[Jim]

how do you lot sort your digital photo's out for storage?
I've currently got mine in folders with date and brief description as the folder name, but i'm sure there must be a better way
cheers

[Monolith]

Nerdy, but:

I store all my climbing photos and video footage on my 350gb external drive. I keep master folders for all the venues I frequent and then dated folders and a very very brief synopsis is given in the filename as a quick cue to what I'm looking for.
Hardly the application of science but works for me mate.

[GCW]

I do the same as you, Jim.
There are photo management programs but I've never had the need to use them.  I can find what I want easily enough by date and venue.
Is there a reason you ask or just a general pondering?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

If you want something a bit more powerful than WinXP pictures folder tools then Picasa is pretty good, the closest Windows version of iPhoto. But to be honest nowdays I tend to upload at full res to Flickr as a backup, I like the idea they are online, therefore safe from hard drive death/house fires/burglary etc. You can keep them private, sort them with multiple tools including geotagging (good for climbing shots)

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm#22

[slackline]

Not much use for those under M$-windows, but I've just discovered f-spot which is for the Gnome desktop under GNU/Linux type OS's (but if you use Xfce or any other gtk based desktop it won't pull in masses of dependencies).

Major feature for me is the ability to tag your photos within the application, and then upload them to your flickr account (very handy as I find batch uploading lots of pics there are often a few that fail, usually in the middle of a set).

[Bubba]

I use Flickr but do worry about it's size limits - also it'd be nice to upload .raw. I imagine that there's sites similar to Flickr that allow this but not sure what any would be.

[slackline]

I use Flickr but do worry about it's size limits - also it'd be nice to upload .raw. I imagine that there's sites similar to Flickr that allow this but not sure what any would be.

Flickr have recently upped the size limits as they now host videos.  Photos can now be upto 20Mb (used to be 10Mb) and if you upload vids then the limit on those is 150Mb.

With regards to formats flickr just takes jpg, non-animated GIF's, PNG and TIFF's and a few others, but they get converted to JPG anyway (all from here).

I'm no expert on RAW (and I'm sure some of the resident photo bods would be able to ellaborate), but I think the main problem is that this format is minimally processed, and its the post-processing software that actually renders the picture and in turn allows you to tweak different things into something that you can view, so the hosting company would have to have an absolute shit load of servers to do all of this (making it prohibitively expensive maybe).  Also there isn't one standard format across manufacturers which would again make it more complicated to have a site hosting such things (not to say it isn't possible though).  I'm not aware of any myself.

Have been playing with f-spot a bit today, and it seems to take a while to import and organise the >25000 pics I've accrued so far     Haven't even started tagging them  , nor have I tried uploading to flickr which is the main reason I'm checking it out.

[Bubba]

Isn't there a photo size restriction on Flickr still - eg, 2300 pixels or something? That pretty much stops you uploading original pics. I should probably check it.

[slackline]

Isn't there a photo size restriction on Flickr still - eg, 2300 pixels or something? That pretty much stops you uploading original pics. I should probably check it.

I don't think so, I think its done via file size since I've quite a few large stitches that are massive in dimensions (I think the largest is the 18 pic stitch taken up on Bleaklow dimensions are 18545 x 1839, original here).  I did have to reduce the size of quite a few though, but that was to get them under the older 10Mb limit.

[Johnny Brown]

I name the folders by location and date, then use Lightroom for searching, viewing, editing, etc everything bar print prep. The keywording feature is handy for big collections and easy to implement at import.

[Control freak]

Ive just started using an app caled iTag that allows you to tag photos a la flickr and many blogs now.

Seems ok at the moment - I'll let you know how I get on

[underground]

Wasn't there an free and unlimited photo host mentioned a while ago - like gmail - ever expanding, but for photos?