Suggestions please. I've got a lot of photographs (many gigabytes) of disused mines, both under and over ground. But my filing of them on hard disks is pretty poor really. Made worse by the amalgamation of older PCs onto the current one.

I'd be interested to know how people are organizing their mining photos, and also related plans and documents, on computers, not paper copies.

It's a mammoth task, but I've got a terrabyte of online storage to upload everything to in a new hierarchy, and am looking to see how other people organize their stuff.

Thanks in advance.

Its a subject that requires a great deal of thought and planning. 'Most people' seem to be be happy to organize things by date which is probably fine if your interest is in birthdays, holidays and the growing up of your family. However this is not going to be be helpful if you want to find all photos relating to some perticular special interest 'topic' i.e. a place or a particular steam engine. The places may have been visited many times, the steam engines may move around the country. Trying to find software to assist a more subtle organization than simply date is also difficult because software can cease to be supported or be unavailable on your 'new' computer and re-organizing the photos for a new piece of software is often a significant task.

Many years ago after significant thought I decided that for me the best basic organization was to use a directory structure to organise things geographically i.e.
Country->County->(nearest)Town->Descriptive Location
with filenames also being descriptive with a numeric suffix where needed.
Additionally all the photos would be in a format such as jpeg that supports EXIF information and the EXIF info would contain the correct date, description and location information.

Provided the above rules were followed it should be easy to find any particular photo or selected group of photos and it was UNTIL the powers that be decided to reorganize the country. Lancashire is a good example it got virtually cut in half grr. :curse:

So my advice is think long and hard about how you want to use the photos and try not to use the particular properties of a particular piece of software, there are many EXIF editors and directory structures will always be available everything else can change. Above all unless you want to repeat the significant amount of work you are about to do remember the old adage KISS (keep it simple stupid).

---

Have a look at Digikam. Open source (free) and available for Linux/Windows/Mac.

Allows tagging of photos, so I can easily sort by location, people or date. Also allows annotation of each photo.

https://www.digikam.org/download/ 

Just took a quick look at mine, I have 57 G in my "Mining" folder, this is subdivided into "General Mining" and "Mining Photographs", the latter is 27G.

Both are sorted into sub directories named after main districts, eg "Derbyshire", "Nenthead" etc. So not necessarily counties, but area that basically suit me. Then more sub directories each being a particular site. Dates, camera settings etc can be seen in a photos property sheet, obviously digital cameras only. Stuff from old film cameras need more thought.

My system is set up to suit me not Mr Gates, dont use the Windows installed folders, "Documents" etc, but my own directory structure, "Shared Documents", "Shared Data Files" etc in the root. This is because my system is a Local Network, probably what a lot of folk would call an "Office System", multiple machines hard wired as an Ethernet on the 169.254 block.
To satisfy anyone's curiosity, the "Shared data Files" is the MS Outlook shared pst file, the back end data to LEL Lamps, and back end data to other stuff such as Mining Journal index etc.

I described my system in detail in some other thread. Cant remember where.

Backup is to other machines storage and also removable media.

---

Have a look at Digikam. Open source (free) and available for Linux/Windows/Mac.

Allows tagging of photos, so I can easily sort by location, people or date. Also allows annotation of each photo.

https://www.digikam.org/download/ 

Pretty impressive package! Its amazing how open source projects deliver so much.

A very simple approach that seems to work for me uses bog standard PC folders named by the significant place followed by a few hyphen separated other names if its a long walk. Then finished off with a space separated date in reverse order. ie 201209.

Sorting can be chosen by name, date or text string using no more than a PC’s OS. I seldom have more than a dozen shots per trip (most being so poor I delete them) so the photos within are easy to recall and have their exif inf embedded/accessed by a right click anyway.

Wow some very good set ups !

Mine is all on my phone as don’t actually own a pc , so I use google photos and have made albums , by mine names so for example I search parc lead mine will bring up this album once in this they are all in trips with the dates . So if I have been a place 5 times have 5 albums all dated trips with notes for
Each place I update with equipment needed for example .

---

I would beware of any services offered by Google and likes, they are pulling their websites facility next year, hence the new CMT home for Flintshire Mining.

I like everything under my own control, bet that surprises everyone
:lol:

---

I would beware of any services offered by Google and likes, they are pulling their websites facility next year, hence the new CMT home for Flintshire Mining.

I like everything under my own control, bet that surprises everyone
:lol:

Sadly no money for a computer ;(
Or I would rather have them personally also ! Luckily can store them all on additnow So am happy will have them backed up on here !! :thumbsup:

---

I would beware of any services offered by Google and likes, they are pulling their websites facility next year, hence the new CMT home for Flintshire Mining.

I like everything under my own control, bet that surprises everyone
:lol:

Just a bit more :offtopic:

Hi Roy,

Are you referring to Google's recent email concerning their data storage protocols or is it something more specific?

My email seemed to say it would have no impact as long as I was regularly using stuff and didn't abuse "reasonable" data storage limits, something almost all providers do somewhere in their t & c's.

Jim

I dont use them so dont know what they are up to, I was referring to website hosting, free?, which is a service they will no longer be offering after this year.

A bit more


Bottom line is I don't trust my stuff in some else's hands, you never know what strokes they likely to pull. With terabytes of platter storage, virtually as good as solid state, going for nothing on eBay, plus cheap ex office PCs, why do it.

---

I'm very boring and just keep mine simple.

Folder: Mine
Folder:Date Visited

Plus a folder of Miscellaneous photo that I can't work out the location of.

I'm very boring and just keep mine simple.


Plus a folder of Miscellaneous photo that I can't work out the location of.

I am in the same situation with loads of colour prints, however if you sort through them some or all may have a date stamp on the back.

---

A bit of topic a friend of mine has inherited around 70 photos /cards of old drag line excavators some have locations on them I will ask him to register and upload the location ones to correct albums going to be hard with rest as without showing a key spot finding where they from will be near impossible!

---

One thing you can try is having two sets of folders - one with the images sorted by date (by year and month for example), and the other by location. The location folders just contain shortcuts to the dated folders. That way you don't have duplicate images taking up twice the necessary disk space, but the downside is you can't easily move a photo to another folder, or rename the folder or any folder in the hierarchy, without messing up the shortcut. And you do have to wade through every photo, creating all the shortcuts, and then move the shortcuts into the correct location folder.

I wrote a script in Visual Basic that can copy photos from an external drive, such as a camera, and concatenate a hyperlink that would be stored in a table and displayed in a MS Access Form, screen for the not knowing.

---

Now is the time to be ruthless and get rid of all the rubbish stuff so what you have left is nothing but good imagery . 😉

---

I use Flickr and set up a different album for each mine.