• Untitled Document

    Join us on March 29rd, 7pm EST

    for the CBEC Virtual Meeting

    All EYO members and followers are welcome to join the fun and get to know the guest speaker!

    See the link below for login credentials and join us!

    March Meeting Info

    (dismiss this notice by hitting 'X', upper right)

Boat Photo Organization--"Systematically Photograph Everything"

Christian Williams

E381 - Los Angeles
Senior Moderator
Blogs Author
Another “obvious” one that I tend to forget. Systematically photograph everything! Especially in states of disassembly. E.g. old battle scars might be revealed beneath the bottom paint. A year or two later, you might be thinking, “Hmm, how exactly did that thing go together?” And you can just open the files for a look.
--Toddster, 2018


Right-o. But how to find them?

Cell phones changed everything in boat maintenance. Many of us now have thousands of pictures of absolutely no apparent value to anybody, but which are in fact worth many a man-hour for all of us. They show a shadowy mess under a sink, or a tangle of wires, or an obscure bump in a bilge. Gold!

Filing them so we can retrieve them is easier now than ever before, but--my photo organizer is obsolete.

(Picasa, a free product from Google. Works very well, but unfortunately no longer supported or available.)

My technique

Every time I have boat detail photos on the iPhone I immediately download and sort them. (I'm not in "the cloud". Uploading probably better).

I have preexisting folders with names like "Bilge," "Compass rebuild," "Cabin lighting" "DC panel" and so on. I sort new photos into existing folders, many of which have 50 shots. If it's a new topic ("Helm Jump Seat"), I start a new folder.

Here's the key: delete all duplicates ruthlessly and immediately, and pare the batch down to essentials. Rename key photos so they can be found by computer search if all else fails.

But in general, when you need to find that series of photos from your chain locker rebuild five years ago, they should be in the folder "Chain Locker Rebuild."

Also: It is also surprisingly useful to just take 200 pictures of the boat, labeled "bow" stern" "quarterberth" etc.

That's because it's impossible to remember stuff on your own yacht. How high above the deck is the fitting for the boom vang? Is that deck plate 3" or 4"? Do I have a drainage hole on the outside of the Dorade box like everybody else? Are my cockpit drain hoses crossed?

A detailed photo record of the existing boat--stem to stern, engine room, steering gear, under the toilet, inside the hanging locker--backs up your memory.

Or, more often, proves that you apparently have no memory left at all.

So: what photo organizers are people using today?
 
Last edited:

bgary

Advanced Beginner
Blogs Author
So: what photo organizers are people using today?

Like you, I download photos off my phone pretty frequently. I copy them onto my computer and into folders in a "one-drive" - this is a free Microsoft thing that "looks" just like a regular folder on your computer, but the contents of that folder automagically sync through the cloud and are available on any device you use. What that means in practice is that once I have copied the photos into my "one-drive", I can get to them on my phone, on my work computer, on my home computer, on the iPad on the boat, wherever.

And, yes, organizing them is hard. I've found myself with two overlapping and somewhat duplicative approaches
-- organized by topic-area (rig, deck, sails, interior, engine, etc) and
-- organized by project (2016 mast-rehab project, 2017 water-pump project, 2018 winch project, etc)
-- oh, plus "event" folders (2018 rendezvous, Rebel's first cruise...)

Yeah, it means that in some instances I have copies of the same photo in different folders... but I'd rather have that than not be able to find any copy when I am looking.

One of the first things I did when I got the keys was take a bunch (probably 200!) photos, of everything I could think of, from every possible angle. Ostensibly so I could put things back together after I'd taken them apart, but they've proven to be useful over the long run. Just opened the folder this morning to look at something (do my stanchion bases have a set-screw or a machine-screw to hold the stanchion in place?... turns out, it's a round-head machine screw.)

$.02
Bruce
 

toddster

Curator of Broken Parts
Blogs Author
I think I'm still inhibited by old habits (the cost of kodachrome and processing) and not used to "free" imaging. Whereas I have come to realize that many younger people I know seem to casually and automatically record almost everything. "Wait... are you videoing us? Why?"

Anyway, with iPhone, every image is (can be) automatically stored in the cloud. The drawback is that deleting unwanted images is a bit tedious. Too bad Siri isn't as good at automatically recognizing parts of the boat as she is at recognizing people's faces. However, since every image is also filed by location, it's not too hard to sift the database for only images taken at the marina. Or a particular date (from the log book, right?). It's also not hard to type in keywords for images, but it would be easier if you could say them while taking the photos and have them automatically filed. Heck even my (relatively old) Nikon can store voice notes with photos, but I don't remember how to do it, off hand, and they are "dumb" - not searchable.

Edit: To clarify, instead of storing things in topical folders, (although I do have some of those) everything is in one big database ("photos") that you can query by date, location, face, or keyword. There are more complexities to it, but I probably don't know them all. When I work on a project (for work) I put edited copies of relevant images into that project folder, then paste them into documents as needed. But this is probably an old-man thing. The Apple Way is to insert them into documents directly from the media libraries, so they remain linked. I have never really got clear on the difference between "copy and paste" and "insert media," but I keep imagining that one day my electronic log book and maintenance logs will have relevant photos and sketches - maybe even GPS tracks and instrument data - dropped right in effortlessly.
 
Last edited:
Top