SiteWe Ask, You Answer: How Do You Organize Photos for Articles?
Renegade readers, I don’t know the answer to this question. Can you help? Please post your advice in the Comments section below. Thanks so much! [lf]
Melissa writes: How do you wrangle photos for your articles? I just sent off a holiday roundup that entailed getting photos (about 3-5 per) from about 15 sources. Captions, credits, the whole deal…. I can’t figure out how to keep all this info straight on a project of this size. Smaller projects are of course easier, but I seem to be doing a lot of roundups these days. I’ve thought about opening up a smugmug account just for this (I have a personal account already) but am not sure if editors care to do a little downloading on their own or not. Meanwhile, I forward photos ad infinitum.
I’m also doing a daily bridal blogging gig for CondeNast (yay!) and am receiving daily loads of photos from my sources to go with the blog — i choose from each lot, resize them, and send them up to my editor in NY, who picks them and publishes the entries. Even that seems a bit clunky.
And even though I do a good job of labeling my email for easy retrieval, I still find myself searching for photos.
Any ideas on how to keep the meta info (captions, credits) straight? Storing and sending?
5 Responses to “We Ask, You Answer: How Do You Organize Photos for Articles?”
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diane
Said this on October 8th, 2007 at 11:15am:I used to write for/edit a daily blog and had (remote) access to the blogging platform so could insert photos straight in. I think for daily stuff, that’s a really good idea! I’ve written for other blogs (eg The Guardian’s) where the subs do formatting stuff, and they don’t expect me to re-size or even choose pics at all.
All I can suggest is having lots of easily-retreivable, clearly named folders.
More tech-minded people than me can advise of Flikr, smugmug etc, and perhaps editors can say how they feel about downloading? - my feel is photo handling is usually a sub’s job in any case…?
Robert
Said this on October 8th, 2007 at 5:01pm:Flickr is one option - the tagging system makes organizing photos relatively painless.
Though if you’re looking for an offline solution, try Google’s free Picasa (picasa.google.com)which also makes organizing relatively painless. You can also e-mail photos straight from the program or even integrate it with a Flickr account.
jessiegirl
Said this on October 9th, 2007 at 7:23am:my writing hasn’t been published yet but i’m an artist and i’ve worked with projects that include massive numbers of images. here’s my advice.
Make sure you name you folders and images clearly. Use the underscore to replace spaces and all lowercase letters - this will make dropping them onto the web easier as these are standard web practices. for example: bridal_dress_annekline.jpg. this helps them sort into abc order and makes them easier to find.
For a specific article/project i’d have one project folder with lots of sub folders, one for each participant, which would be broken down to original picture files, then a folder for each picture from that participant which contains all the info related to that picture - picture/caption/permission. It seems like a lot of folders and possibly a lot of reorganization but if you start that way for next time it is easier to manage and find everything.
One last thing. Don’t be afraid to use the search feature. Find on the mac and the windows search feature work well. limit the search to the main project folder and then type in what you know is in the file name: bridal_dress; condtenast_blog_drink or whatever you name them.let the computer work it’s magic. If you prefer to search visually use the search feature to narrow down where you should look and then open Picassa which is a free download from google. Picassa has an awesome folder view that shows you thumbnails of the pictures.
hope this helps.
LindaFormichelli
Said this on October 9th, 2007 at 12:05pm:Thanks for your help with this reader question! I’m clueless in this area.
Linda
Ellen Rose
Said this on October 24th, 2007 at 10:57am:Okay, here is my uptake on this. (Uptake still a word?) My husband takes all the pictures I need for interviews I do for several magazines. They all take digital camera photos and will use attachments. I keep each interview’s pictures in a named folder in My Documents. I usually do a hard copy of a query before I send it out thru email and I note the number of the pictures which go with that query at the bottom of the page. I haven’t had any problems losing stuff but I do have a magazine that I write for “Just Labs” which will not take digital photos. What is with that?
I also make sure that the editors know that the pictures are mine and I get credit as well as the money for them. (My husband is very unselfish about this.)
Ellen