Picture Organization

[JediRach]

How do you organize your pictures? My files are a hot mess and I don't even know where to start.

[Nicole]

I use Lightroom with folders, collections, and (occasionally because I'm really bad at remembering to do it) keywords. Mainly I use folders though. I'm usually pretty decent at figuring out about when I took a photo. I'd really like to get all my photos keyworded though.

Other options? Aperture (Mac), Picasa, iPhoto (Mac). There might be others too that I don't know about.

[royey123]

Picasa. It's great for quick fixes and overall organization.

[kels0119]

I am interested in this as well. I am currently going through my Lightroom catalog and trying to clean out 'rejects' and then going back to keyword as much as I can. I also keep them in folders of each shoot, like "Christmas Day 2010" and thats all thats in there. It does help some

[LMAshton]

First thing I do is rename each picture to include the date and a sequential number, so 20110109-01.nef, for example. That way, they're easily sorted in date order no matter what might happen to the shooting date & time in the EXIF data. Then I plunk them into my folder structure, which is basically country, then year of shoot. If I have photos belonging to a particular event, I'll also create a folder for that specific event.

I'm a hobbyist, so no pictures for clients or such. If I did have those, they would go into a separate directory for client photos, but still with date and sequence in the file name and into a folder for each client.

As for tagging and whatnot, I use Lightroom and am still working through my backlog of photos. I haven't even done the entire current year yet.

[monkeygirl123]

I have folders named People, Landscape, Nature, Pets, Days Out, Weddings etc. Within each of those folders are sub folders (ie in Nature, I may have Birds, Insects, Flowers/Plants etc, and in Days Out I may have Exmouth Beach, Paignton Zoo, Woodbury Common). Being able to find a photograph by date isn't important to me (I'm just a hobbyist) so it works really well.