For the last few years, I had a very simple way of managing my photos. For the most part, I only take picture at “events”, like birthdays, vacations, weddings, etc. I would create a folder for each event, put the photos from that event in the folder, and then upload them to my smugmug account.
For the most part, it worked great. I generally knew what photo I was looking for by the event I took it at, which made it nice and easy to find. The smug mug galleries let me share particular events with friends. All in all it was a win all around.
But this is 2009.
Photos are no longer just about archiving what happened at a particular event. People want the meta data that goes with them. They want the names of the people in the photo. They want to have them shared instantly.
For a long time now, smugmug has supported tagging photos. It’s a slow and rather tedious process, and I was never inclined to do it. It also never seemed to line up with any of my other systems (namely my hard drive). Well, as of yesterday afternoon, I have a new process for photos, that goes like this:
- Upload the Photos as I have always done, to a folder on my hard drive for each event. This is no longer required, but works best for me for “quick” organization.
- After uploading, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery to tag my photos. It’s facial recognition is decent, so tagging is pretty quick. It also provides me multiple ways to manage my photos (date, tags, galleries).
- Once tagging is complete, I use Omar’s Windows Live Plugin for SmugMug to upload all my photos to SmugMug, tags included.
- Last but not least… I’m all about facebook getting my photos as well, so I use: SimpleMug App to automatically post my pictures to facebook for me.
Now I think the only thing left is to have it automatically twitter or blog post when I post a new gallery… That would have my photos fully integrated.