How to Keep all your "PRINT WORTHY" photos handy.

[CyberDyneSystems]

Nothing special,. just a quick and dirty method that may be of some help.

I have way to many files in my 10D folder... I have tried differeing methods of sorting them.. and I am sure you have a good method on your own.

Today I was wishing that of all the various folders,. I would have an easy way of locating all the files that I had done "post processing" to. In other words,. I wanted all my "printables" in one place for easy brwsing with ACDsee.

Again,. there are many ways of addressing this,. but I like quick and dirty.

Clearly I did not want to browse through thousands of photos and pick them one by one.

Are you familiar with "batch files" ?
Tiny little scripts that use DOS commands and automate things.
Very simple and it makes you feel like a softeware programmer when they work :mrgreen:

I wrote a little batch file that would copy all files of a sepcific type to a specific folder. As it happens,. ANY file I have manipulated is saved as either a .psd (photoshop native) or .tif file so that it would not be compressed. (if you allready work with RAW files, this solution will work perfectly for you)

All the unedited images are either RAW or .jpg,. so these files will be ignored.

Here's how to do it;

Create a .txt file on your desktop and input the following text;

xcopy E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Eos10D\*.psd E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Print /s

Where "xcopy" is the ame of the DOS command,

"E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Eos10D" is the PATH to my specific folder where all the image files are.. obviously you will need to alter the PATH to browse to your own image directory...

"*.psd" tells XCOPY to ONLY copy files that are .psd ( * = a wild card telling xcopy ANY file that ends in .psd regardless of name)

"E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Print" Tells XCOPY where the destination folder is,. in this case the folder is called "Print"

"/s" tells XCOPY to include .psd in ANY subfolder within the "Eos10D" folder.

I entered a second line like this;

xcopy E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Eos10D\*.tif E:\Graphics\Digita~1\Print /s

Which is identical except it will copy all the .tif files as well.

Now to make this text file a batch file you simply rename it from;
"Printcopy.txt" to "printcopy.bat"

The .bat extension creates a batch file!

Now,. save changes,. MAKE sure you have created the DESTINATION folder,. and then just double click on the "printcopy.bat" icon on your desktop,. and watch the dos box role!!!!

Now I have copies of all my post prcessed images in one folder. :)

[pradeep1]

A fine DOS nerd you are. :D

[ilya]

What Pradeep said :P

What I do is keep a chronological directory tree structure. At each month's subdirctory, I'll create '4Web' and a '4Print' subs. Each file I save in those are worthy of web or printing, also get a 4web or 4print in the file name. So I can locate them quickly via a search, and I also have the best of each month within easy reach.

I also find that I'm not really into saving any PSD's or even Tiffs because I never go back to the same file in Photoshop to pick up where I left off. That's because I try new stuff in PS all the time, and feel like my skills are improving every day, and its easier just to start over every time. Plus those are huge files. Anyone else with same experience

[iwatkins]

I do the same a Ilya.

Mainly I have a directory tree that DownloaderPro builds for me. Into each Month directory, I create a new directory called WebReady and PrintReady:

\Year\Month\Negatives\Day\
\Year\Month\WebReady\
\Year\Month\PrintReady\


All RAW files are stored in their own Day directory with filenames of YearMonthDay_HourMinute_ImgNo.CRW.

When I save a completed image for the web it goes into WebReady (as a JPEG) with the same filename but obviously ending in .JPG.

When I save a completed image for printing it goes into PrintReady (as a TIFF) with the same filename but obviously ending in .TIF.

In addition, at the end of each month, I use Photoshop's Contact Sheet maker to produce a contact sheet of all shots for that month. I save it (them) as TIFFs in the root of that months directory. This way I can print them out or view on screen to find an image that I can't find on keyword searches or just to have a browse.

It work for me as I can quickly find most things.

Cheers

Ian