How do you organize your cam pics???

[j-bird]

Since I have made strides of joining the 21st century I now have a digital trail cam. As such I have started gather pictures which is great. How you you guys organize yours? Obviously I delete any of them that are false triggers or essentially of no value, but I can see this turning into hundreds of pics in just a year - how do you organize them in a way that it makes sense and you can find what your looking for later?

 

[foggy]

What is this organizational thing you speak of? I don't file.....I heap.

 

[j-bird]

What is this organizational thing you speak of? I don't file.....I heap.

That is my point foggy. I set my cam for a 3 shot burst and I have a hundred or so pics already and I want to have some sort of system before it gets out of hand. I don't have a lot of deer so I figure I better take lots of pics - maybe it will make me feel better!

Just looking for ideas - I know some of you guys run several cams and I figured maybe, just maybe, you have figured out a way to keep things organized.

 

[Terrific_tom]

I have an external hard drive and store my pictures on it. I lost a lot of pics about 7 years ago when my hard drive on computer crashed, so now I put all my pictures on the external hard drive. I just make a new folder with the date that I pull card. Example: Trailcam 5-14-2015

 

[SD51555]

Make a thread for your place on this site. That's one extra layer of backup as well. Plus it gives us something to talk about. I also put the ones I want to keep on an external hard. But a thread here not only stores them, but you can keep a timeline of your projects and reference back to them as time goes on. "When did we do ______?"

 

[biglakeba$$]

I keep it very simple

Year with subfolders of each month. I run up to 8 cameras, but I delete a lot of photos. You can only keep so many pics of baldies...

Only additional folder I make is a "cool pics" folder where I put oddball pics or neat things.

 

[Buckly]

I keep no pics of doe unless it's something unusual . I keep notes though, on fawns and doe numbers. Every year I make a folder for bucks and put any new or known bucks in there for that year. I keep the best pic of each unique buck. If a better pic comes up I replace the old one.
I usually end up with about 20 pics a year that I actually keep. I don't have clutter, I just keep what's important for my needs. Every one has different needs for their pics. I run 6 cams and have anywhere between 20 to 150 on each cam per check. I erase 99%.

 

[gwm]

I run around 10 cams. I have a name for each location / cam, such as 2nd waterhole, and have a main folder for that location. I then use sub-folders under that main folder for each month. It allows me to quickly go to the location and then see the pics for each month in that location.

2nd Waterhole
May
June
July
August
Sept.
Etc......

I usually only keep pics of bucks unless I think it's a neat pic.

 

[j-bird]

I like the idea of the location and then a folder for every month.

Is there much or any value in keeping pics of does?

My use for the mineral site and cam was to monitor antler progress and inventory bucks.

 

[John-W-WI]

Folders by year, below that - folders by month.

I nuke anything that isn't a buck or interesting.

Go get a free google drive account and store them there. Your computer can crash and they will be safe and sound on the 'cloud'.

-John

 

[tooln]

Like John does, but I back up to a flash drive. Don't trust the cloud or anyhting not in my control.

 

[phil@thesidehill]

I like the idea of the location and then a folder for every month.

Is there much or any value in keeping pics of does?

My use for the mineral site and cam was to monitor antler progress and inventory bucks.

I run between 3 and 6 cams per year. I also organize by cam location and sub folders under that. I usually keep sub folders organized by date of the card pull. So I have folder waterhole then sub folders 6-17-15, 6-24-15, 7-4-15 and so on. Additionally, I find this helps me keep track of time between card pulls....which helps me stay out and resist the temptation to barge in and "over check" the cameras. I keep the main folders separated by antler growing year so after bucks shed out I start a new year....it's kinda like hunting license year....so we are now in the 2015/2016 antler year.

I've been running cams since 2003 and I used to always keep pretty much every pic of deer and other cool animals....bears, yotes, fox, bobcat, turkey's...etc. the last few years I have started deleting more non buck pics. I do still keep doe pics...but my property's hunting strategy is predicated on keeping doe groups happy and present during daylight hours during the rut....so by becoming a student of the doe patterns I become a better informed buck hunter....during the rut. When time allows I actually keep a spreadsheet of deer "data" gleaned from the cams so that I can sort on different variables to look for patterns. It's pretty time consuming and tedious though. I had one buck a few years back that for some reason I believed to be predominately a morning visitor to my property, but when I had all my data loaded into a spreadsheet specifically for him I noticed that I was completely wrong, he came during the evenings just as much as AM's....I'm sure the reason for my incorrect assumption was because the best pics I had of him were in the AM's and they were the pics that I looked at most so sub consciencely I was thinking he was an AM deer.

 

[phil@thesidehill]

Oh yeah...I also use photobucket to store pics off my hard drive and it makes it easier to share pics on forums.

I also create separate folders for target bucks.

 

[biglakeba$$]

Main reason I dont store based on location is because my cams dont stay in the same spots all year.

 

[huthut]

Same as biglakeba$$ -- I keep my pics by year and month. I run up to 15 cams at a time and some locations are constant while others are moved to different locations regularly. I keep bucks & cool pics and delete some repetitive pics of the same buck &most baldies. I keep pics on my hard drive and back them up on a dedicated jump drive.