Orgadisnization

This morning I am hard at work closing browser windows. I have so many windows and tabs open—there must be more than five hundred—that it's slowing down my browser and/or my computer, and making it difficult to find things. I have more than 5,000 bookmarks already and no time to sort them all and jettison the ones I no longer need or that no longer work, but I'm adding the URLs I need to keep to two new categories of bookmark. The impetus this morning: I started a new post on a browser page and can no longer find it. It's lost. I don't think it's gone; I just don't know what window it's in or where the tab is.

It's hell being disorganized. Despite sporadic attempts at bringing things under control, I'm naturally not very well organized. It's a mental aptitude and I don't have it. My best defense has always been to limit complexity, and limit the number of possessions I have to keep track of. I haven't done very well with that.

This is dated now, because it concerns film negatives and proof sheets, but here's my longtime pet theory on "photo asset management": At first, we don't have much work. We've only shot a few dozen or a hundred or three hundred rolls of film, and it's reasonably easy to find things simply by looking for them. This stack? That box? Ah, here they are. No prob.

That's the attitude we start out with. A comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system? Why? What's the need? Seems like overkill.

...Until it doesn't. One day follows the next, one month the next, the year ends and a new one starts; the years go by. We keep taking pictures. Negatives or slides pile up; we think, hmm, I should organize that lot soon. But there's more immediate work insisting on being done, and the organization tasks keep getting shoved to the back burner. 

I did attempt to catch up once...in 1987. I took the whole Winter and organized all my rolls of negatives into PrintFile folders and made fiber-base (the term of art was not "fiber-based" but "fiber base") contact sheets, and put them in sequence in archival binders with slipcases (some of you remember Light Impressions). It was an enormous amount of labor. And it was expensive. I never did it again.

Sooner or later, it's too late. We've gotten into sloppy habits, we have piles of prints and negatives and contacts of all manner of description in every stage of completion and it's all over everywhere and it's overwhelming. It's now too late to start that comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system we were certain at first we didn't need.

And everybody's like that. Two stories: in the early '90s I was waiting to talk to a photo gallerist at the AIPAD Show in New York City. She was on the phone; clearly some kind of crisis. She kept giving me signals that said she knew I was waiting for her and implied that she would try to get to me. At a pause in the conversation, she covered the mouthpiece of the landline phone and explained: the Angels are missing!

She was on the phone with Salgado in Brazil. She had orders for the Angel picture—real title, "Primeira comunhão em Juazeiro do Norte, Brasil, 1981" (First Communion in Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil, 1981)—that had been on the cover of the then-recent bestselling photobook An Uncertain Grace...and Sebastião couldn't find the negative.

As far as my digital asset management is concerned, you really don't want to know. As an indicator, I'll just mention that my first three years of digital shooting—2003–2006, with an Olympus C3040z—is no longer extant. I lost it all somehow, between now and then, in some data transfer or another or on one failed hard drive or another. No idea, really. I do remember some of the pictures. My son's first day of second grade; good times with my friends at Spring Lake. But it's all gone.

Second story: Arnold Crane was visiting Walker Evans in Connecticut to photograph him. Evans, always a natty dresser even in his youth when he was poor as the proverbial church mouse, was very neatly turned out, according to Arnold, and his entire house was clean as a whistle and neat as a pin—the objects on tables were as arranged, Arnold said, as exquisitely and artfully as a Japanese rock garden. But then Walker took Arnold to see his archives, and led him to an office room that was considerably messier. There, filling the far corner of the room, were the archives of the great Walker Evans—in heaps and jumbles of prints and negative sleeves and papers and boxes! Not even the habitually fastidious Walker Evans kept his prints and negs in order. Arnold showed me the photo of it. Made me laugh.

And so it goes. Evans died in 1975, and the Walker Evans archive is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where presumably it is organized in a suitably orderly fashion. And now I'll get back to work attempting to close my open tabs and browser windows, and finish my tea.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Holmes: "I haven't dug through my negatives for quite a long time now, but I do try to maintain good organization habits with my digital images. I firmly believe that if you don't keyword an image as soon as you import it, you might as well throw it away. Immediately after importing a day's images into Capture One, I add keywords to every single image. If there's an image I don't feel like keywording, I move it to the trash. And I try to add every conceivable keyword I can think of. I might keyword an image 'ford mustang' but that won't help if someday I search for '1968' 'green' and 'car.' (And 'steve mcqueen.') (I also have a personal rule to keyword everything in lower case. Otherwise I end up having to search for both 'Mustang' and 'mustang.')

"And that leads to my highly recommended method for organizing images: create Smart Folders, or Smart Collections, or Smart Albums or whatever your asset manager calls them for every possible project or theme. Smart collections are wonderful because they allow you to organize a single image into multiple collections. You can view a smart collection through any additional filter, and if you ever need to move your image library to a new asset managing applications, all you need to do is create the same smart collections, because every asset manager transfers keywords. And all the asset managers I'm familiar with allow you to put smart collections into folders, for even more organization.

"That's it. Good keywords will allow you to find any image you ever took. And smart albums let you organize groups of images by project, person name, country, vacation, whatever."

Keith B.: "That is why I tell people that I used iPhoto and now Photos. The automatic organization tools are good enough for me, so that it fits my lazy workflow, just throw them in and be done with it. I have started to add some keywords and places, but just enough to help other people find things."

John Camp: "It is apparently widely agreed that messy desks—what you essentially have—is a sign of genius. I suspect you knew that, but were too modest to mention it. Some time back in the 'aughts, I went to Iraq and flew with an air assault battalion. The images, from a Nikon D3, are carefully filed in a stand-alone Lightroom program. I can't find the computer."

Mike replies: Genius, no, but creative...I do think of ideas all the time. It's exhausting. I wish I could give it a rest, and concentrate calmly on one or two things and let everything else go.

BTW, you loaned me that D3 and its amazing but huge zoom for a post, do you remember? Thanks again for that.

Peter Wright (partial comment): "Your story about losing your new post in your browser fairly boggled my mind! That would seem to bring disorganization to new heights (or new depths). And I thought I was bad!"

Martin D: "Every missing file, every mislaid print: from now on I will think of Walker Evans, and in my grief for the missing picture, I will smile."

Mim: "This is very familiar. I've never been naturally organised—I lived in what looked like chaos, more or less kept up with things that people demanded of me (or that I promised them) and had a kind of mental map of where stuff was—a bit like your early 'photo asset management' except it covered my whole life. I could usually put my hand on something I needed reasonably quickly but did spend an hour (or two or three) per week digging for stuff.

"...Until I got a chronic illness. For two years I barely got out of bed and now I have about three or four useful hours per day with my mental energy taking just as hard a hit as my physical energy. Suddenly I couldn't track my whole life in my head anymore, and I couldn't spend an hour searching for something because that was a quarter of my day gone. For a while I worried that I was forever going to live in chaos and never find anything ever again. Then I (slowly) got neater. More organised. I'm still not great but most things have a place and most are actually in their place most of the time. My photos are on my computer neatly sorted by year and even backed up on my NAS and it's rare that I can't find the one I want in quick order.

"So it is possible to improve—but I doubt I ever would have done it if I hadn't been forced into it; it certainly doesn't come naturally."

Tom: "When I worked on a newspaper in the film era there was film everywhere. We printed from the whole 36-exposure length and afterwards it was loosely coiled and left on shelves and tables. We never got on top of filing unless it was a neg we wanted for our portfolios in which case we quietly, individually stored them properly. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what became of the tens of thousands of black-and-white prints we produced either. They simply seemed to disappear after their trip to the process camera and we never gave them a second thought. Such was the pace on a newspaper."

Rand Scott Adams: "Dang...I hate being the voice of reason. I used to have your disease. But it isn’t a mental aptitude. It’s pure discipline. For me, the pain of the consequences finally outweighed the pleasure of sloth. I once took a seminar on 'office efficiency' wherein the instructor recommended OHIO. 'Only Handle It Once.' You pick something up, you 'deal with it' before you put it down. Changed my life. Applies equally to literal and virtual 'things.'"

Comments

[Rob de Loe]

A good friend of mine had a Walker Evans-like thing going on too in his life. Were I to comment that one cupboard door in the kitchen seemed to be hanging lower than the others, the next time I saw that kitchen all of the doors would have been re-hung. But his office... If a scrap of paper or a book came into his possession, there it remained -- row upon row, shelf upon shelf. When he retired, it all went into a dumpster except one tiny box load that he carried out!

As to digital files, Adobe has me in near-permanent chains because I started with Lightroom and have come to rely on its "digital asset management" tools. There's really no switching at this stage. On the plus side, it's easy to find what I'm looking for...

[David saxe]

Well said. My photographic career can sometimes be explained by one word—loss. Over the years, due to an endless series of moves, I have lost all my negatives from 1986. a series of hospital portraits from 1984 (25% of the total), some slides from my honeymoon in 1986, and probably a few more that I have not yet noticed gone missing. These days it's a bit simpler. Everything now has been digitized and sits in my computer (or hard drive) now in front of me. Of the 100K photos that probably reside in my HD, I can find any one in a matter of minutes. It doesn't really matter much any more because when I aim gone, someone will eventually throw out/erase/loose my computer info and that will be it—Poof!

[John Abee]

Maybe I can help a little. You prob know this but there are several apps availbale to scan your links (favorites?) and identify duplicates and dead links. Start there. If you use Chrome (and you should) it's essentially baked in. For any other browser, google it and in 2-min you are well on your way.

[MikeR]

When we (wife & I) went digital, it didn't take long to realize that my organization methods of chronological shoe-boxes of envelopes from the camera store, and more carefully organized PrintFile sheets with accompanying contact sheets, were obsolete.

My next best thing, still in use today, is chronological folders, e.g., 2018, 2019, with sub-folders named by date, who, camera, and some content info. Recent example:
191009_MR_G85_Yosemite_Tenaya_Tuolumne_OlmsteadPt

That gets me close enough. LR asks too much of me, especially when the backlog has gotten enormous.

[c.d.embrey]

#When in doubt I throw it out. My system was FUBAR, it took me longer to find something using a bookmark than it did using a search engine. So I stopped using bookmarks. PDF copies of interesting sites are stored in a single folder, in alphabetical order, so that they are easy to find.

Words from the stored PDFs, may be copied into document form when needed (easy to copy-and-paste quotes). And then used for my writings. This works for me, Other's MMV.

BTW my iMac is using a hot-spot, provided by my iPhone, to access the internet. Not as fast as an ISP, but fast enough to do real research.

[Nick]

I am only marginally capable of maintaining some degree of order and cleanliness in real-world spaces, though I do better at work than at home, since some of the things I work with (e.g. certain chemicals) tend to cause problems (e.g. displeased safety personnel, pillars of radioactive flame) if improperly stored. My digital spaces, though, are in quite good shape, with well-organized and consistent storage systems that I have maintained for decades. Apparently, my laziness and my intolerance to disorder balance each other just barely to the side of the angels in the easy-to-manipulate digital world and just to the other side in the harder-to-manipulate physical one.

[Phil Stiles]

Wouldn't your browser history help you find the site?

[Keith]

I'm a total newbie compared to you and most of your readers. I started editing in Lightroom, and did nothing beyond editing and giving a star rating system.

Then I wanted to find a photo of a buddy. I went back and retroactively tried to apply keywords. I made several passes trying different strategies, and trying for consistency. I did searches for all edited photos with no keywords. It took days.

I still find photos that don't have keywords and should have. I now realize I've taken enough photos of something that I should create a new keyword, and go back to apply it to all the relevant photos. Yeah, I'll get right on that.

[Speed]

My father told me that to prevent clutter I should put "stuff" into boxes, label and date the boxes and discard any that aren't opened within six months.

When I cleaned up his estate I discarded years of dated and unopened boxes.

He implemented the first part of his plan. I took care of the second.

[Carl Weese]

Last year a friend and former workshop student had a gallery show of platinum prints, mainly miniatures—6x7cm contact prints. One of these was used for the show invitation card, and the gallery sold four of them. Except...the photographer couldn't find the negative. Anywhere. No way, no how.

Luckily she had made a high resolution (1200 ppi) scan of the print as the basis of the postcard. She sent me the file and I made a "ring around" set of digital files with slightly varied density and contrast and printed them out as negatives on single sheet of transparent media for her to cut apart and experiment with. It worked. Nobody ever found out. I don't expect this would have worked with a larger print because scans of platinum prints pick up too much paper texture, but we got away with it with the little gemlike 6x7.

[Michael J. Perini]

I am disorganized by nature , I feel your pain. But with Photography I have always managed to do broad enough organization so as not to be too onerous but still allows me to find what I need.
For all client work, I always used Aperture which made organization a snap.
My simple rules were ingest all files immediately after the shoot. And cards can only be in one of 3 places: in the camera, next to the computer in the “in process” box, or formatted and back in the wallet. It just became a habit.
My desk, not so much, workshop , no pictures please.
My wife keeps telling me that being disorganized is a lot more work than being organized . I know she is right , it’s just that......we’ll, you know.......

[Moose]

The solution is obvious, a "pre-need" donation of your archive. You won't get the Met, but all you need is a small museum or college program that can attract an intern to do the work. \;~)>

[hugh crawford]

Try the OneTab plugin. It closes all your tabs and makes a page of links to all of them and offers to create bookmarks from them. I use it in Chrome, but there are versions for Safari and Firefox.

It's great for trying to make sense of a few days researching say Duesenbergs, getting into the history of Textron-Lycoming, Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex, his trip on what became the Lincoln highway and the creation of the interstate system, which obviously leads to Jack Kerouac's on the road and how they both passed by my elementary school in the town with immigrants from the Azores, which logically necessitates a dive into the history of Pan American World Airways' flying boats, the fascinating lives of Juan Trippe and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, who was a movie producer whose last wife until his death was an actress in his last movie which was one of Dennis Hopper's first movies, and later Dennis Hopper directed "The Last Movie" which takes place in Kansas but is filmed in Peru and married one of it's actresses, Michelle Phillips of the the Mamas and the Papas, but for only eight days.

But I digress. Look into OneTab.

[John Merlin Williams]

Mike,

Not sure how to include an image, but here's a link to the XKCD site that demonstrates the universal nature of the photo-organization challenge:

https://xkcd.com/1832/

John Merlin Williams

[Richard]

I use photosupreme for organising. Even if - like me - you're too terminally lazy to add the tags so you can search your pics later at least you have them curated in one place, can go from there to the storage they are on, you can find them by timeline, if they have GPS data you can find by location, and it allows you to store them in a consistent folder structure (handy if the worst happened and your database got corrupted with no backup...)

On those browser tabs - yes I do that :-( But if you use Firefox a couple of tips that can help. First, use the down arrow at the right of the tool bar to display a list of tabs. Second, using % as a wildcard and typing in part of the URL, Firefox itself will find the tab for you and you can go straight to it!

[Peter Wright]

I am certain that the fate of your early digital files will be followed by at least 99.9% of all smart phone pictures today. They are basically ephemera: shoot, share, forget, lose, repeat.

Your story about losing your new post in your browser, fairly boggled my mind! That would seem to bring disorganization to new heights (or new depths). And I thought I was bad!

[Dave Levingston]

Thanks. You made me feel slightly better about my photo mess. I have little hope that a professional archivist is going to come along and save the day for me. But maybe I’ll start telling people I use the same system as Walker Evans.

[Mike Ferron]

Don't feel bad Mike. I am just as sloppy and disorganized as you with both film and digital.

I do this for fun and attempts at art. My creative release. Lets be real ok? My photos are not that important. I don't shoot historic events. Everything I do will be forgotten when I pass on. It's ok.

[hugh crawford]

"I started a new post on a browser page"
Stop doing that already.

[mark lacey]

Wow, more than ten tabs and a hundred bookmarks and my brain is fried!
That is seriously out of control.....

[Bill Tyler]

To find a page you were working in recently, try looking at your history. You should be able to find where you were with a little time spent going down the list. Since it's in reverse time order, a recent page will be near the top.

[Adrian Midgley]

A web browser feature of _find the open tab(s) containing this phrase_ might be useful. Care to suggest it to Mozilla for Firefox, giving this index case?

[DavidB]

I consider myself lucky that my first few years using film SLRs was while working for a research laboratory. During our field programs, we did a lot of photo documentation and were required to log each photograph taken (time, location, object, etc.) Then when the film slides came back they were delivered to our desks and we had to annotate each slide so that we could match it with the logs.

This discipline continued when I finally began taking my own photos. It has made it easy when scanning slides to know exactly where they are stored and what each slide contains.

Digital has made this a bit easier as I no longer need to log all the particulars of the image since it is embedded in the metadata. I save images in folders that are labeled YYYY_MMDD_{event} and then add keywords as necessary.

Still, there are times that I have been too clever about naming conventions and keywords and still have to search.

[Richard Parkin]

As Hugh writes above “ "I started a new post on a browser page"
Stop doing that already.” +1 as they say on t’interweb! I don’t even type a comment in the browser as you can guarantee that if it’s a long one or takes time the browser box will time out* or crash or whatever,

Several people have suggested a search in browser history, which is good but in Safari a text search in the address bar can search in tabs as well.

Also you can copy a page to MS OneNote via ‘Share’ and add a note/tag and file to a folder. I’m sure there are other even better ways of doing this but just keeping tabs open and hoping to hit on the right one sounds impossible to me.

* Itjust happened on this post but I had copied it before the timeout!

[John Krumm]

This is more or less how I prefer to think of Mike at work:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/german-born-physicist-who-formulated-the-theories-of-news-photo/3062505

[Phil Gyford]

While, like other commenters, I try to keyword my photos, it’s possible this won’t be as necessary in future... I don’t use any “cloud” photo storage, and keep few photos on my iPhone, but Apple, Google, et al are getting better at automatically “knowing” what’s in a photo thanks to machine learning. But I’m too cautious and old-fashioned to give it a try!

Regarding keeping track of links... I’ve been using https://pinboard.in for years to store links I might need again. $11/year and it’s fast and reliable. You can add keywords and comments to help find things in future. For another $25/year they’ll store the complete page content, in case the original disappears in future (it will!). I’ve no connection to the site.

[Jimmy Reina]

Mike,
For someone who claims to be unorganized, you do an amazing job of keeping this blog together, thanks for that.
It is good to see comments from so many others who suffer from organizational disorder-maybe we should start a support group.
But who would organize it?

[Pritam Singh]

It often happens that I get into a flap about things which I put in a safe place and can't subsequently find. The ordinary regular stuff is always easy to find amongst the clutter.

[David Comdico]

I gave up trying to fool myself that I'll ever get the chaos under control. I simply try to keep from being overwhelmed by it. When I watched "In No Great Hurry," the doc on Saul Leiter it almost scared me straight. And I emphasize almost.

[Frank Figlozzi]

I'm still at the stage where I can remember most of the pictures I've taken, so I don't really need a sophisticated filing system. Why? My photo output simply isn't very high.

When I shot slide film, vacations were an excuse to take pictures, and I shot to my heart's content. When I got home I'd make extensive notes about my experience, including the number of pictures I'd taken. One day I decided to compute my average. It came out to about one 36-exposure roll a day.

Now, many years later, we're in the digital age so pictures are free, right? So my output should be a lot higher, right? Well I made that same computation recently and found that my average now is still about 40 pictures a day. No change. Go figure.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

[Adam Lanigan]

I have committed myself to the task of doing a major winnowing of my digital archives this winter, which has ballooned almost unchecked lo these 15 years. It recently cracked the 150k mark (which proves a very neat and tidy 10k per year average over the long term). Thankfully though, it's simply a matter of scale and not disorganisation.

So, I am currently working backwards through time, flagging any somewhat reasonable keeper. These are photos that can simply make it to first base - technically correct or maybe visually interesting because it is not. Anything that does not meet that first bar is the chaff.

Following that, I'll proceed through and dutifully tag and label the places and faces in the remaining grain - I'm assuming about 25% of the original lot will survive. I've made several abortive attempts over the years to tag photos from the unabridged lump and it is quite tedious, so hopefully this makes it more achievable.

I'm also using this as an opportunity to pull older or forgotten photos out into various themes to illuminate some avenues to pursue for a next project. This is really the driver here - dig in and see what treasure is there.

This is the PLAN, at least. We'll see how well executed it is.

[Richard Tugwell]

You write your posts online in typepad? Why not just write them offline and copy paste when done?