Tiffany Bond wrote:
How many of you have this happen to you sometimes (or in my case, every other time)? Photographers will send you a heap of photos either on disc or through email, and tell you to pick x amount that you want edited. Then they tell you to look at the image number and make a list of all the photo numbers. Well, it turns out they've sent them all completely out of order, and there are hundreds of photos to choose from. So a lot of similar-looking pictures are scattered here and there and everywhere away from each other, which not only makes comparing them to one another impossible unless you open each individually and line them up together... but it also makes the number list confusing. If there's a photo limit, it's even worse. You end up with this list of numbers, and you can't remember which photo went with what number, so you end up having to go back and search for each number (out of order none the less) so you can double-check that's absolutely the photo you've decided on. I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I promise, it's frustrating. Sometimes, I go through and re-check a set of photos one by one several times before I'm convinced I'm not accidentally skipping over a photo I really want.

Does anyone else have this happen to them? How do you handle it and organize it in a way that doesn't make you crazy?

This IS really frustrating. I've found the best way to sort through any number of images I'm given is to make 2 additional folders. Make a "yes" folder and a "no" folder.
Put any images you immediately liked and are sure you want to take a second look at in the "yes" folder.
Put any images you immediately saw and thought "I'll never choose this," in the "no" folder.
Leave any uncertainties in the original folder.

From there you can either go through the maybe's once more for any definite yes's or no's or just move on to sifting through the yes's. It'll be much easier to sort through a bunch of images you initially liked. If you did 6 looks, you can just create sub folders in your "yes" folder and drag and drop all the images so you can look at them separately. The organization, at least for me, helps a lot.

A N D E R S O N wrote:
Not sure why it would matter if they were in order or not? My files are usually something like DSC_392, DSC,_354. So just write down 354 if you liked that one...

Edit* Maybe ask them to send over the good ones for you to choose from and remove all the junk shots. Whenever I have clients select images it's usually out of 20-30 shots that have made it past my first run through.

I'm not sure how else to explain it to you, or I would. I promise, the out-of-order-ness is definitely a confusing problem.

Adam J Caldwell wrote:
Why don't you just change your computer to list the files in order of number?

On a mac you just click "name" on the finder and it does it.

Dunno about windows.

I actually thought about finding a program or something that would just put them in order for me, but it wasn't terribly easy to find exactly what I was looking for. This method would also work for folders or disks, but not as much as files that are individually sent as a wall of text through email. I run windows, and I'm sort of technology-limited in my computer skills aside from photoshop and internet.

T A Y L O R  wrote:
This IS really frustrating. I've found the best way to sort through any number of images I'm given is to make 2 additional folders. Make a "yes" folder and a "no" folder.
Put any images you immediately liked and are sure you want to take a second look at in the "yes" folder.
Put any images you immediately saw and thought "I'll never choose this," in the "no" folder.
Leave any uncertainties in the original folder.

From there you can either go through the maybe's once more for any definite yes's or no's or just move on to sifting through the yes's. It'll be much easier to sort through a bunch of images you initially liked. If you did 6 looks, you can just create sub folders in your "yes" folder and drag and drop all the images so you can look at them separately. The organization, at least for me, helps a lot.

This actually makes a decent amount of sense. Unless they're not in a folder to begin with. But I could always just save the ones I like to folders as I go along, and leave the ones I don't like untouched in my email.

Tiffany Bond wrote:
I'm not sure how else to explain it to you, or I would. I promise, the out-of-order-ness is definitely a confusing problem.

It would help if you gave us examples of the filenames in the "heap" of image files you get from a photographer.

Adam J Caldwell wrote:
Why don't you just change your computer to list the files in order of number?

On a mac you just click "name" on the finder and it does it.

Dunno about windows.

It's the same for Windows in Windows Explorer.

A N D E R S O N wrote:
Not sure why it would matter if they were in order or not? My files are usually something like DSC_392, DSC,_354. So just write down 354 if you liked that one...

Yep. I usually reset the camera's filename counter at the start of every shoot (DSC_00001) but it reall doesn't matter if I do. They're still in numerical order as I shot them.

As standard practice, the first thing I do after uploading from card to computer is bulk-rename the images via PS Bridge. My naming convention is: Modelname_Date-of-shoot_sequence#

Example: SUSAN_20130502_001

That way there's no confusion as to the nature of the file if I misplace a file in the wrong folder.

Tiffany Bond wrote:

This actually makes a decent amount of sense. Unless they're not in a folder to begin with. But I could always just save the ones I like to folders as I go along, and leave the ones I don't like untouched in my email.

Not sure what email client you're using, but in Gmail I'm given the option to "download all files" and then I just go from there.