How do you organise your photos?

foodpoison

foodpoison

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Name
Sean
Edit My Images
Yes
I have a server connected to the computer, in there I have lots of different folders based on the subject matter of the shots.
Inside each folder, I have a month and a year of the shoot. Inside there I have 3 folders - RAW, TIFF and JPEG.

However I am constantly struggling with the organisation of it.
I don't want any complex lightroom based answers, just simply a windows explorer breakdown of your photos. I want to try and find something that works.
 
OK I use lightroom, BUT before I did I had to organise my images in a way to find them.

OK first off the orriginals. These I grouped into the year, then the location or subject, and maybe then another sub folder.

Once processed the procedure was repeated with an output folder mirroring the input. That way I could locate any image relatively easily. provided I could remember where it was filed.

I still use this technique with Lightroom, only finding them is a lot easier
 
by date for the file names
the raw are on drive E the jpegs on D and the tiffs on an external drive :)
 
in date order.
 
I have a folder with photos,
then in date order I have folders, e.g.:
2009-01-26 - Portrait Shoot
2009-02-05 - Local Common, etc etc

inside those folders I have
- Originals
- PSDs
- 1024px etc
 
The problem I have storing them by date...

I went to Holy Island last year and want to find the pics. Unless my brain has a shareholding in Letts, the chances of me remembering the date I went are fairly slim.
 
68lbs said:
The problem I have storing them by date...

I went to Holy Island last year and want to find the pics. Unless my brain has a shareholding in Letts, the chances of me remembering the date I went are fairly slim.
Click to expand...

Why do you need to remember the date? I could never understand the point of this. If you use IPTC and decent keywords and an appropriate program finding relevent photos is easy.

I have in excess of 10,000 photographs and can find any photo quickly and easily, I dont need to remember a date only where it was taken.

Steve
 
If you use Lightroom (or Aperture) you can view your pictures by date/year/camera/lens/aperture/shutter speed/flash used/location - and lots of other attributes without doing anything more than clicking a button! Windows Explorer or anything else is not simple - just hard work.
 
I do them by category, e.g. "Nature", "People", etc (most of these have subcategories).
But I'm finding it not very effective as I often want to put things in more than one category. Perhaps I just need better category names. Or to tag things.
 
I order by date but have the folders view set to thumbnails so i can see them even at the root folder :)
 
I use Fastone image viewer, its a lot less system hungry than Adobe bridge and the like.
 
I use Lightroom...

But the backup plan from Lightroom, for instance if I want to find something on one of my backup drives is that the folder structure is year/month/day. Most importantly all images are keyworded so I can type the keyword into Spotlight and it will be found!

[Edit] What program do you use for editing? Most have a digital asset management part to them...[/edit]
 
I organise by date, with description in brackets. EG: '2009-03-09 (TPF example)'. I then have the small jpeg files in the root of the folder. There is a subfolder called 'RAW', for erm, RAW files. Another subfolder called 'Processed' for photos I have processed in Photoshop. Then a subfolder of 'Processed' called 'internet', for low-res versions for uploading to the Net. These are all stored on an external raid drive (2x500gb at the moment). And every now and then I will also backup to DVDs.
 
I have a seperate internal HDD for my photos, a partition of which is specifically for using as a scratch disk for CS3. I have 2 main folders, RAW and processed, and each one of those has a folder with the subject, date and location on it. As I edit a RAW it gets saved as a JPG in the 'processed' folder, and the RAW is dragged to a subfolder marked' Done' or something along those lines, if you follow me.
 
Photo's are imported onto a separate hard disk as Raw's via Lightroom and stored in date format, hierarchical by year.

Metadata goes onto this disk but is backed up onto another disk as well.
Raw images are sorted into collections, i.e. Family, Car, Sport and then subcollections by event. Keywords are also used.

Final images are exported as JPG and stored onto another drive under a similar hierarchy as the collections, except with an added year structure i.e. Family, 2009, family holiday.

Some images are posted online (I currently have about 9000)

So basically I (or my family) can quickly search my final image (jpg) folders to find the shot I want, or I can search within Lightroom using keywords, date or through the collections.

Works ok for me.
 
I have a photography folder in my second hard drive...
in that folder I have 2 seperate folders...2008 and 2009
In each of those I have a folder for each month and in there I have a folder named for example 5-Chynnah and Spud

(the number being the date and the Chynnah and Spud being subject matter [or location])
 
Poppy said:
I have a photography folder in my second hard drive...
in that folder I have 2 seperate folders...2008 and 2009
In each of those I have a folder for each month and in there I have a folder named for example 5-Chynnah and Spud

(the number being the date and the Chynnah and Spud being subject matter [or location])
Click to expand...

I just organised my photos like that - spiffing :) thanks :)
 
But what if you keep going back to the same location and/or subject? You have to keep going in and out of subfolders to find them all if you're keeping them by date.
 
Hard drives

folders like events, family, not yet gone through (for when im to busy)

inside events is like weddings, portraits, christenings etc

inside say weddings is clients name follwed by date

inside clients folder are several folders containing raws, jpegs, for web, album etc

Probably not the best organisation but it works for me
 
Cathus said:
I have a folder with photos,
then in date order I have folders, e.g.:
2009-01-26 - Portrait Shoot
2009-02-05 - Local Common, etc etc

inside those folders I have
- Originals
- PSDs
- 1024px etc
Click to expand...

This man talks sense!

Doing it in Japanese date format means you can list them in Explorer and the date will translate properly. So I have an almost identical setup eg:

2008-12-06 - Max Power - Paul Scooby
2008-12-12 - Systematix - Photoshoot
2009-01-14 - RATT - Dead Sea Souls

If I want to find something I can have a look that way or press F3 in explorer and use the search box to find the folder Im after.
 
My hardware set-up is that I have a dedicate file server with a few terabytes of hard drives on which my photos sit.

My folder hierarchy is: -

"Photos" under which all the pictures will reside; under this are two sub-folder: -

"Master" where all the Originals will reside.
"Projects" where any cropped, framed, adjusted picture will reside.


Under "Master"
"2004" / "2005" / ... "2009" for each year
then "Jan.", "Feb." ... "Dec." for each year
then "1st --- Botanical Garden" (date, then three dashes, then the event / place) .. each day's shootings go into one folder with the folder name indicating where that place was and what date it was. The photos in that folder would be renamed to indicate the name of the event / location. In the event the day has two main events, then each gets its own folder. So, I may end up with two folders for the same date in the same month.

All pictures stored in "Master" are the RAW / NEF pictures, unaltered in any way what so ever.


"Projects and Themes" are whatever grouped of pictures that I've decided to give away, show, etc.
"Macro flowers"
"Macro abstract"
"flowers"
"scenery .. sea"
"scenery .. countryside"
"scenery .. cityscape"
"weddings"
"portraits"
etc.

Only a small handful of shots that I take make it to this part of my workflow (I shoot a few thousand shots per year, but only a few hundred make it this far).

Under each of these categories I have two sub-folders "Copy of Master" & "Final Result" I would put a copy of the "Master" image in the "Copy of Master" folder, as indicated above, only a very few selected ones end up coming this far (I never touch my Masters).

The copy would then be called the same file name as the original one with the added "Copy of Master" to the name's end. The copy of master version would be the one from where I'd do the adjustments etc., and the final result would be filed in the "Final Result" folder, with the name being the same as that from the "Master" folder only I'd add " --- adjusted Final Result #" where # will indicate adjustment number, since there may well be multiple adjustments to a single Master shot.

Some of the Project and Themes, such as weddings and portraits have sub-folder for each individual event .. e.g. in Portraits I have a sub-folder for "Daughter", "Father", "Mother", etc. These sub-folder would then house the "Copy of Master" and "Final Result"

All, of course, are imported in to my Lightroom and I do all the adjustments from there. I am only now starting to play with borders (thanks to cowasaki and Elements).
 
FWIW:

2x750Gb external drives (one backs up the other). Within these, all images are first sorted according to what was used to take them (350D/40D/Camera phone etc).

Within each of these folders for the DSLRs there's one for "Original" unprocessed RAW images; where the camera dumps them by default, in the preset year_month_day folder format.

On the same level as the originals folder, there's one for "processed" images. Within this there's a pair of folders; one for 16-bit Tiff/PSD files with layers for processing, and a corresponding one for merged 8-bit "publishable" JPG images. Inside each of these folders images are sorted into folders with the format Year_Month_Day_Subject for easy location and ID.

As an aside I try to edit the 16-bit images through Bridge and PS, once happy they're batched into JPGs which go into the appropriate 8-bit folders.

HTH, if you can understand it :p
 
Rikki said:
This man talks sense!

Doing it in Japanese date format means you can list them in Explorer and the date will translate properly. So I have an almost identical setup eg:

2008-12-06 - Max Power - Paul Scooby
2008-12-12 - Systematix - Photoshoot
2009-01-14 - RATT - Dead Sea Souls

If I want to find something I can have a look that way or press F3 in explorer and use the search box to find the folder Im after.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I do.

They're stored on 2 identical external hard drives, one at home, one at work.
 
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