I know its been quite a while since I've posted here and you all must be wondering what is happening as of late, well... that will have to wait. Ouch - total buzz kill, but hey it rhymes. Ok ok I promise when the work eases after the completion of my Audio Report and its presentation on February 24, (ooo a teaser!) I will at least try to put together some back entries based on my daily notes heretofore. Until then, I thought I'd share with you all (visually) a little brainstorm session I had about how best to organize Vera's show photos. Every time I come up with a method of organization and ruminate on it for a while, I start to find problems with. I think I've created and destroyed some 2 or 3 versions at this point. Well, here's my latest and I think its the best one so far. So I thought it would be fun to give you all a step-by-step tour and my justifications for it as we go along.
First, I use a Mac - as should everyone - so I could not exactly replicate how it will look on Vera's computers which are PC (gasp!), but this should give you the idea. So we start here in the Archives folder and you see the various archives elements: The Four Ps. For our purposes, we'll be looking at the Vera Photos element.
Here you can see that all photos are organized by year: simple enough. We'll be looking at some 2010 photos.
Inside you can see that photos are now broken down by month. This is just for the sake of example, its likely that various years will not have photos for a whole month - tragic to think. In that case, there will be no point in creating a folder for a particular month only to have it unfilled. We're going take a look at January.
So here we are in January: bitter, cold, gray, and white - just as you would expect. I decided that it would make the best sense to divide up the photos by band name with the date they played and an indicator for who was the headliner of the show. Otherwise, naming a folder like "2010-01-07 Show" is just too general and "2010-01-07 Whatever headlining band" will often be misleading. The latter because very often photographers do not shoot the headliner (as was the case with me). We don't want to name a folder of a whole show by its headlining band only to have end-users going in there and not finding what they were looking for.
Now, I really like Mac's folder highlight feature: its more visually pleasing and facilitates easier browsing. Assuming Vera's PCs offer the highlight feature, we can easily employ it to group together related folders (even though you can tell which one's are related by looking at the dates, this feature just makes it easier!) for each show then, all we need to do is alternate between gray and white. Seems simple enough. Next, we're going to take a look at the Baby Panda folder because I just so happened to be the photographer that evening. I know I know my extremely creative example "Band A" seems so much more exciting, but thats not what I invited you here today to learn about.
Here we are in the Baby Panda folder. You can see here that I've created separate folder one for me =) and one for a hypothetical second photographer. Now, one might object (as I originally did) that this would be extremely daunting for the Admin/Archives Intern to have to split up a single photographer's photo donation into different folders - forcing them to struggle to identify which band is which, if for instance, a single photographer shot (murderer!) the whole show. On the contrary, assuming we get all photographers to sign a release form, this form will provide a space for the photographer to specify which band(s) he shot. So, all the Admin/Archives Intern will have to do is refer to this release form. We're going to take a look at some of my photos because I think I'm so much better than Photographer X.
Ah yes, finally we're down the file level - the unctuous essence of it all. Here is how I'd like files to be named. Its simply common sense to at least have what the picture is of and to order them chronologically as they were shot. Even though very often Camera's will include a time stamp, I decided that its necessary to include the date in the file name. As you can see, my camera was mistakenly offset to 2009 rather than the correct year 2010. We simply cannot trust everyone's camera to always be on the correct time. Next, I'll give you the total perspective of the folder level.
Is your brain melting yet? Just for fun and to look at something even more boring than the infinitely exciting folder structure of the photo archives, I'll share with you a couple of favorite shots from this show.
Here we have Paul Gonzenbach former frontman of Oakland, CA's Jim Yoshii Pile Up performing for his new solo project Baby Panda. And next (to borrow the words of Jon Stewart) we move on to our "Moment of Zen"....
My dear friend Josiah Feinberg and cousin of Paul, playing drums in midst of his Enthousiasmos with the Muses of the Drums! A classic shot I must say so myself.
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