Tagging workflow and/or software?

<p>I occasionally do event photography, but I've never really gotten a workflow down for tagging shots with the competitor's id. I have a few thousand shots from a sailboat regatta last week that I need to tag, and I was hoping someone here might have some suggestions about a good way to do it. There are about 80 boats that I need to be able to tag. In this case, the tag is a two-digit bow-number.</p>

<p>I use PS CS3 as my primary photo editor, so I have Bridge. I also use Faststone image-viewer.</p>

<p>By tagging do you mean meta-data like a caption or a keyword? Lightroom is great for that, not sure about Bridge. To KISS, you could just batch rename the files dsc999-boat-01 etc.......</p>

<p>Mark: adding meta-data would be OK. A quick, convenient way to pre-pend something to the filename, or move the file to a named folder, would also work . The key word is "quick". With a few thousand photos to go through, even a few seconds per photo adds up pretty quickly...</p>

<p>Lightroom lets you do batch renaming easily.</p>

<p>Mark: unfortunately, I need to rename/tag files on a mostly individual basis. There are some runs of the same boat, but many/most files will get a different tag from their neighbors....</p>

<p>I think I found that FastStone has a very convenient tool to add a JPEG comment as you're stepping through files.</p>

<p>Remember that comments are different than tags. If you want other software to read the tags so that you can filter and sort by tags, you should look at tagging solutions. Like Mark said, LR is great at this and LR integrates well (including tags) with online portfolio sites such as Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr.</p>

Geoff,

 

I have done exactly that, thousands of shots of three and five day regattas. First question would be "what do you want to

do with them?" I ask because it is rare to make sales of any but the best images. I do several things, I upload all the

images by day and race. Any sailors looking for images of themselves will look through. I also select the best ten images

for any publication, cruising mags, racing mags, local paper and event organiser etc. If they want to see more, or specific

boats, then i'll relook for them or point them to my online galleries. This saves lots of time, the truth is unless the boats are

very interesting or unusual, major classic events for instance, then very few sales will be made below the best ten picks.

 

Another thing I have done with one event is to hand over all my images to the organisers, they then add labels, but that

kind of working relationship is rare.

<p>Sorry I realised I didn't actually help much with the answer! Anyway the industry standard for bulk file renames, metadata, tagging etc etc is <a href="http://www.camerabits.com/site/">Photo Mechanic</a>.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.zarias.com/workflow-photo-mechanic-to-lightroom-to-photoshop-to-delivery/">This is a great tutorial</a> showing it in a workflow.</p>

<p>Scott: no worries! Good information. Sales are always small. For editorial use, I usually try to find out what the writer/editor is looking for to support their "story" and find some of the best shots that would seem to fit the bill.</p>

<p>I've gotten other recommendations for Photo Mechanic. Since I only do events rarely I'll give FastStone's comment tool a try in combination with a script that reorganizes the files based on the JPEG comment. Thankfully the bow-numbers are two-digits so I think the right hand on the numeric keypad and the left on the arrows should be about as fast as anything.</p>

<p>Just FYI, here's the event site that I threw together day-by-day at the regatta: http://moving-target-photos.com/2010RCC/</p>

<p>++ for Photo Mechanic. I've used it for years, although I'm doing a lot with just LR3 these days.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>++DigiKam is my solution. I myself work under Linux, but most customers do not, and they need help when getting a DVD of mine with hundreds of photos. So I advice them to use DigiKam under Windows ( Google says, there is a Mac version too).<br /> It is too late for the first poster, but it may help someone.<br /> Open Source under http://www.digikam.org/drupal/download?q=download/binary/<br>

(Edited for redundant info.)<br /> Tags: photo foto workflow linux windows mac tag tagging keyword stichwort</p>