Organizing FROM a CD

[Killman]

I've been too busy learning all of the 'fun' functions of PSE to be too concerned about organizing all of my photos. I'm wondering how everyone else goes about organizing their photos and if there is some common workflow that everyone follows. I'd also be interested in finding out how everyone stores their photos. Most of mine are already on CD's with just a few stored (or ever seeing) the hard drive. My wife is a photo freak, so usually the first thing we do when we get back from a trip is to take the SD card from our camera to Costco where she prints everything off - good, bad, out of focus, Everything! Typically it is around 700 photos :eek: But we have them burned onto a CD. My goal - once I really start using PSE - is to take the photos I want from the CD, correct them as necessary, crop them and to finally save them. My question is...should I save them to the hard drive or another CD? I haven't tried it, but I do not think it is possible for me to save them back to the original Costco CD.
Any suggestions or thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated!

[vawitt]

I've been too busy learning all of the 'fun' functions of PSE to be too concerned about organizing all of my photos. I'm wondering how everyone else goes about organizing their photos and if there is some common workflow that everyone follows. I'd also be interested in finding out how everyone stores their photos. Most of mine are already on CD's with just a few stored (or ever seeing) the hard drive. My wife is a photo freak, so usually the first thing we do when we get back from a trip is to take the SD card from our camera to Costco where she prints everything off - good, bad, out of focus, Everything! Typically it is around 700 photos :eek: But we have them burned onto a CD. My goal - once I really start using PSE - is to take the photos I want from the CD, correct them as necessary, crop them and to finally save them. My question is...should I save them to the hard drive or another CD? I haven't tried it, but I do not think it is possible for me to save them back to the original Costco CD.
Any suggestions or thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated!

Hi, Killman.

I have not yet mastered the use of the organizer. All my photos are organized on an external hard drive, with copies on CDs, pretty much as follows:

1) A folder for the year
2) A folder inside the "year" folder with the name of the trip or activity the photos are from
3) The photos, inside, sometimes broken down further into folders by activity (if we are in one place for several days and did several unique activities, or hikes, they are organized in named subfolders)
4) Many are renamed using a free tool I downloaded from someplace called the Renamer. I can quickly rename the photos with the name of the location, the date, whatever.

You are correct; unless the Costco CD has been set up in a certain way, you probably cannot save your "fixed" photos back to it. However, this is a good thing, I think, because you'll always have clean, digital negatives. I'd burn my fixes back to another CD.

Have fun!

~Val in rainy IL

[Karin Sue]

You should be able to take your cds and import the images into Organizer while leaving them on the cd. Organizer will make a file of proxy images (big thumbnails) I think there is somewhere you can set your preferred size for the proxies. Now you will be able to view, tag, and organize all your photos without filling up your hard drive.

When you want to work on one, Organizer will request you put the cd in the drive and bring up a copy of the image. You will not be able to make changes and save back to the cd. I don't know where the default save folder of images brought in from a cd are. I think you will lose all connection between the organize thumbnail and the image on cd unless you chose to duplicate the image and work with that. It may be that if you decide to revert to original from an edited copy it will call for the cd again. I am not sure.

After you have an edited image you can File>Move it to a new cd. You only get one burn per cd, so you might want to wait till you have a batch ready to burn.

So far I've been pretty much filling up my hard drive but I think it is time to start moving some of them off so I have been investigating options. An awful lot of people on the forum prefer an large external harddrive for photo storage and back ups.

[Wendy]

Hi there ...

I used to backup to CDs but its a long slow process ... so I went for external hard drives. It is just so quick and easy to do and the price of the drives has come down a lot ... :) I really think that its money well spent

Wendy

[Killman]

Thank you all for responding. I've worked with the organizer a little bit, including making proxy images from my originals on CD. I just was not sure if I wanted to have multiple CD's where one is the original and another with the 'fixed' photos. I'm not the most organized person around so keeping track of multiple CD's probably isn't a good idea for me!
I think I will look into the external harddrive option. I know prices have gone down and that probably would be the best way to keep everything in one place and organized!

[Wendy]

Hi ...

I don't think that you will regret it ... it makes life a whole lot simpler :)

Wendy

[Killman]

Anything to make life simple! My simple little mind is having a heyday trying to figure out all of the cool stuff it can do with PSE! Unfortunately, between the time my simple little mind reads how to do something in PSE...and the time I can get to my computer to apply it... I've already forgotten how to do it!