How do you archive your photos?

[megawinks]

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to know if you guys have any particular method of archiving your photos, especially for professional photography assignments. I'm asking from the perspective of filenames and folders, that will allow for systematic sorting yet easy to re-access the photos (from external HD) by keywords when needed.

P.S: I'm an Adobe Bridge CS3/4 and MacBook user, and I always backup my photos to an external HD asap (But the pics are all in a messy state right now).

Thanks!!

[alex3410]

i use lightroom to sort out my photos (as it deals with the folders automatically)

i have a folder for each year and sub folders for a 'subject/event' and sometimes a sub folder for a location such as duxford where i end up going several times a year so i can group all the duxford folders within a master duxford folder

lightroom also lets you search for images really easily

and you can have as many libraries as you want so you could create one on the external HDD and open it when you connect it

[kaightie]

i have my external hard drive sorted by type of event..wedding...family...newborn ect then in each of those folders are seperate folders with the date of event and last name so that when some one calls or i am looking for a certain picture i can refer to it by date or client.

[luminescent]

Originally Posted by megawinks

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to know if you guys have any particular method of archiving your photos, especially for professional photography assignments. I'm asking from the perspective of filenames and folders, that will allow for systematic sorting yet easy to re-access the photos (from external HD) by keywords when needed.

P.S: I'm an Adobe Bridge CS3/4 and MacBook user, and I always backup my photos to an external HD asap (But the pics are all in a messy state right now).

Thanks!!

Like many others, I use Lightroom. My lightroom catalog is on a local SATA drive for fast catalog access while my image archives are on two external 500 GB SATA drives. I also have a 1.5TB external which holds a backup of the 2 archive drives + regular lightroom catalog backups.

I like lightroom because it really is the best photo cataloging and management software out there and it is very flexible. You can either create a single folder archive (which I would not recommend) or you can split up your photos into whatever folder structure you desire.

My archive is organized by year-month (e.h. 2009-01, 2009-02, etc.) and also tagged so I can either do a tag-based search or, if I know what month I shot the photo(s), I can go directly to that month in my folder structure.

Hope this helps!

[MKM7965]

As of now I have 2-500GB HDs. One to store, one for backup. I don't have a great way of organizing them like with Lightroom. I just name folders and archive by year.

[jmb667]

Coming to the thread a little late, but thought I'd throw in my $0.02.

I use iPhoto to do all my organization of photos by event and date. Then I keep a copy on a networked HDD, another on a second USB and a collection of DVDs I keep in our safe deposit box at the bank (which will eventually be replaced with a 1TB portable USB HDD).