Monday, January 07, 2019

Preserving Albums, Collections & Organization as you move digital photos

In the process of downloading my files from flickr I’m reminded of the unexpected issue most folk find when trying to transfer a lot of files between different photo managers. Things like EXIF and key words can be embedded in the files (in the case of Jpeg and Tiff, also DNG but not other RAW formats) and sidecar files (eg .xml can also carry this data with photos as they are transferred between packages. Unfortunately the organization features such as Albums (or Collections in Lightroom) are not transfered and/or not compatible between packages.

image

There is a simple solutions I have written about before. It is using special key words to identify the albums. I use names beginning with the tilde key ~ and write that into the keywords (or tags in flickr jargon). In most software you need to enable writing back of the keywords into the embedded data and/or writing the sidecar file beside each file. When you load into the new software it will read in these keywords and you can selective filter on a given ~keyword then do whatever is required to create the new album or collection.

Very simple really.

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