How do you organize your photos?

[dm788]

I am new to this thread but have been taking digital photos since the early 2000's and have over 50,000 files as of now. For most of this time, I have been using Photoshop Elements organizer and it has worked great. Every month or so I would upload all of the photos from the camera, name them with a naming scheme that works well for me, and put them into the Elements organizer. I like that because it is easy to tag photos (with people's names, events, comments, etc.) so I can easily search for photos. That worked great until a few years ago when smartphone cameras started getting really good and my wife and I take more pictures with the phones than we do with the DSLR. It makes it more difficult to constantly upload the photos from the camera and both phones while trying to maintain them on the phone as well. Also, 10 years ago I didn't have to worry about having all the photos accessible from my phone like I do now. I also like how Google Photos keeps everything, makes collages, slideshows, etc. Anyways, I would love to hear some new suggestions. I still want to keep them on the computer where I can easily tag photos so I can search for them later, print them, make slideshows, etc. since I have thousands. If there is something that automatically tags faces accurately, that would be very helpful as well. I also would like access to them from our phones. So, please let me know what you guys to do organize, tag, and view photos from different sources. Thank you!

 

[chuasam]

I use Adobe Lightroom.
I have various catalogues and I make folders for specific trips.
You can organise them by country if you travel alot to specific places.
Like one catalogue for "x country" and then subfolders for cities. Tag your meta data by cities and name of subjects...
i'm a nutter like that

 

[dennybeall]

I like the idea of loading the photos onto the pc and backup drive in a logical way such as in folder array with year and then the event folder inside of that with the photos in that folder.
When you bring the files into Lightroom they are entered in the Lightroom catalog but that doesn't move the file.

 

[dm788]

Hey guys. Sorry it took me so long to get back to this, but thanks for the suggestions. Thanks for the Lightroom suggestion. It sounds similar to the Elements program I have been using so the learning curve probably would not be too much. I imagine the facial recognition aspect is better than what I have now. Even if I use this, what are you recommendations for the other stuff I mentioned (getting pictures from the other devices, viewing them from phones, etc.)? Do I pretty much just need to still manually take them off of each device and put then in folders, and then tag them with the software? Or is there an easier way?