Hard drive for storing your pics .... How do you arrange yours?

swag72

swag72

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7,969
Name
Sara
Edit My Images
Yes
I am asking this as I am having a re-think about not only my work flow, but also how I store pictures in folders. I currently have a 320GB portable external drive, which I have used for the last 18 months. I am getting a new drive and so I am planning how to best store pictures in folders.

On my last HD I had the following main folders

Raw : Uploaded pics : In progress

Each of these folders were then divided into specific pictures types in the Raw. Jpeg, TIFF and Stock photos then went in the Uploaded folder

As I am going to be starting from scratch, I would love to see how others arrange their folders and if there is something I am making over complicated.
 
Raw - Year - Month - Event

I very rarely keep jpegs after uploading to the web or sending to the printers.
 
Am I right in thinking that if I ammend a raw file, ACR will save the changes as a x... (something) file, so I really don't need to be saving a tiff file any more. I can just convert it if needed?

Maybe I don't need to keep Jpegs either :thinking:

I think my saving process has been very heavily duplicated and unnecessary up until now.
 
2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010

Date (eg 21/05/2010)

Raw - Jpeg - Edited
 
RAW - Date
Export - Project

I used to have a very elaborate folder structure for easier navigation, but after re-doing my workflow I basically let the darkroom software keep track of everything by use of various metadata. Basically, I don't care how or where they are stored as long as I can find them easily. It takes some planning and thinking about how to do the tagging, but it's well worth it for me.
 
badly lol. Really, there is no such flow to it. They all go in 'My Pictures' usually under a subfolder according to whether it's misc, a day out, an urbex, etc. Then a description of what it was and then a date order. It's a completely fxxxed up filesystem that only I know my way around. I also tend to bin my RAWs nowadays once the JPEG has been output, I just can't be arsed with the amount of HD space it takes up for a file that I never touch.
 
I have 4 disks in my system, plus backups.
I use lightroom, so have one disk (disk 3) solely for Raw, imported in date order under year folders. Tagged and categorised under category (family, vehicles, rugby), then by year, then by event. It means I can search by date, category or tag words.

Then one disk (disk 4) for final images, stored in jpeg in a similar fashion as above, category, year, event.

I have the main disk purely for operating system and associated files, a second disk for Apps, programs etc. This second disk also has the catelog backups from lightroom.

Then I have an external 4Tb NAS box that backs up my important files every friday, plus a couple of 1Tb USB disks for ad hoc backups as well. The usb disks are stored at work in our firesafes.
 
folders named: Photo location --> date of photo set

This seems to work since when looking for a particular photo i can rarely remember the date but i'll know the location. It probably wouldn't be as useful if you took hundreds of shots at the same race track or something similar.
 
My workflow needs addressing and is something I want to look at.

I use Downloader Pro to create a folder on my 250GB MyPassport portable drive within Uploaded Images/Year/ using the shooting date in this format 2010 05 31. Raw files are then uploaded to this folder and renamed 100_1234_5DII and backed up using SyncToy to 1TB external hard drives using the same naming convention. I use Elements Organiser to sort, view and tag the raw files.

I store jpegs in folders by subject within My Pictures. I was renaming files with descriptive names but now use the same filename as the raw file.
 
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