Reference Photo Organization

jackfruit

Whats up Polycount!?  Recently I acquired a large folder of reference photos, there is so many topics that range from environments, animals, lights, materials, etc. I am wondering how do I tag or organize all this stuff? Should I get a new image management program? How well do you manage your reference photos?

garcellano

Hey Jackfruit, I would assuming having them in an external hard drive would be convenient, organized in folders. Never quite used any image management programs, other than probably Picasa if that counts. For offline, I have some on my external. For online, I have them just in an album.

AtticusMars

I've been looking for something decent for years and everything I've tried is crap.

A good system in my opinion requires a good tagging system, fast database querying, and fast thumbnail loading.  I've yet to find anything that meets this criteria. Most load thumbnails quickly, very few have decent tagging and fewer still can search a database quickly. Also the vast majority have terrible image viewers because everybody apparently thinks you need to have access to photoshop filters while looking at images.

The best I've found is Zoner, mostly because you can customize the toolbars to turn all the garbage you don't want off. But it still doesn't search fast enough. So for now, my images are just a big loose pile in a folder on my hard drive.

thomasp

for references i have been using picasa for a long time now. i have about 35k images or so - not sure if that's considered lots or barely any - organised in a folder structure by subject, sometimes grouped per project. i don't use tagging (it has that though, just too lazy to think of tags really) but just favor the really handy ones and then go through the much smaller database of favorites. you can also subtitle images and search for that.

picasa makes searching and scrolling through large numbers of images/thumbnails really comfy and i find it great to have an overview of images on my hard drive. it can not handle the more exotic/cg-specialty filetypes though, it's originally some photo album tool after all. the basic photo editing tools it has don't get in the way for me.
the true downside for me is that it will refresh folders only at it's own pace, you can't force it to. so if you copy a bunch of images around outside the software it may take time till the program picks up on the changes. you can backup and copy around the thumbnail database between computers which is very handy and also very necessary because the program is a bit flaky when it comes to using network drives to access remote image libraries.

btw. you could look into trying out nomacs - http://nomacs.org/ . i am not using that right now but when i played with it seemed similar to picasa and a pretty smooth experience. been a while though.

ExcessiveZero

I organize my stuff into folders sometimes, other times I just dump them and scroll the folders are more to organize what I don't need unless I revisit something instead of what I do, as you only tend to really need the reference for the length of the project.

Textures are a bit different have a highly organized system for that.

But I would for sure try not to get in the habit of reference hoarding, something I used to do a lot more.

GhostDetector

You can use FenrirF.  The downside is that you just need to take the time a lot of time to organize everything as well as the lack documentation.

pior

Hoarding a ton of reference material is not necessarily a good thing. What about deleting that huge folder (that would get rid of the problem instantly !), and from there on only saving/bookmarking things that are relevant to whatever you're working on ?

Having too many references/influences just creates white noise, which in turn negatively impacts the amount of time and brain space you can allocate to solving actual design challenges.

Now I understand that this doesn't quite answer your question but this is definitely something to consider. If you don't know what's in this folder, you probably don't need it

I personally don't organize reference material by theme but rather by specific project being worked on or to be tackled in the near future. I find that it keeps things practical and goal-oriented.

Norstu

Acdsee looks good. I don't actually use it...yet. Did a quick Google search because i'm also looking for something to help manage the chaos. 

http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee-19

iadagraca

I've been using xnview after going through a few options. Uses a decent file system access, thumbnails for psd files. And tagging and nested tagging which lets you view a tags set of images regardless of the folder which is nice. 

http://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

I think the only thing it's lacking is that it's not as sexy looking as it could be, but thats a nit pick.