Shooting in Raw (Storing them?!?!)

prodigy2k7

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I just bought a 500GB external hard drive to store all my raw files and maybe some JPGs. How do most of you store them?
Most of the time, I have stored my files just how it comes off the camera, example:
25_12_2007/IMG_0001.JPG
25_12_2007/IMG_0001.CR2
25_12_2007/IMG_0002.JPG
25_12_2007/IMG_0002.CR2
but not im thinking of saving a more organized way...Ex:
25_12_2007/JPG/IMG_0001.JPG
25_12_2007/RAW/IMG_0001.CR2

Also, do most of you store by date? or by event name? or.... what are some good suggestions on how to store a lot of raw/jpg files in a good organized way.
 
I give every shoot its own file number and Date. Then i print out the contact sheets and put the same information on the sheet so that i can recover images quickly.

Really its up to you, no photograher will have the same system. Its just what ever works best for you. In my case I pretty much organize by date and will put some kind of caption on it if I need to.
 
Here's my organization....may not be the best but it works for me.

First I create folders in my pictures folder for the category....i.e.

001 Portraits
002 Landscapes
003 Insects
004 Automobiles
etc.....

Then in each of those folders I create a folder named RAW. When I import them I have the program re-name the photos as the date they were taken _001, _002, etc... I have them put into the proper RAW file and have the program create a subfolder in that RAW folder with the transfer date as the folder name.

So if I was to transfer new portraits from today I would have them put into

\2008\My Pictures\001 Portraits\RAW\2008-08-25\ and the file names would be in the date shot format in that folder.

My jpeg organization is a little more messy and I'm working on cleaning that up. But....I do create separate folders in each of my folders (i.e. 001 Portraits) for web and print ready named accordingly. Right now my jpegs are all transferred to the main 001 portrait directory or wherever they are supposed to go but it's starting to get overwhelmed so I have to re-look my jpeg organization.

I do find that the renaming with the date taken for the photos helps with my organization.
 
Sounds good, I do like the idea of sorting into years first...
 
I use a year/month/event folders that I dump into. In the events folder I will also create "edited" & "web" folders. I've just started using LR2, so I tag/keyword all imports as well.
 
Okay....just got done going through my 2008 photos (2008 files so far ironically which is really freaky) and have organized my jpegs in the same manner as my RAW's in their own seperate JPG folder. Thanks for this post as it gave me a kick to organize those which I've been avoiding.

Also, for family pictures I do it different since I usually have so many and I like to track the age of our 1 year old son. For those I create 007 Family (or the likes) and in that folder I create 001 January, 002 February, etc....then in each of those I have a RAW and JPG folder. This way if I want to see what our son looked like in March compared to now it only takes about 10 seconds to do so....
 
I tend to make a new folder for each shooting event - labled with a name and date of shooting.
Inside that folder I dump all the RAWs from the camera - I then make a "Keeps" folder inside with the RAWs and into that I place all the fullsized JPEG edits of my RAWs.
I also then make folders within the keeps folder for different sized versions of each shot (using folders so I can keep the file names the same) I do this only as I upload to different places with different upload restrictions.
 
I create a directory using "event"_"year+month+day" ... "disneyland_20080826"
Copy everything into directory - this is JPEG & CR2 (RAW)
Sort by JPEG so I can view using windows viewer - forgot it's name.
Delete mangled JPEGs, re-orient those that are portrait.
Sort by name again.
Every CR2 should have the corresponding JPEG. Those that do not are deleted because I've deleted the JPEG.
Back up to external HD, back up to DVD, upload to flickr.com, upload to costco.com

Recently realized, I'm not too thrilled with in-camera processing. Much prefer to use DPP (or LR1/LR2 depending on price). That may change way I archive. It will definitely save at least 30%-40% storage because I will no longer store every JPEG.
 
I've got my folders organized by the date of the shoot, with a keyword in the name to remind what the heck I shot on that date.... lol.

So something I shot today would go into my 2008 folder, in a sub folder with named with today's date plus a "trigger" word. The file name is usually left the way it comes out of the camera. Something like:

2008/2008-08-27 Sunset in park/DSC_00001.nef

Works for me :)
 
I make a folder for each job. These folders are numbered sequentially since day one. That number is generated by my customer data base.

Inside that folder, I make separate folders for RAW, TIF, and ORDER... sometimes JPG for web stuff. Only files that get printed are retouched, so I keep them in the ORDER folder, preserving the original image.

Since the same image will be stored in different formats and in several folders, I don't any re-naming to avoid any confusion.

Each job is then backed up onto DVD or CD and filed sequentially. Hard drives will fail eventually.

-Pete
 
I think that if you have enough files that you need a 500gb external drive that you should seroiusly consider some image asset management software such as LightRoom or PhotoMechanic. The actual structure becomes much less importnat if you have one of these tools and use it.

Having said that, I use a date system. year/01 January/0101 ... This is consistent with Adobe Bridge as a choice for creating the folders automatically. So, I need only change the seeting once at the beginning of each month. Sometimes, I will break the day files apart in to seperate events like

2008/11-November/1121 - zoo
2008/11-November/1120 - botanical garden

Once I have everything loaded onto the HD, I fire-up LightRoom and index the new entries. I can then keyword them, tag them with event properties, etc.

But, the biggest mistake I ever made in organization was splitting the RAW and jpg files. If the files are together, LightRoom and other asset software will recognize them as a single unit. If you split them into seperate directories they become seperate assets.

Charlie
 
I have adobe lightroom but not really learned how to use it yet...
 
I download my photos via Bridge and store them in folders by dates "yyyymmdd". When there's a particular event/session/whatever connected with the date, I also write it next to the date. I've tried storing photos by types - landscapes, portraits etc. but ended up with one big mess. Cataloging by date also helps me keep track of how my photos tend to improve with time. I've owned a dslr for just half a year so it's very easy to see the differences. When I've got one of these 'I'm useless' days, I just open the photo folder and watch the progress I've made. It helps :D
 
We've had a very similar thread over in the Beyond the Basics recently. Also, doing a fast search on "workflow" will give you a lot of the info you are looking for.

Check it out. ;)
 

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