still no way you'll choose #1, so you might as well delete it now.)

...but I still can't imagine how you find that certain image "where Person X was standing near Person Y on...humm...whose wedding was it?" in your several-thousands-image-collection...do you look through all of the images really?

I either rename the images to wedding_001, wedding_002 or johns_wedding_001, johns_wedding_002, etc and/or dump them into folders named wedding_pics, johns_wedding_pics, etc.
The few bytes that the ICTP adds aren't really a consideration, but I'm almost compulsive about trimming filesizes. Mainly, I just don't think it's worth the effort to add in ICTP/EXIF data (and since I also don't think it's worth the effort of resetting the clock/calender in my camaera every time I change the batteries, the data it includes in the pics is wrong and therefore useless, so there's no point in keeping it).