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For pure organization, I found IMatch to be absolutely great. While I did switch to Lightroom last year to take advantage of the raw processing workflow, I found the management aspect of IMatch to be much better. (I had used it for 5+ years before the switch.) While it is Windows only and does use a proprietary database in the back, it's quite straightforward to export categories (basically hierarchical keywords) and custom properties into IPTC metadata. There's also a Visual Basic-based scripting engine allowing plugins, either written yourself or from other users.

I definitely wouldn't recommend that. I'd get a specialty utility like Flash Pipe or Downloader Pro. I'm sure there's freeware and open source programs out there, those are just ones that I have used and like. But since the OP is almost certainly talking about a large number of photos, I wouldn't recommend just copying.

After they're onto the hard drive, you'd want to use something like imatch there are other good ones out there both free and commercial, but I've used this one and found it to be quite good. If you're generating enough images for the OP's question, then it's time to get a management program.

After that I personally like to burn a copy to DVD or some sort of WORM media just in case I get fat fingered. And the copy on my hard disk gets backed up to backblaze for my offsite requirement.

It's a tremendous pain, but if you're dealing with a large enough number of photos to ask this sort of question, it really is important to do those steps or something equivalent.

Yes it costs money, but it does a ton of things. It keeps a database for your tags/whatever but you can have it apply any and all info it knows about your pictures to the EXIF/IPTC fields. There's a ton of scriptability and you can export the DB to tons of formats (and define your own format). Hey just looked at the website and it supports XMP as well (another metadata in the file thing).

http://www.photools.com/

No I get nothing for this (haven't even looked to see if I could). Satisfied customer.

It's realtively inexpensive at $60, and the latest version was perhaps a little slow to market.... BUT!

http://photools.com/

IMatch is exactly what you're looking for. It can import/export IPTC data, EXIF data, and there's a scripting language that you could use to import/export your own database. Lots of tagging options (I have my family tree, literally as a tree of tags, locations, events, ...) and you can then tag all your photos with as many tags as you want.

I'm making this brief since I'm busy, but you can try out the free trial. That's what I did before buying it and the trial is what convinced me to go this route rather than the pile of other options I had tried that were either overpriced for my needs, or didn't meet my needs at all.

Unfortunately is windows only, but is full of features.
It has the possibility of multiple categories assignment and the categories can be organized in hierarchical mode. You can even assign keywords. Categories and keywords (with all the file metadata) can be used for searching images, for example you can do the search you cite but you can put even restrinction on file size, resolution and others attribute.
It has two ways of decoupling the db data from the program : the first is using IPTC (it can export categories and keyword to IPTC), the second is using a XML export function wich will export all the db info in a documented XML format.
It has even batch processing and a scripting engine (in Real Basic) wich can access all the program classes. ( http://photools.com/ )

use camerabit's photo mechanic to transfer to your computer and select photos. http://www.camerabits.com/

Use iMatch (nothing to do with apple) to store and create database for your photos http://www.photools.com/im0002.php You'd be amazed by the list of features and how powerful the program is while using very little resources.

Finally, use Photoshop for any sort of editing.

I do photojournalism ($$$K in digital equipment) and fine art photography (traditional dark room) for a living. I supposed that's "professional" level.

Aperture can kiss my ass.

iMatch has a basic language scripting built in, can control other programs, can handle RAW, hundreds of thousands of images in its database, simple image editing, yada yada yada..... it's a mature app.

The programmer is very responsive and active on the user forum.

As an amateur photographer that needed to manage 1500 to 2000 images monthly, I evaluated several Windows based image management solutions and found IMatch to be an excellent solution. The tool provides robust cataloging and searching, plus provides easy automation for common tasks like image scaling, cropping and watermarking. While not the most robust solution for large and complicated scripting tasks, the VBA like scripting language it provides is easy enough to use to dump all relevant data out in XML so as to build custom scripts/applications in whatever external languages you desire.

Hands down this is the most useful application I've purchased in the last couple of years, and while I cannot claim with certainty that it would scale to managing the volume of images mentioned, it certainly seems capable of it. An evaluation version of the tool is available at the site and the price is great for the level of functionality it provides.

It's not free (as in beer, or as in speech) but IMatch rules, and you can output your catalog in xml if you want when you decide to move to a different piece of software. Storing it in a database while it's in use makes sense from a performance standpoint, so no plain text storage there, but extracting to plain text is possible.

One of the best pieces of software out there, bar none. I bought it before a single day was up with my free trial, and haven't looked back. If Adobe Album got you excited with it's promise, make sure you have a spare pair of pants when you try out IMatch (Ok, that was crass and uncalled for.)

Seriously though, I can't speak highly enough about it.

I did try out about a dozen different photo cataloging programs (including picasa) before deciding on IMatch. None of the others were even close.

I don't work for the guy who writes it or anything, I just love the software.

I tried Picasa out, and was underwhelmed by it's functionality.

I wound up buying iMatch for categorizing/organizing my photos. It's an awesome tool. If you're a windows user on Slashdot, and want to organize your photos, it's probably the software for you.

I literally tried dozens of programs over the span of a week or so, and found fault with each one - until I found iMatch. I was so impressed with it's abilities, I bought it less than a day into my 30 day trial.

There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.

Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.

The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.

1. Acquisition: getting the pictures in, whether from a flatbed scanner, a slide/negative scanner, PhotoCD or digital cameras. This also encompasses automated primary cleanup done from within a scanner driver
2. Reviewing: deleting dud pictures, and if you have duplicates, selecting only the best one. Getting rid of the chaff early is a major step in improving your productivity, but it is difficult to be objective about one's own photos
3. Asset management:Cataloguing your pictures in a database, with categories, captions and all. Professional organizations like photo agencies go to a very high level of detail as this is the key to their business, but this is also essential for anyone contemplating building an imae collection of more than 1000 pictures or so.
4. Editing:You can go hog-wild with Photoshop or the GIMP, although since this is a very labor-intensive process, it is usually done to a small minority of pictures
5. Output:getting prints made, but also publishing to the Web

What hardware you use for acquisition controls the final quality of your results, so don't skimp on a cheap scanner, use slide or negative scanners rather than flatbed scans from prints, and use digital cameras like the Canon D60 or Nikon D100 that have larger sensors with less thermal noise rather than point and shoots. Using a alide/negative scanner is a very slow and laborious process, and a better option is to have scans made by a photo lab. Avoid the low quality Kodak PictureCD and opt instead for PhotoCD, which has higher resolution and scans made more carefully.

For most of the other phases, the choice of software does not matter very much and will indeed change over time. It is essential to get asset management right up-front, however. The solution you use must be

1. scalable to accomodate an expanding collection of photgraphs
2. open: you don't want to be locked in a proprietary database format, at the very least you should have the ability to export the database to some kind of text format
3. flexible, allowing you to enter as much or as little metadata as you require for any given photo
4. Offer powerful retrieval capabilities: you should be able to run queries like "find all the photos of me and my grandma in front of the Golden Gate bridge", or full-text caption search (if you use captions, not very common because of the amount of work involved)
5. standards compliant, the key standards being EXIF (picture metadata like aperture and exposure) and IPTC (the press photographers' standard for captions)

The best program I've found so far is IMatch (Windows only, I'm afraid), mostly because of its incredibly flexible category system, that works like set theory with multiple inclusion relationships and boolean operators.

Finally, the most comprehensive description of a Photoshop editing workflow is available here on Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site.

1. Acquisition: getting the pictures in, whether from a flatbed scanner, a slide/negative scanner, PhotoCD or digital cameras. This also encompasses automated primary cleanup done from within a scanner driver
2. Reviewing: deleting dud pictures, and if you have duplicates, selecting only the best one. Getting rid of the chaff early is a major step in improving your productivity, but it is difficult to be objective about one's own photos
3. Asset management:Cataloguing your pictures in a database, with categories, captions and all. Professional organizations like photo agencies go to a very high level of detail as this is the key to their business, but this is also essential for anyone contemplating building an imae collection of more than 1000 pictures or so.
4. Editing:You can go hog-wild with Photoshop or the GIMP, although since this is a very labor-intensive process, it is usually done to a small minority of pictures
5. Output:getting prints made, but also publishing to the Web

What hardware you use for acquisition controls the final quality of your results, so don't skimp on a cheap scanner, use slide or negative scanners rather than flatbed scans from prints, and use digital cameras like the Canon D60 or Nikon D100 that have larger sensors with less thermal noise rather than point and shoots. Using a alide/negative scanner is a very slow and laborious process, and a better option is to have scans made by a photo lab. Avoid the low quality Kodak PictureCD and opt instead for PhotoCD, which has higher resolution and scans made more carefully.

For most of the other phases, the choice of software does not matter very much and will indeed change over time. It is essential to get asset management right up-front, however. The solution you use must be

1. scalable to accomodate an expanding collection of photgraphs
2. open: you don't want to be locked in a proprietary database format, at the very least you should have the ability to export the database to some kind of text format
3. flexible, allowing you to enter as much or as little metadata as you require for any given photo
4. Offer powerful retrieval capabilities: you should be able to run queries like "find all the photos of me and my grandma in front of the Golden Gate bridge", or full-text caption search (if you use captions, not very common because of the amount of work involved)
5. standards compliant, the key standards being EXIF (picture metadata like aperture and exposure) and IPTC (the press photographers' standard for captions)

The best program I've found so far is IMatch (Windows only, I'm afraid), mostly because of its incredibly flexible category system, that works like set theory with multiple inclusion relationships and boolean operators.

Finally, the most comprehensive description of a Photoshop editing workflow is available here on Michael Reichmann's Luminous Landscape site.

First, I'm currently using a databasing package that I came upon after almost giving up and writing my own. I'd tried scores of different software, but nothing could give me access to a lot of photos, deal with off-line storage easily, and give me powerful databasing/scripting tools useful for finding that important photo. It's called I-Match and can be found at Photools.

The software won't do much for preservation except for its good offline capabilities.

For that, I store photos in a simple system on my hardrive. I break up the directories into 650MB sections with subdirectories that are named with the date as in, "20010927_Wedding". That directory contains subdirectories named "processed", "web", and whatever else makes sense at the time, but the top level contains completely unmodified files in .jpg format.

Now I can copy these directories wholesale to CD-Rs.

Here's the first big point: media sizes always get bigger. So in a few years, I won't duplicate those CD-Rs (there's already two copies of everything right now). Instead, I'll copy them to DVD-R (after they have time to work their bugs/formats out). The DVD-Rs hold a few more CDs worth than the equivalent CD-Rs. A few years from then, my holo-bubble-memory or whatever will hold a few DVD-Rs worth. So in all, I should still be carrying around a relatively small collection of archival data disks despite the growing amount of data.

As for formats... I have a Canon G1 and it has a great RAW format. IMatch even has support for it. There isn't a chance in hell that I would store anything in it without also storing an equivalent high-quality .jpg. JPG is like text. It's going to be around for a long time to come simply because there is so much content in that format already.

From this discussion, however, I will modify my procedure slightly. I'm going to start including a tar'd, bzipped2 version of the xpm tools on each of the CDs.

As for prints, I have no desire for my prints of digital images (so far) to last. The archival copy is the copy on the CD-R, not the print. I _want_ the print to degrade over a few years - it'll keep things fresh. Just so long as I can get at the original data (and the processed version that was used to make that print). Of course... there are artifacts that the printing process introduces that can be considered part of the art....

http://www.photools.com/

windows only though