Introduction to the Digital World

So, you have bought your brand new digital camera and have started taking pictures profusely. Or maybe, you just bought a new scanner and want to convert all those paper prints to bits. Whatever your path may be, you are suddenly feeling the pinch of digital pain.

How do I store my images? How often should I backup and where? I have accumulated a fair number of images - how do I index and search them? How should I easily publish them on a web site. Do I need expensive and complicated software for these tasks? I had similar questions a couple of months ago, and have slowly managed to come up with a working plan which is described below. This plan has been converted into iOta, an image organization and archiving program with a KDE/Qt interface, which integrates flawlessly into the KDE Graphics menu.


This plan is simply a guideline for managing your photographs. You can use your own software to follow this plan through your own scripts, in which case, disregard all references to my scripts and iOta. Or you could simply download iOta which does most of this for you. Or, you could download my scripts (which are very old, and no longer supported actively) and modify them to your taste and try and follow parts of the plan as needed. Pick whatever suits you. If you do pick iOta or need more clarification on how this outline could work in practice, check out the iOta documentation.


If you are instead looking for photography information, you can visit either the main Photography Tips and Techniques page, or the Digital Photography page. To take a gander at some of my travelogues and images from National Parks and elsewhere, you can visit us Over the hills and far away.


Digital Photography for the BSD/Linux User

The procedure outlined below, and all the software mentioned is heavily influenced by my platform of choice - FreeBSD. Therefore, people using variants of BSD/Linux/*nixes will have no problem feeling at home. On the other hand, these programs (and equivalents) are easily available for the Windows platforms and should work as described below.


There are three approaches to following this image organization plan - which I shall call iOPlan for brevity.

  1. The first approach is to blindly use iOta which will organize your images strictly following the procedure outlined below.
  2. The second approach is to utilize the software described later, and write your own scripts (or download and modify mine) to perform the organization yourself.
  3. Of course, the third approach is to read up the plan here, digest it, and devise your own variant which might suit you better. If you feel that others can benefit from your modifications, please drop me a line.


    4. For the impatient, this page has been subdivided into 5 sections.

    1. The Software
    2. The Cataloging Process
    3. Storing and Archiving
    4. Web Publishing With Ease
    5. Data Modeling and Databases


    The Software

    Everything I need can be done using a basic editor and the following free software.

    Before you start taking tons of pictures, it will do you a lot of good to read (or at least glance through) John Shaw's The Business of Nature Photography. Excellent organization tips coupled with useful advice on writing and publishing, make this an indispensible book even if you are not planning on selling a single photograph.


    iOPlan - The Image Organization Plan

    The Cataloging Process

    Having described the related software, lets jump right into iOPlan. The first step along your road to better organization is Cataloging. To see the outcome of these steps, you can download the two images shown above, and use "strings [imgname]|more" to see how this information is embedded into the image. A sample index.html file containing these images can also be found here.


    Storing and Archiving

    After days of photography (you should be eating up megabytes of images every day now, shouldn't you, instead of reading this webpage), and after religiously following the cataloging process for your downloads/scans, you decide that you might want to archive your images. I prefer to burn my images on CD-R. I keep two working copies of every set of images on two cheaper CD-Rs, and keep one really pristine copy on a good-quality (Gold?) CD-R, which I just use for burning more copies. For me the critical mass to transfer my images on CD-R is about 375 MB worth of photos (about half of the capacity of a CD-R).

    I use a layering approach for burning my images. Every time I make a copy of about 350 MB of my photos, I burn the previous set of 350 MB photos with it. This way I ensure that I always have extra and overlayed copies of my photographs.


    Web Publishing With Ease

    So far, you have cataloged your entire photo collection and archived them on CDR. You just spent your savings investing in a domain name and are planning on spending your pocket money on a hosting service. Now you want to publish your work on the Web. Well, you already have all the required information embedded in your images, so the hard part is over. For consistency, you can click on the images below to see how this works. Also, you can download the actual images (not the thumbs), and run "strings [imgname]|grep Desc:" to see the caption.



    Data Modeling and Databases

    For those whose images have outgrown the capabilities of simple greps across their JPEG files, using a database becomes a must. The choices are varied as I have discussed in the Software section, and you should pick one based on your skill level and ease of use. For myself, I have built a simple Berkeley DB based embedded database application called iOta which satisfies the entire plan outlined above. To learn more about downloading and using iOta, please visit the iOta page.

    Either way, the critical step is to decide what goes into the database, and the fields below are my interpretation of what is useful for my images. The more you enter, the more specific your searches could get.

    1. Name: [Char 30] The unique image name, based on date and time.

    2. Category: [Char 255] The broad category of images, such as Kings Canyon National Park.

    3. Description: [Char 255] A more specific description for each image. Something which could be displayed as a caption to the image.

    4. Keywords: [Char 255] Phrases and words describing the image which may not appear as part of the caption/description, such as "patterns green cloudy"

    5. Equipment: [Char 128] All information about equipment ranging from camera used to lenses, whether filters were used etc.

    6. Film: [Char 80] Film type used.

    7. Copyright: [Char 80] Copyright information about the image. Usually this will be your name.

    8. Access Tags: [Short Int] The access control for the image. I have three access types.
      1. Private images - for my eyes only.
      2. Personal - for a very small audience, say, family.
      3. Clique images - for a larger set of people, say, close friends.
      4. Public - for everyone to see.

    9. Type Tags: [Short Int] The type of image. Currently, I have 4 different types.
      1. Original - nothing special. The default.
      2. Enhanced - Color, levels, contrast etc. adjustments on original.
      3. Black and White - Black and white or desaturated.
      4. Sepia - Any duo-toned version.
      5. Duplicate - An identical looking image.

    10. Quality Tags: [Short Int] The quality of the image. Makes it easy to search for good images when you have terabits of other lower grade images lying around.
      1. Ordinary - A regular image.
      2. Poor - Something to be ashamed of.
      3. Good - Better than average images.
      4. Excellent - Some of the best photographs. In this was it is easy to search for your best photographs when you desperately need them.

    11. CD Archive Number: [Short Int] This is your CD volume number (after archiving and burning), or your Kodak PhotoCD or PictureCD number. You can play tricks like keeping the first digit to represent the type of CD (Digital camera, Kodak PhotoCD or Kodak Picture CD), and the rest as a CD number.