Photo Buffs: RAW image archival

[GilaMinumBeer]

I am an amateur photographer at best but have amassed a huge volume of photo's. I need suggestions on a better way to organize everything for archival and retrieval. To date, I have multiple folders for categorization but find it makes locating a photo difficult.

To make matters worse, I can;t find a compatible RAW image viewer for Vista and the software I use for editing has limited file management capabilities.

Any suggestions as to what works best for you?

 

[ScottyT]

I keep all my photos on my external hard drive under a very simple Year/Month/Event folder system. This works very well for me and my 400+ GB of photos.

Let me know about the RAW viewer for Vista if you find one, as I have yet to get Photoshop installed on my new computer.

 

[jmulligan]

I don't actually know about this, but HWMO uses Adobe Lightroom. You import the photos into the program, and you can have search terms and edit metadata and process the photos in there as well. It can also arrange by dates, etc. for easy retrieval.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

Uggg. I have Lightroom on my laptop as well as Bridge and PS CS2. I have been dreading having to move it to the new PC cause it's a bootleg and I never used it for anything.

Sounds like I will have to now casue the Canon RAW image codec doesn't work in Vista for some reason. Arrrgh!

Anyone know if the Adobe stuff is 32bit, or 16?

 

[yermej]

Are you running Vista 64? I don't know tons about this stuff, but from reading the Canon site, if your camera is supported, there should be a way to get the codec to work. The codec is here (I hope that works).

The overview shows the camera models it should work with. In the reviews below the overview, somebody mentions that Vista 64 includes the 32-bit version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which can make use of the codec.

Maybe that'll do what you want?

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

Are you running Vista 64? I don't know tons about this stuff, but from reading the Canon site, if your camera is supported, there should be a way to get the codec to work. The codec is here (I hope that works).

The overview shows the camera models it should work with. In the reviews below the overview, somebody mentions that Vista 64 includes the 32-bit version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which can make use of the codec.

Maybe that'll do what you want?

Thanks for the tip.

It worked an gets me closer to where I want to be. It's still not as convienient as manipulating through Explorer but it is more capable than using the Phot Editor I have (at least for file structures and grouping).

I may still resort to moving Adobe over. At least it should run better on this machine if it will run at all.