How do you organize your photos?

[bratkinson]

In my opinion, using date as the highest-level qualifier makes sense in the short term, but for long term storage, I prefer descriptive folder titles title like: "Family Vacation 2011" or "Annas' 90th Birthday". It's easier for me to remember "who" or "what" was the purpose of the shoot rather than "was it 4 years or 5 years ago I did ...?".

In each folder, while doing post processing, I have RAW, After Lightroom, After PS, and Final folders. I find some of the PhotoShop Elements features are easier for me to use, and, it offers some abilities that Lightroom 3 does not. Once I've completed all my processing, and printed/presented/made CDs/whatever with the shoot, everything except the Final folder gets wiped out. The odds of my wanting to go back to the RAW or any intermediate-processing folder or use a non-final photo are nil or, at least, extremely unlikely. For what it's worth, I just finished building a screaming fast computer, and so now I put my 'in process' work on one of my SSD drives. I'm still awestruck on how fast I can transfer RAW+JPG from the card to SSD, and then do all my processing from SSD. Only the Final folder then gets moved to long term hard drive storage, and backed up on my regular backup cycle.

For what it's worth, though, my storage and processing procedure are continually evolving. I didn't have a clue how fast things could go, for example, with a new computer and SSD drives. So I changed where I put things to work on. I'm always open to reducing my processing time.

 

[slackercruster]

Thanks for all the feedback. Great ideas! I decided to use the date last and the name first like bratkinson. Tried dates first, but didn't like it for my use.

What about you unorganized guys? Anyone else out there like me with a mess of jumbled up pix?

How do you pros deal with trash? Do you keep it all or trash so-so stuff?

The pix are all for me only. I don't make $$ at it. So I can trash and keep what I like. I usually look at pix 3 or 4 times or more before trashing. But I do trash really messed up shots pretty quick.

 

[12sndsgood]

Oh i'm unorganised, i'm getting more organized as I go now that I'm seeing so many folders and such I see the need for it. I still need to take a weekend and go thru what I have and get better organized. My system is also changing as I find out what works for me and what doesn't.

 

[slackercruster]

OK, I looked up the DAM book at AMZ. I can get the 2005 version for .01 to .35 plus shipping. For my half-ass use is that good enough? Or do I need to spring for the current $25 copy?

As I said, am no pro. So just looking to clean up and less stress with the files.

(Library dos not have this one..thought they would?)

 

[TCampbell]

If you're interested in photo management than you should probably be looking at Aperture or Lightroom. These are both RAW workflow & digital asset management apps.

There's a lot of advantages to using one of these. They don't replace Photoshop... mostly they take over the management of the images and they handle the vast majority of the adjustments that you'd apply to images. You'll still need Photoshop when you need to do a heavy edit, but they are designed to integrate so that editing the occasional image in Photoshop is fairly seamless.

What I like about Aperture (and I'm guessing Lightroom allows you to do the same thing but I don't know that app very well) is that the app is already designed for the photographer who shoots so much that they overflow a hard drive and need more disks. Aperture allows you to manage offline images. Basically the "library" knows about all your events and it can create thumbnails or previews (a preview is a low-quality JPEG which is big enough that you can see what the image is to know if you found the right image, but it does NOT contain all the data.) It knows which offline disk you used to store the original master images (these are RAW workflow apps and while they can manage JPEGs they're really optimized for RAW workflow.) When you locate an image, it'll tell you which offline volume has the masters so you can connect that drive and bring the image online to use it.

I think both Apple and Adobe have 30 day trial licenses you can get to let you check out these apps.

 

[slackercruster]

I got LR. Don't like it to organize. Just do some PP with it.

 

[Joshonator]

I organize by topics. For example I have a folder for foreign trips (outiside the country) and domestic trips (inside) and then in these folders have a foldeer for each trip. I also have folders for general macro, still life, ect. I have a folder for unsorted pictures for when I import bunch of different pictures on my card and then distribute them from there. Most of the time I organize them in the folders myself and then synchronize with lightroom.

 

[SoCalTiger]

I organize by major topics and then year then YYYY-MM-DD date with a short summary suffix. So an example structure would look like this:

\My Pictures\Family\2012\2012-08-06 San Diego Zoo