Warbird Photo Library Question...

PhantomAce08 · **Posted:** Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:21 pm

Ok, I know this is a dumb question but...

For all of you with massive amounts of historical photos and even current warbird photos from museums and/or air shows, how do you keep them organized? How are you able to post a picture of a particular subject in 5 minutes of someone else posting a question?

What type of "system" do you use in naming your files? By plane serial number? By plane type? A combination of several things? Do you just add details to the file description?

I guess I just want to see what other people do and get some ideas as I begin to start building my collection/library.

Like I said, kind of dumb and silly, but I was just curious

Thanks!

Mgawa · **Posted:** Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:36 pm

I have only few thousand of the images scanned and stored in my PC and they are organized in two main order. First large section is called Photographs and there are folders with collections like.... "Ruskoi Centralniy Voenoy Musey" or "Kirk Hammet Collection". Other way is by the airplanes. And there are separarated by the wars- WW1, Interwar, WW2 and modern. But there could be also managed by countries.

Not all names are given but I try to give most apropriate name like Bf109G-6 R4 black 4 JG54 East Front Nov 1943. In many times give much shorter name like "Hrabbak Bf109G2" or even shorter. Most important is to include data in the image properties. Right click- Properties and then write in all data about event, author, date, descriptrion, copyright...

Cheers

Jack Cook · **Posted:** Tue Feb 12, 2008 9:02 pm

Quote:

how do you keep them organized?

Kaos theory

I group by branch ofservice, type, and if enough by unit.

ltdann · **Posted:** Tue Feb 12, 2008 9:13 pm

By type of aircraft...each one has a folder. When enough, I break them into sub-types. File convention is type-source-sequential number, such as F3F-2-DOLL-002

Rich

bdk · **Joined:** Sun May 02, 2004 1:16 am **Posts:** 11332

A folder named after the date I took the pictures and a short description?

My heirs can sort them any way they wish I guess.

Roger Cain · **Posted:** Tue Feb 12, 2008 11:32 pm

Never a dumb question.

If your talking about photographs, I keep mine in albums by type. Each photograph has a stamp on the back listing the location, date and a unique number for pulling up the negative.

New to the digital end of it, I'm currently storing by air shows and then sub folders for types, and attempting to use my failing memory. Eventually I hope to sort them all by type, but havn't figured out a system for the location of each plane yet.

bomberflight · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:16 am

Good question ! And it raises another one ...... How much time do you want to spend sorting and filing your images ?

You can use something like Adobe Photoshop ( I use Elements 6 ).
When you import the images it reads the Exif data so it "knows" when you took it. You can add tags to an image and create folders etc.

So you could store the images in a date folder, tag it for the airshow etc.
You can also tag each image by aircraft type / operatior etc etc etc.

Then it's possible to do a search using the tags to find all the tagged images that will match.

I started down this route ~ if your going to be very detailed ~ it will take a lot of time!

If the pc were ever to crash you would lose all the tags anyway.

So I went the low tech route. I have created a series of "My Documents" folders for WW1 Wardirds / WW2 Warbirds / WW2 Trainers etc etc. In each of those I keep folders for each airplane type. Inside those are folders for specific airplanes.

I keep my digital pics in there ~ along with any scanned magazine articles or notes I've made ( saved as a word document ).

I currently store around 200 Giga Bytes of data and everything on the PC is backed up onto a portable external hard drive. ( this is kept at work so if I get burgled or there is a fire I don't loose everything ).

Did I mention I work in IT as a business analyst :oops:

bomberflight · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:24 am

Just to finish up ..... :shock:

my folder structure looks kind like this .....

- My Documents
- WW2 Warbirds
- Hawker Hurricane
- Hurricane XII "Z5140" ~G-HURI ~ HA - C

So when I have an image of a Hurricane with the code letters "HA - C" .... I know exactly where to file it !

I hope this helps

Swiss Mustangs · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:01 am

Okay...

let's have a look at my external 320 GB HDD....

for my P-51 files I do have the following:

general folders for photographs, tech docu, database, drawings, etc.
then within each subfolders for differeent topics...

let's look at the photo folders...

theatres of operations, subfolders for various theatres of operations, next level are groups, next levels are squadrons, next level contains photos, by serial number (mainly)

also folders for each sub-type (with NAA designation), next level production batches which contain photos again sorted per serial-number

scrolling down...

also folders for each Air Force that operated the type.... again with subfolders for units, etc.

this also applies for other a/c types of interest.....

not bad, eh ?

Martin

Swiss Mustangs · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:08 am

and as an additional example.... here's the Douglas A-26 folder....

JDK · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:55 am

I have a highly trained Gentleman's Personal Gentleman called Jeeves who mixes a d@mn fine Martini and organises my photographs as I take them. He also proofreads my writing and polishes the computer screen. He suggests great tweaks to my poorer writing efforts. His toughest job is refiling the books on the shelf after I've used them.

When I'm awake, however, I have a failing memory and numerous folders for the digital and scanned photos. I have drop files and photo boxes alpha-numeric by type for the real pictures, and manila folders (inc photos) for types of major interest. We will not mention the boxes of lose photos.

Once, I filed all the Photos at the Warbirds Worldwide offices (and no, I don't know what happened to them either). However, I dumped all the blasted P-51D photos in a box and gave them to Paul Coggan to sort, starting a long-running joke and a lifetime aversion to the type.

k5083 · **Posted:** Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:07 pm

The main collection of photos that I maintain, taken by my late friend Dick Kamm, consists of slides that he manually sorted by manufacturer, then type, then serial or registration number. I typically scan them when needed to answer a query or for my own purposes, and organize the files on disc in that same way.

Reportedly, it took Dick a LOT of evenings to keep his slide collection properly organized, but I think he loved every minute of it.

My own photos are a mixture of slides, negatives, and digital, and because the negs have several types of aircraft in one strip, I cannot organize them by type. So mine are organized by date taken and by roll of film. I kept up a database of the photos that could be sorted or queried by type and serial for a while, but I've fallen years behind in updating it.

The result of this is that if there is a call for, say, pics of Spitfire TE308, I can find all of the ones in Dick's 70,000-pic collection in a few minutes. But in my own collection of only 10,000 pics which I am more familiar with, it would take me much longer to try to remember all the occasions on which I saw the aircraft, and I probably would miss some.

On the other hand, my filing system has advantages for other kinds of queries. There is no practical way that I could pull all of Dick's pictures from Oshkosh 1981. But mine are all together and could be accessed very quickly.

As I scan the collections, I could set up a cross-referenced database so that pics from both collections could be pulled quickly based on either aircraft or time/event criteria. But it would be time consuming and at this point I do not get enough calls to search the collection to make it pay off. If I make the collection more available as a public resource in the future, it may be worthwhile.

August

CWBuff · **Joined:** Tue Jul 19, 2005 1:14 am **Posts:** 854

A photographic memory helps, but mine is failing slowly... so...

Whether on the PC, an external drive, or stored on CD/DVD, all of my digital files follow the same basic system.
Although some may find it to be fairly organized, it's actually a bit of a mess. Someday I'll get around to changing
the filenames to be a bit more uniform... maybe...

Here's the WWII folder on my PC:

USA folder:

US Aircraft folder:

P-40 Warhawk folder:

USA P-40 folder:

P-40M/N folder:

P-40 USAAF folder:

P-40 Survivors folder:

For the actual photos, I use artist portfolio books as well as binders for storage:

Fade to Black...

Eric Friedebach · **Posted:** Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:46 am

I like to document things as they are disassembled (makes life easier on long-term projects). My filing system isn’t all that complicated, but I use Google Picasa on my laptop in the shop.

http://picasa.google.com/

Here’s a screenshot of some of my stuff. What I like about it is the ability to visually browse, move and zoom in.

Jack Cook · **Posted:** Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:03 pm

Hey Eric,
I don't see MY T-28 tail there :shock:

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