It's been a few months since I last posted about photo tagging and asked "how should I use metadata on photos?"  There were some great responses, both in person as well as in the comments, and I filed that task away for a future project.  Well, the future is now.  We took over 1700 photos in the last couple weeks alone (having an 11-week old will do that to you) and our "filing system" is starting to show its age.  Not having things like ratings, dates, or even the basics like "this is a picture of Stella and Mike" is starting to bug me since I'm spending a few hours each week just dealing with photos.

So this is what I'm going to do with our entire gallery, starting right now:

1. Keep the photos organized by event in folders.  So "Christmas 2007 in Seattle" remains - it turns out that's how my wife and I like to browse our photo collection, and since I'm not a hardcore photographer (yet) it's easiest for us to keep it like this.
2. Rename all the files to something like "Title (#) mm-dd-yyyy" where title is the name of the folder (i.e. Christmas 2007) and the # is the sequence number. 
3. Make sure all the photos have the capture date set.  Since some of them are scans or were taken with a 9-year old 1MP digital camera, there's a good chance dates aren't captured across the board.  So I'm going to correct this.
4. Make the title on the photo the same as the filename for now.  There are some instances where I'll type more than this like "Stella laughing at her zebra toy", but just to be consistent I'm going to keep it simple in the default case where there's nothing better to use as a caption.
5. Add creator and copyright metadata.  The creator will be something like "Torres Family" and the copyright is used just in case the photos find their way onto the web.  I know it doesn't actually protect anything, but since it takes 2 seconds to add it, why not?  I'm also going to use the creator tag to indicate who took the photo since I have rolls from just about every family member over the last few years.  So instead of using sub-folders for this, I'm going to use the creator tag and filter on that.
6. Add two basic ratings to photos - 5 star for amazing, 4 for great.  I may have a few that use 3 as well, but to me that's the equivalent of not having a rating at all.
7. Flat out delete all poorly shot or blurry photos while I'm doing this.
8. Convert BMPs to JPGs since I have a bunch of images from the mid-90s using the bitmap format.
9. Opt to write all the XMP data to the file of course!

And finally: 10.  Apply tags to all the photos!  Talk about tedious :)

I realize that a few months ago I said "I'm not going to go crazy with this and spend hundreds of hours applying tags to previous photos"... but I rethought that [I know Jay is laughing right now thinking "I knew you would"].  But the photos we had pre-baby are all actually pretty easy to apply metadata to, and being the neat freak that I am I knew I wouldn't want to have half of my photos cleaned up and the others just sitting around unusable.  So I came up with a very basic tagging scheme based on what I've seen others do online.  I'm going to use hierarchical tags (even though most apps including Windows Live Photo Gallery don't visualize them like this) and I'm going to use capitalization and spaces in the tags.  This is the basic format I'm going to use:

1. Places -> Seattle, La Grulla, Glen Ridge, etc.
2. People -> Full name
3. People -> Stella Torres -> Birth, 0-3 months, 3-6 months, Smiling, Yawning, Sleeping, etc.
4. Nature -> Flowers, Landscape, Ocean, etc.
5. Things -> Car, Plane, Bike, etc.
6. Portraits -> Pregnant, Fitness, Funny, etc.

To perform all of the steps above, I'm going to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom since bulk edits like these are cake in that tool... and any changes I make, including applying tags, will immediately appear in Windows Live Photo Gallery for basic viewing/editing.  As I get more serious about photography (and trust me, I'm really not that serious) Lightroom is becoming an essential part of my workflow.  I love how I can use Lightroom to do all of this and not only does my desktop software (WLPG) pick up the changes immediately, but Media Center does as well!

To illustrate how slick this is, soon I'll be able to pull up pictures of any family member sorted by date in 3 seconds on the HDTV in my living room thanks to Xbox 360 and Media Center.  Love it!  It's like magic.

Of course, this is going to take me quite a while.  But just like I did when I ripped 900+ CDs, I'm going to take it week-to-week ;)  I'll spend about 30 minutes each Sunday working through 5-10 folders until I'm finished with everything.  It should only take a few months provided I'm disciplined about it.  And then I'll never have to do it again; it just becomes about new photos at that point, which is much, much easier.  And if it's anything like my encoding all of my music, it'll be boring and tedious... but I'll be pretty thrilled when it's all done.  Just in time for CES 2009!

Speaking of CES, be sure to watch Bill's keynote at 630 Pacific at www.microsoft.com/ces!  This is my favorite time of the year - CES and MacWorld... geek heaven.

Where will you soon be able to get music from all of the major labels, without any DRM restrictions, at moderate bit rates?  Amazon MP3 of course.  Fantastic.  Sony BMG has finally entered the fold.

I've spent years berating DRM and buying nothing but CDs, which feature both higher quality sound and zero restrictions on how they're used.  But Amazon's MP3 Downloads have me slowly thinking about sacrificing a little quality (most songs are 256kbps variable rate) for convenience [of course, I do wish they would support lossless formats].

I'm not sold on the design of the store - it feels a little bit too much like Amazon.com and not enough like a fun place to hang out (see Zune for this) - but all things considered, it's the best store on the block.  As their catalog grows, I can't see anyone favoring the current iTunes model over straight cheap, DRM-free MP3s.  The subscription model is still a better value (and I expect music junkies will still use that to sample music) but for ownership, Amazon is doing a fantastic job.