How To Organize Your Photos - The Right Way!

[mightymarce]

I have my pictures so far ordered by date (year, etc) and that seems to work pretty well, am about to embark in the grand task of tagging photos as well for easier cross-referencing.

BTW Picasa3 uses tags as well and is free.

[Daniel591992]

Originally Posted by mightymarce

I have my pictures so far ordered by date (year, etc) and that seems to work pretty well, am about to embark in the grand task of tagging photos as well for easier cross-referencing.

BTW Picasa3 uses tags as well and is free.

Do you know if Picasa saves the tags in the pics metadata?

[Dizzle]

Wow! I use Lightroom on my desktop for my main file storage and structure, but on my laptop for when I travel I use a simple system.

MMDDYY - Event Name
---FLICKR
---HR JPEGS (high res)
---PSDs
---RAW

This way I can easily track by date and event and when I get back home can easily import the RAW files to my Desktop LR catalog, PSDs are for files I may work on or be working on, then I save a Hi Res JPG and a lower res image for Flickr (if so needed).

And using Adobe Bridge, you can set it to save each copy to its appropriate folder automatically.

6 levels of folders is a bit much.

[dharmit]

I have RAW files downloaded from the camera such that they go in folder as below

C:\Photos\2008-12-10\RAW

When I convert raw files to JPEGs or TIFFs I have them as

C:\Photos\2008-12-10\JPEG
C:\Photos\2008-12-10\TIFF

If I edit those files (except editing raw files), like merging two photos or making a panorama or making them BnW I have following folder

C:\Photos\2008-12-10\Edited


this is for storing the photos. Now for tagging

I use Picasa for tagging and I normally tag them based on

• what they are ("Flower", "Sun Set", "Morning", "My Son" etc)
• where they were taken ("Australia", "Townsville", "Brisbane" etc)
• Emotions attached to them ("Smiling", "Happy", "Dont Disturb" etc)

Picasa lets you add multiple tags and multi word tags to the same photo. This makes it easy for searching

I also add best or favorite photos in Picasa Albums (not web albums) and also give them star rating.

[anthonybeard]

i organize all mine by year and date. so my path would look something like this:

F:/Images/Camera Pictures/2008/2008-11-27/picture 001.jpg

[Ginger Pixie]

I guess I don't need to worry too much about this yet.

My camera uploads the pics into date taken folders, and I go through and save any good shots to a "best photos" folder renaming them dependant on subject. The rest (and the originals) get transferred onto my hard drive.

At the moment, I don't have that many in my "best photos" folder

One day...

[wulf]

I think it is good to have a strategy as well as using software like Lightroom. Plain old folders and files will probably be usable long after you pass the dreaded point of incompatibility that affects so much software while it is still relatively young.

I presently use iPhoto on my Mac as my primary way of accessing photos (good for browsing visually) and upload everything I want to keep to Flickr (offsite backup + tagging goodness for finding things). I also have a couple of external hard drives that I back up to, where I use files and folders to organise things.

My system is "organic" because it shaped by the content. I have main headings like gardens, holidays, music and the all-important misc. Within those, the directories used vary depending on subject matter.

For example, in misc, a lot of my photos are stored by year but there are various other categories for things that I will return to over time. In gardens, there are a limited number of gardens I generally shoot in so I have directories for each one and then break further pictures down by either year (my back garden) or date of visit (for several large gardens that I visit once or twice a year).

My aim is to have a structure that is neither too shallow nor too deep to quickly navigate through.

I also embed information in the filename. A typical one might be something like rose.20080729.jpg or, if part of a set of images, bee.20080815.03.jpg. I go for fairly generic titles - if I get too many similar ones in a directory, then I will consider whether another directory is required. The date (YYYYMMDD) is important - sometimes this information gets lost when files are copied around.

Wulf