Over the last couple of years, I’ve been putting a lot of photos on my computer in the hope of being able to find ones I want fairly easily. At this point, I’m up to about 16,000 (at least that’s what the computer says, but I have my doubts). I’ve tried several different programs to organize them, and none of them seemed to be very intuitive. When I upgraded my computer operating system last month (I went to Snow Leopard on my Mac), I invested in the latest version of iPhoto and resolved to work with it until I mastered it.
One thing was clear – I have one library with 13,000 photos in it, and that was extremely unwieldy. As I had loaded the photos, off of CDs mostly, I had gone through and put most of them in albums. Unfortunately, not all of them, though. I needed to come up with a new plan, so this is what I’m going to try:
First, I am going to set up five or six libraries; such as Clip Art, Nature, People, Architecture. (You can do that in iPhoto by holding down the Option key when you open the program.) I intend to limit each library to about 5000 images. It’s possible to scan that number fairly quickly, and they can be further sorted into albums for easier retreival.
Second, I will go through and add appropriate keywords to ALL the photos that are currently in the huge library. I will then export them, and import them into the appropriate library. (I’ve tried out this process and it works.) I’ll let you know (in six months or so) if this process works.