Photo Cataloging

I have started in on a project that will take me months to complete but this makes it a good activity for retirement. This project is cataloging all my photographs. I keep my archive of photos in a photo manager called digiKam, with most of the photos organized by year and then by month. I started this archive early in 2017 when I bought a little compact long zoom camera, the Panasonic ZS50, in advance of a trip to Iceland in fall of that year. In addition to organizing the photos by month and year, I also started tagging the photos with keywords and rating them in quality from one to five stars.

I fell off the program of tagging and rating the photos sometime in the middle of 2018, which leaves about a 7 year gap in this process. I have been working backwards to fill this in, and I have completed between July 2025 and May 2024. (I set July 2025 aside, and have just completed it. Because of my photo palette project in July, I ended up with 740 photos for the month, which made it a bear to get through.)

Is this effort going to be worth it? I think so. The rating process is an important exercise in figuring out one’s photographic style and aesthetic sensibilities, and tagging the photos helps a great deal with retrieval. The photo at right is a fun example of the latter. I wondered what I had cataloged under “Animals / pigs”, and came up with several photos of a pig enjoying the Whole Earth Festival in Davis in 2018.