Good to know. Frankly, I don't have a good organizational system, so a lot of my pictures just sit around dormant in RAW (NEF in my case) form. I'd like to keep all of the RAW files, essentially for archival purposes, but various dng conversions result in sidecar files, which only add to the organizational burden....all this before I've even done any serious processing, let alone tiff or jpeg copies.
I guess I need to just make the effort, but I would love to hear some more strategies. I've finally got my iTunes library where I want it, now on to the photos.
It's really important to have a good organizational system for your photos for a variety of reasons. The big one is simply being able to find a photo. It also makes backing up easier and things like that.
First, let's make something clear. If I don't have at least 2 copies of an image somewhere (on different drives, of course) then I don't consider myself having one. Backing up is so important. There are books written on the topic of how to do it, so find a solution that works for you and use it. Several months ago we had a forum member here lose (if I remember correctly) a year or two worth of photos because they weren't backed up and a family member formatted the hard drive. Don't let that happen to you!
About organization, it's worth the time you spend organizing your photos. And remember, the longer you wait to do it, the longer it will take to organize. My method is fairly straight forward. I have a folder for the year. Inside there, I have folders for each month. Then, inside there, I have folders for each 'shoot' I did.
For example, I went on a hike with my wife and daughter last week end up Indian River. So I have a folder inside my January folder called "2011_01_29_Indian_River_Hike." Inside that folder are my RAW's from that event, and two other folders. The other folders are named "Master" and "Output." My file names follow the format <Date>_<Event>_XXXX.dng where XXXX is a counter that identifies each individual image. So for the folder I named above, the name of the first image in the set is "20110129_Indian_River_Hike_0001.dng". The master folder uses the same convention, but is a .tif instead. The output folder looks similar, but adds a tag after the counter to tell what it's used for. So, the web version of the file I mentioned above would look like this, "20110129_Indian_River_Hike_0001_Web.jpg". If I made one to print as an 8x10, it would looke like this, "20110129_Indian_River_Hike_0001_8x10.jpg".
Photoshop can rename your images in batches, I'm sure other photo editing software can also. A program called Irfanware will do it also. I use Bridge to do my renaming when I import and convert to dng. What I use isn't what's best for everyone. It works well for me, and that's all I can say. Find a way of organizing that works for you, and stick with it. It's well worth the extra bit of work getting it set up.
