I use Lightroom which is excellent for asset management. There isn't a best practise I'm aware of. A professional photograher is going to need a significantly different workflow to a hobbyist though.
So
for me... Organising my photos on disk is largely irrelevant and as Andrew mentioned, follows the yyy-mm-dd-filmstock-cameratype.tiff convention. All images are stored in folders by camera and then by film stock. It's not that important though as I take the time to keyword everything.
My steps...
1. Copy images from SD card(digital) / scan folder (film) into my "Image Dump" folder which is a holding folder.
2. Curate those images, deleting anything bad, out of focus, blurred due to low shutter, or boring.
3. Sleep on it
4. Curate further where I've taken multiple images of the same thing, reducing images down to small numbers.
- These steps significantly reduce the number of images on my computer. I tend to keep 3-4 images from a roll of 36. Digital has even less keepers.
5. In LR, create a new folder (if neccessary) under the latest year (2020). My suggestion is to have things organised
at least by year. Creating sub folders under that year main folder is going to be very specific to you. As a film shooter, I organise by camera/film stock because I like to see how they compare. As a digtal shooter, I would have a folder per event. "Egypt Holiday" for example, or "Fred's Wedding" or "Lake District Trip". If you are a landscape photographer who gets up every weekend to go to Keswick to take pictures of mountains at sunrise, this isn't going to be as useful, and things like MM and DD can be more useful.
6. Drag images into new folder.
Now I've moved them out of the temporary storage and into a permanent home. At this point I keyword my images. I try really hard to do this after every import, and it's much easier with film, becasue I do it per roll which is usually only 3 or 4 images! Taking hundreds of photos on digital massively compounds the issue which is why it's so important to be able to self-crit and curate your images down to a small, manageable number.
Keywording follows a piecemeal process because it's a boring task.
7. All images get a keyword based on the genre. I label it as photography style. "Landscape Photography" or "Street Photography" or "Nature Photography". I have a smart collection to pick this up so that once it's done I can go have a cuppa/sleep
8. All images now get three more keywords. I describe the image (in my head) in one sentence and pick at least three key words which I add as... keywords... I also add names (family names or pet names or location names) Once I've done this, I give the photo a green label. It means it's "catalogued".
Above you can see how I have 20 images to do keywording on (they are not green yet and thus have no label).
Of those 20 images, 5 are animal, 3 are Asset, 11 are landscape and 1 is abstract.
So if I'm feeling very lazy, I can keyword the Abstracts tonight and leave the Landscapes 'till tomorrow...
All this work gets the images in a state where I can find them in future. And I find them using collections, smart collections and keyword searches.
My wife says she wants a picture of a chicken for a flyer she wants to put round the neighbourhood for eggs. I do a search on "chicken" keyword. Don't need to remember what year I took it, or what month. I want to do a nice A2 print of our youngest for the wall? I search on her name to pull all the images into one place. A pic of my wife when we were on holiday in Morocco, but I can't remember the year? A search of Morocco + My wife's name will do the job. Christmas card with the cat on the front? Search for catname(s).
Organising images on disk is all well and good, but keywording your images properly is such a powerful tool for finding things.
This is my keyword grouping... Some are obvious...
Actions - Anything ending in "ing" (running, laughing, sleeping etc)
Concept - Ideas or concepts: Silhouette, humour, shadows, romantic
Effects - double exposure, panorama, monochrome, long exposure
Event - Christas, party, Fred's Wedding
Utility - iphone, blog illustration, contact sheet
It's a real nightmare to do this once you've got a lot of photos so well worth getting it sorted before you start. Makes finding your images much much easier in the future.
Wow... that was a massive reply!
