Organising photos on the HDD?

Mark G

Mark G

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Mark
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Hi all.

I'm about to replace my PC with an iMac and I'm going to take all of my photos off the pc's hard drive and put them on to one 4tb external drive which I will access from my iMac and MacBook.

Currently I have about 4 different drives all with different photos on them. I'd like to amalgamate these onto the 4tb drive too. Before I start though, I'd like some advise on the best way to structure the folders? Shall I separate my paid work into a different folder to my personal stuff and then just go by date? Or just keep it all in one big folder structure?

I use Lightroom so I access my photos through here normally. Should I export finished photos to the Apple photos app or export them as a backup, or not bother exporting at all?

I'm interested to hear how you all manage these tasks?

Cheers
Mark
 
It depends on how you remember them.

For work i go by date and surname of client
For personal stuff i go by category and event
 
I'd go with two separate main directories.

Work
Personal

In both I'd have directories that were meaningful like

Joe Jones and Stacey Maceys wedding 16092017

In personal pretty much everything that is meaningfull'

Doing things by date has some merit but it doesn't really give you anything instant.

Thats pretty much how I have mine on my NAS drives.
 
I'm beginning to realise that date based folders aren't the best, I have my collections laid out like how my folders should be and for the last 4/5 years, I've pretty much let lightroom name all of my folders by date. I'm thinking that it'd be best to go through the lot and sort them all out by name/event but I have 44,744 photo's in my library!

This could take some time!
 
If you use Lightroom do you want the same file structure as you have been previously using? Are you keeping your current Lightroom catalogue and file structure?

Lightroom will need the files relinked for it to find them on iMac if you are keeping your current catalogue. This is easy if you keep the same file structure a uou can relinquish the main folder and Lightroom does the rest automatically, otherwise it may need every shoot or file relinking individually. Don't forget to make a backup of your current data in case there is problem when transferring.
 
I'll be copying it all onto an external hard drive and copying the catalog across too so all I will need to link will be the top folder. The more I look into it the more frustrating it gets as I can currently find anything I want, it's just a mess. If my wife was ever to look for a specific photo or event, she'd have no chance!
 
Lots of threads on here about Lightroom organisation so worth a search.

It's a personal thing of course. I go by date, and just have one catalogue file, as things often overlap, personal/work, commercial/weddings, etc. Have often thought about splitting into multiple catalogues, but I think there would be downsides for little or no real benefit.

YYYY_MM_DD Job Name. Then keyword things. And add to collections for ongoing projects, or folios.

I used to just name by event when I started out. Soon realised that was a stupid way of getting into a disorganised mess very quickly.

45k isn't too many if you wanted to start a new system. My catalogue will probably hit 300k by the end of the week, some people do that much every year.
 
I go by date. In the Pictures folder I have subfolders for each year then subsubfolders named "mmdd" followed by the "event" or location. I can then see at a glance which folders contain (for example) shots from Dartmoor Zoo (DZP in the folder names) as well as them being organized in date order (hence the Americanised date format). My use is purely personal so nobody else needs to be able to find shots/folders, although (IMO!) the system is logical enough to make it relatively easy to track down sets of photos.
 
Is use date and the the event name. Renamed in LR. This works for me as I can recall when the event was and if ot sure can scan the folder name for it.

This is in a parent directory that is the year, and then split work or personal.

Works for me and my wife can kind of navigate her way around if she has to.

Exports are in the same folder, called jpegs. This bit may be improved, having a separate folder under the year, but right now I'm sticking with what I have and what works for me.

There are probably more structured file systems, but I'm content with what I have.
 
You're using lightroom, so I hope you've key-worded your images when you first imported them? That way there is no need for more than a rational date-based folder structure, because LR will always locate the images you need through keywords, as James described above. In your position I think I would create a separate folder on my new drive for each of the external drives, saving images into them from the individual drives in order to make it easier to re-link the images in your catalogue.

I'd suggest that as far as possible you should avoid allowing software to take over filing duties - you'll never find anything manually if you need to - even less so than you can now. Export *when you need to* but otherwise not.
 
Thanks all. I have decided to stick with the folders as date format. Each event has it's own collection. This is how I've done it up until now so I'll just keep it this way. Renaming the folder structure is too much trouble considering they are already set out in individual collections. My collections are all listed in sets by year, then set by month and then listed by event so it's not too much of a mess really.

I have not often used keywords when importing, I don't know why but I just never used them. I think I will now though, perhaps I will go through my collections and keyword the important sets for future reference.
 
That's pretty much how I did it until a few years ago, Mark. TBH, I only started doing the dated subfolders after an illness that left me with an even worse memory than I had before along with a need to organise things!
 
Just remember that you can keyword many photos together at the same time - reduces the pain considerably.
 
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