For a while now I have been struggling with how to best organize my photos after returning from a trip. When you are shooting multi-frame (exposure), multi-row panoramas with dark frames for noise reduction it becomes a bit of a head ache to organize the images into logical groupings for post processing. At a minimum, I want to have each scene in a separate folder and have that folder include the associated dark frames etc. You can kind of do this in Light Room but I found it to be extremely cumbersome.
Scratching my head I decided to try OnOne Perfect Photo Suite's powerful image browser feature and wow was I happy! I read about this in the literature and about four months ago took advantage of the buy version 9 now and receive 10 when it is released, but until now only really just played with the software to add enhancements to existing images.
My goal was to break the images down into folders by shoot as they were captured during the trip. My approach to archive storage is to name the sub folders based on the cards used for capture. As can be seen in the screen shot below, the browser feature allows you to preview your photographs in a nice tiled view - all of this without having to import any of the images into a catalog. You are working directly with the images as they exist on the file system. Quick and clean.
The OnOne Perfect Photo Suite Browse mode
As I went through the images I created sub folders for each scene. I created a read me file with the notes of the groupings which creates a nice reference for the archive if you have need to come back to the originals (this would be totally optional as you could just copy the files directly to the sub folders). My notes were saved in a note pad as follows.
Acadia July 2016
ThunderHole
186-229 (07/03) (SanDisk_CardA 100MSDCF)
HuntersBeach
230-253 (07/03) (SanDisk_CardA 100MSDCF)
RavensNest
900-974 (07/03-07/04) (SanDisk_CardB 100MSDCF)
Champlain
1212-1234 (07/04) (Lexar_Card1 100MSDCF)
NorthEastHarbor
975-1071 (07/04) (SanDisk_CardB 101MSDCF)
BirchHarbor
672-897 (07/03) (SanDiskCardA 101MSDCF)
RavensNestDay
377-671 (07/03) (SanDisk_CardA 101MSDCF)
Schoodic
255-376 07/03 (SanDisk_CardA 101MSDCF)
BassHarbor
1072-1211 (07/04) (SanDisk_CardB 101MSDCF)Next, after creating the target sub folders, I chose the images to be copied by selecting the first image, scrolling to the last image in the group and pressing shift and clicking on the image.
Then right mouse click on the selected images and choose Copy from the popup menu. (You can also choose Edit->Copy from the menu bar.) Finally, simply select the target folder, right click and choose paste. This creates a COPY of the original images in the new target. Note that we are making redundant copies of the image so this will use more space.
It is as easy as that. Then I go into Light Room and perform the import. (You can either import in place or have LR make another copy of you source images - that is left to personal preference.)
So for me OnOne Perfect Photo Suite's browser feature made my life so much easier and allowed me to actually get on to post processing much faster.
Cheers!