Best Practice For Creating Albums - Coming from Picasa

[MattSpew]

I'm coming from Picasa, RIP Picasa, and I've started recreating my albums in ACDSee 9 Pro and had a terrible thought that I'm going it wrong; with around 160 albums, I want to get it right from the get go.

My process has been for example....
1. Create a set called "Holidays",
2. Create a collection inside "Holidays" called "yyyy-mm - Skiing in made-up place",
3. Start adding the best photos to the collection, edit/process photos, share.

I just want to make sure I should be using "Sets" and "Collections" for albums.

[Glen Barrington]

To me, I would likely use a collection for something like this. Possibly a Smart Collection, if I could identify a common search attribute that could be used to identify all the photos that would go into such a collection.

[MattSpew]

What about your album? Unless I've missed something, Sets and Collections seems to be the old way to create Albums.

Not every photo is worth of being in an album. I also haven't tagged any photo, nor do I plan to.

[Glen Barrington]

What about your album? Unless I've missed something, Sets and Collections seems to be the old way to create Albums.

Not every photo is worth of being in an album. I also haven't tagged any photo, nor do I plan to.

Everyone uses ACDSee a bit differently, that's one of the reasons I like it. It has a rich management set that allows for people to find their own useage rules.

Sorry, I don't do Albums, I've a few collections though, and some special use folders that contain copies of photos from the database. I want the database to be my repository, and any auxillary folders to facilitate special situations.

In my mind, the ACDSee 'Tag' is not a permanent thing, like a Keyword or a Category., but rather a temporary marker for resolving maintenance issues.

For instance, let's say I'm writing an article for my blog and want to find some suitable photos for illustrations. In that case, as I reviewed photos, the photos that I thought might work for the article would get tagged. Then I would create a (temporary) smart collection of tagged candidate photos for secondary review, untagging any photos that were weaker than others. Eventually , I would winnow out the weaker photos for illustration purposes and then move copies of the strongest photos to the article folder.

When I was done with that task, I would then "untag" the remaining photos.

[MattSpew]

Thanks for the reply, my process of temp-tagging photos that might go in an album is very similar; so I'll keep doing that.

I start moving album to actual folders like you're doing; it has the added benefit of my albums being independent of the ACDSee.
Which is a big win for me; I wouldn't need to rebuild all my albums, like I'm currently doing, if I changed apps. (Stupid Picasa..... Smelly Google!)

Something like;
1. Import from SD,
2. Tag the photos I like,
3. Review and develop/edit tagged photos,
4. Copy tagged photos to Album folder using ACDSee,
5. Add tagged photos to a Collections/Set,
6. Sync with my online albums,
7. Untag,
8. Have scotch.

That way I've got my photos in albums on my NAS and inside ACDSee.

[alfounet]

Hey MattSpew,

I have the same question, also coming from Picasa where the photo editing was easy but somewhat limited, but the virtual album and online upload management was incredibly easy compared to any alternative I found so far.

In your process, are you creating copies of pictures, ending up with the same file at different places?

I'm using Ultimate 8, so maybe it's only a matter of wording (I'm not sure what a collection/set is), but here's my process so far:
1. Move from SD to local folders, one folder per day and/or topic (yyyy-mm-dd - Skiing in made-up place)
2. Open the folder in ACDSee, sort, delete the blurry and unusable, edit and "develop" the ones I plan to put in the album (mostly the raws, I shot in raw+jpeg). Some won't be added in the album but I keep them anyway, not really sure why. Maybe because megabytes are kind of cheap.
3. In the "Manage" view, there's the convenient icon telling if a picture has been edited/developed. There's however no way to select only those, so I select those manually, and add a sub-Category of "Albums" to them (Set Categories / Albums / Skiing in made-up place).

At this stage I still have the pictures in the initial folders, and virtual albums thanks to the Category system.
However I didn't figure out the next steps yet.
I would need to:
- upload the pictures online, but ideally without having to save as/export the edited raw files into jpeg, nor resizing them (no need to upload 5456*3632px). Picasa did that well as I didn't even have to think about it.
- once it's done, move the folders from my laptop to my NAS. That shouldn't be a problem, however I don't know how ACDSee will react when it couldn't find the pictures of the Categories I created. I'll see.
- have a beer, although several others would have been spent in the process already

How do you "sync" with your online albums? Do you use ACDSee 365, or other places like SmugMug, Zenfolio ...?
That actually adds up to my problems, I currently live in China where the Internet is ... limited, and when Flickr and Google Phots are totally blocked, other websites might be very slow if there's no mirror or good CDN in Asia.

Cheers!

[MattSpew]

Hi alfounet,
No, I don't create copies of files, I use the Collections and Sets built into ACDSee

The process I've settled on since getting ACDSee is;
1. Import from SD,
2. Tag the photos I like and permanently delete rubbish/failed photos,
3. Review and develop/edit tagged photos,
5. Add tagged photos to a new or existing Collections/Set,
6. Upload new photos to Flickr,
7. Untag,

As of yet, I haven't found a way to 'sync' albums with Flickr. I just manually upload whole new albums or new photos for existing albums.
The built-in Flickr function handles any resizing for me.

I bought ACDSee outright and don't use their cloud stuff.

[AdkMike]

As a photo hobbyist, and having used Picasa for years, I too recently started looking for a Picasa replacement as my photo management system. I selected ACDSee. Album management is very important to me so that is why I was drawn to this thread.

I would like to thank the original poster and all those that followed. This thread was a terrific starting point for my learning of ACDSee but this evolved into a rather different process as I figured out how to do what was important to me (which was so natural under Picasa).

I feel the most valuable asset of Picasa was its simplicity in allowing one to grab photos and videos from many folders, add captions to photos, rearrange the sequence of photos and videos, then export the whole lot to a new folder with a prepended sequence number, in order to preserve order for import into other applications. And all of this would happen without the modification of the original photo files (except that the caption is modified in the original file).

I would now like to share with everyone what I use as a similar workflow under ACDSee.

Disclaimer: While experimenting with my procedure, I advise you to use backed up files and new folders to avoid any unintended consequences.

First: This is how I configured the display (ACDSee defaults were already quite comfortable to me):

1. Under Panes: turn on Catalog, Folders and Properties Panes
2. Set display conditions under each thumbnail using Tools/Options…/File List/Thumbnail Info/Choose Thumbnail Info, select in this sequence:
   1. File Properties/Filename
   2. EXIF: Image: Date/Time Original
   3. IPTC: Content: Description, setting 3 lines

Here is my ACDSee Workflow for making a new exportable photo album like you can in Picasa. (I have ACDSee Professional, but I think this can all be done with ACDSee Standard)

1. In the Catalog Pane, Right-Click on “Albums” and create a new album. (Actually I create a two-level hierarchy of albums, where the uppermost layer is the year and the next layer is event/subject within that year.) ACDSee sorts these albums alphabetically so choose names wisely.
2. In the Folders Pane, navigate to each folder containing photos/videos for your album. Select photos/videos or groups of them. Then Right Click/Set Categories/ Albums/AlbumName. These photos are now in your new album. Continue until you have finished (you can always go back later and add more photos/videos to the album). Sidenote: Just below and to the right of each photo/video is a checkmark that you can select. This functions very much like the “starring” in Picasa. In the Catalog Pane, navigate to Tagged under Special Items to find all these tagged items.
3. After adding photos/videos to your album, In the Catalog Pane, select your album. Then, in the Manage Pane, manually sort your photos and videos by drag and drop.
4. Then add/modify captions on photos using the IFPC Description field (if you set the display options as indicated above, the captions will be displayed below each thumbnail in the Manage Pane). To add/modify captions, click on any image. In Properties Pane, open up the IPTC tab and enter/ edit captions in the Description field. Note: the captions will be added to the original image file in the original folder.
5. As necessary, go back to your original folders and add additional photos/videos to your album, rearrange the album thumbnails further, edit captions and so on until you are satisfied with your album. (Videos can’t have captions like images do).
6. Once you are satisfied with your work, let’s add a sequence number to all photos and videos. Do this by selecting everything in the album. Then in the Properties Pane, display the ACDSee Metadata. Select any field (I will use the Notes field for my example) and type the following, without the quotes: “Seq Num <000>”. This will insert, into the Notes field of each selected photo/video, a field with the values Seq Num 000, Seq Num 001, Seq Num 002, Seq Num 003 and so on for each. (You can verify this by selecting just one photo/video at a time and viewing this field).
7. Next, select all photos and videos in the folder. Then do a right-click, Copy To Folder. Create a new folder and select it as the destination. (I advise you to have a well thought out folder tree where you organize your exported folders.)
8. Then, in ACDSee Folders Pane, navigate to your newly created destination folder. At the top of the Manage Pane select sort. Under the “more” selection, you can set up a sort based on the value in the ACDSee Metadata Notes field. This will sequence the photos/videos in the same sequence as was in your original album!
9. Lastly you will want to rename all photos/videos with a prepended number sequence. Select all in your destination folder, Right Click, Batch, Rename. Set the template to “###_*” (no quotes). Each photo/video file will be renamed with a sequence number prepended to the filename.
10. One last problem you may have noticed. If you go back to your album, you will see two copies of each photo/video – the original and the one in your destination folder. To remove the destination folder photos/videos: go to your destination folder, select all, then right click, Set Categories, albums, album name. Since it is already in the album, this causes the items to be removed from the album.

In Windows File Explorer sort the files alphabetically. If you want to send your photos to a Facebook “album” then startup Facebook in a browser, within your account, create an album there with a corresponding name, then upload. When the Facebook file upload selection window opens, navigate to your exported folder, all files are sorted alphabetically (by the new prepended sequence number) and will be uploaded to the Facebook Album in this same sequence! (However Facebook does not respect sequence order for videos – they are always placed at the end of the Facebook album). Photo captions (IPTC Description field) are visible in Facebook when you select each individual photo for display.

There you have it – my main work flow! After using ACDSee for a couple months, I’m now convinced that it is quite versatile if you give it enough time.

To move photos in a Picasa album into ACDSee, I open up Picassa and add a tag corresponding to the album name to all files in an album. Then in ACDSee, I search for all photos with this tag and group them into an album. Unfortunately, you cannot preserve the same sequence you had in Picasa – so you will have to manually drag and drop to recreate that sequence. (Note: With Picasa, I never used tags, but now with ACDSee, I am experiencing how my workflow can make use of them quite extensively)

Let me know if this works for you and any edits I need to do to clean up this post.

[senatorsrule]

Also a Picasa convert to ACDSee Pro. ACD is so feature rich I've only started to learn some of the many features from reading this forum.

Sharing my simple system that I had used in Picasa and feel free to critic. I don't create albums but dynamically generate ones as required using this method.

1) Upload photo/vids and organized year/month/day
2) Delete all unusable items
3) Immediately rate the great stuff as 3,4,5.
4) Upon having the ratings I can dynamically create an album filtered by rating + folder range. Filter for just the 5 for absolute must share. Filter both 4 and 5 for a slightly larger album, and filter all 3,4,5 ratings for everything if online space/audience attention span is long enough.
5) You can select all and categorize them to an album.

This method ensures I can regenerate copies of albums as long as I don't tinker the ratings later.

I am starting to Categorize/Keyword my photo/vids to be able to do more complex filtering for album generation (everything 5 rating + birthdays + date range + person) but haven't really needed to do that for my needs. Maybe one day I need to build an album of 5 ratings of everything of my children category from year x to year y?