How do you store your files / RAWs?

i tend to work with project. each project has a folder. then there is a subfolder for the work prints, then one for the ones i print. every file has four back ups each on it's own external drive.

i then print out a contact sheet and print that out , using plain office type paper, it has the same name as the project file. that way i can view all the files in the folder and decided which i want to convert from raw and go from there. the contact sheet is a hold over from many years in the darkroom which i find easy and natural for me.
 
I usually store my pictures in order of when they were taken, so I have 12 folders from January - December,

Hmmm, That'd probably be neater than my system, I should change whilst I've still got realatively few folders.

I've got a drive dedicated to my pics, and under there folders January08, February08, etc. From there, my camera automatically saves images in folders by date anyway, so I just copy the folders directly from the camera, then each days pics have their own folder.

Processed JPEGs then get their own folder based on subject, "Haydns 7th Birthday", "Cocos Holiday" etc on a seperate drive. (This keeps the wife well away from the RAW files, she can just use the drive that's got JPEGs)
 
My Pictures. Categories (animals, abstracts, etc) and put them in there.

I have never been able to sort by date and date only. I never would remember when I took that one picture of the dog in the tree. (horrible example).

I have all pictures, RAW and JPEG conversion in the same place. If there are RAW files in the animals category, and I needed a JPEG version, its going to be right next to the RAW one. Makes them easy to find and I know right then if I have a JPEG version of it or not.

~Michael~
 
I have a single folder for RAW, one for film, one for slides, one for edited and one for posted when I edit something for the web. Personally I would not be able to work with a date folder system as I am not sure 3 years later what month I shot something, and a subject folder system doesn't work because I sometimes have overlapping subjects and do not want to keep duplicates of my originals around.

I let Lightroom and its keywords keep everything organized for me.

I back up everything to at least 2 separate locations.


There is a book that was recommended to me called The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (By Peter Krogh and published O'Rielly) that discusses this subject, if you are interested in diving deeper into it.
 
I hope this isn't considered a hijack, but this discussion brings a question to mind.
Do you think that jpg format, or even each camera's raw format will be around forever ?

What I'm getting at, is say 30 years down the road, you want to look at a picture that you stored in jpg, but by then who knows what Operating systems will look like, and what kind of image formats will be around ? jpg may be so antiquated by then, you can't find a program to read them.

Has anyone given this any thought or am I just being uber paranoid ?
 
My Pictures. Categories (animals, abstracts, etc) and put them in there.

I have never been able to sort by date and date only. I never would remember when I took that one picture of the dog in the tree. (horrible example).

I have all pictures, RAW and JPEG conversion in the same place. If there are RAW files in the animals category, and I needed a JPEG version, its going to be right next to the RAW one. Makes them easy to find and I know right then if I have a JPEG version of it or not.

~Michael~
That's me, except for the RAW and conversion stuff. I can't do RAW. I too would be lost to find the one tree or weird bug if it was tossed into a dated folder. Large groups of pictures of events would be fine in dated folders, but that odd single shot here and there would be lost over time.

Here's what my folders look like....

Folders.jpg


I have all my original images in these folders. They are on a 2nd hard drive, which is nearly full of stuff thus I need a new one. I save edited images on a different drive/folder system seperate from the main folder I have the originals in.
 
Good idea with the screenshot. Here's my RAWs folder:
CaptureRAWfolders.jpg

When I upload to the computer, it automatically goes in the RAWs folder, I just have to move it to the correct year and month.

The processed ones are organized by subject, there's way too many folders to show here though...lol.
 
Good idea with the screenshot.
Well, if my system sucks, at least I had a good idea of showing a screenshot of my system, hehehe :D

When I upload to the computer, it automatically goes in the RAWs folder, I just have to move it to the correct year and month.
I have a specific folder for uploading to the computer as well. The folder shown in my screenshot above called "New to Sort". I upload to there, then have a handful of folders with my daughter's names and other common subjects that I initially sort them into. This way, I can use a program I downloaded to batch rename them with the shot date and subject in the filename. Other non-common subjects, I manually add the subject, then batch rename the date on the beginning of the filenames. From there, they are put in the individual folders by subject in the root "Photos" folder.

Seems kind of long to do all that, but it is quick work with batch renaming.
 
My ingestion program, Photo Mechanic, lets me assign a folder to the files that I ingest that is automatically tagged with the date and the project name, that goes into a larger folder, one for my work for the campus newspaper, one for work for clients, and one for my personal work. For folders that have a lot of projects, I will organize by month as well. After I make my selections, I move them into a 'picks' subfolder. When everything is done, I output the jpegs, upload them to my site, then move everything into an external HD for storage.
 
I use iPhoto and albums within it, however I hope to get Lightroom or Aperture soon. Which one though !! ?

I guess this would answer the original pic aswell

Light room 2!!! I find its far better then aperture... it organizes the pics for you kinda like iphoto but you can actually go into the folder... and pick your self up a second monitor.. best thing about this program.
 
What Ive noticed with all the progs is. You start out using one of them. and down the road you find another one you like better. Now what do you do. You have to start all over again with inputting all the data. I'm with the guys who use folder with dates and subfolders. It always works. And as for the fact that jpgs and raw might not be here in years to come. thats not too much of a problem. I'm sure they will be able to convert them to what ever is the acceptale format.
 
I have a simple design that is program independent and has worked for me for years. I simply have a folder called "digital pictures" and in there they are sorted by a folder with a date and short description like:

2008-11-15 - Strobist Meet at Veronica's

Inside that folder I have 2 subfolders:
- RAW
- JPG

That's it... thats all. I do not need to catagorize by picture type nor add a ton of useless metatdata to every picture. I have never not been able to find any pic in a matter of seconds.

I store them in 3 sometimes 4 different locations:

- My 18TB SAN
- My 2TB "to be backed up, temporary location" external storage drive
- My 2TB working drive (while working on the pictures)
- DVD-Rs

Simple, effective and tons of redundancy.
 
And as for the fact that jpgs and raw might not be here in years to come.
This comment, question, and discussion has been coming up quite a lot lately. I bought my first computer in 1995. I've been seeing JPEGs since 1995. It's now 2008, 13 years since I first had a computer and have seen JPEGs. Is it unreasonable to assume that JPEG is pretty much here to stay? I don't know about RAW as that is a new format to me, but JPEG? It's been around for what seems like forever and I assume will stay forever. Pretty reasonable to assume that? I think so.

I convert my 4 MB images from my 7 megapixel camera to 30 MB TIFF for editing, then down to 50 kb for the web without any visible degrading (for monitor viewing). I think JPEG is pretty darn good. I can't see any reason that anything would change in the future
 
...and then there is the JPG2000 standard, which is basically a higher quality JPG in a smaller file, though that standard is not going anywhere very fast.

Nikon has included the ability to shoot TIFF files in the D700, not that I ever will, becuase the files are HUGE and yet still do not offer the ability to adjust WB as easily as in a RAW file.

No, I believe that RAW and JPG files are going to be around a LOT longer than you and I are going to be in photography... lol.
 

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