How To Organize Your Photos - The Right Way!

[Daniel591992]

Hey, over the summer I decided to start a site about organizing digital photos. I finally created it last week! Let me explain the method below. If you want a more detailed version, visit the site.

So here it goes. It's basically a few folders, with many, many, sub-folders. In fact, I have over 250 folders for 10,000+ pictures. Seems excessive, but it isn't. It keeps me sane.

The first thing you do is create a few general folders. Mine are: "Anniverseries and Birthdays," "Concert and Shows," "Holidays," "Misc.," "Photos Emailed to Us," "School," "Sports," "Vacation and Trips," and "Weddings." Each folder then has a few sub-folders. The Vacations and Trips folder, for example, has a folder for each place. Each place is then divided by year, if necessary, which is then divided by location. For example, I go to Brazil every year and take many pictures. Instead of placing all the photos in a folder named "Brazil", I have a folder for the year, another folder for the state, another folder for the city, and another folder for the name of the place (for example, Ipanema Beach). My Vacations and Trips folder can goes over 6 levels deep!

Do something similar for each general folder. I've explained each folder thoroughly in my site if you need help.

I've been using this method for over five years. It's worked great, but I occasionally tweak it to fit my needs. Hopefully, it works for you.

[crunch]

Be careful with too many folder levels and too descriptive names in Windows. Surprising as it seems, there IS a limit to how long a file name can be (path included).

So a file stored as "c:\documents and settings\daniel591992\my documents\my pictures\anniversaries and birthdays\home\2007\september\3\son's birthday 1 of 145.jpg" means the path name is roughly 140 characters long (including spaces of course), which is still safe (the max is 256), but just keep it in mind.

[kirbinster]

Why reinvent the wheel when you can use a product like Lightroom that does this all for you. When I import into lightroom it puts the photos in a folder by date taken. Then it uses key words to organize the photos in its database. If I ever want to find a picture I just type in the key words and search.

[private]

PSE6 does that too, but I cannot be bothered with all of the tagging, but I am SURE when my folders are no longer managable, I will be so mad at myself for not tagging my photos...

[Daniel591992]

Originally Posted by crunch

Be careful with too many folder levels and too descriptive names in Windows. Surprising as it seems, there IS a limit to how long a file name can be (path included).

So a file stored as "c:\documents and settings\daniel591992\my documents\my pictures\anniversaries and birthdays\home\2007\september\3\son's birthday 1 of 145.jpg" means the path name is roughly 140 characters long (including spaces of course), which is still safe (the max is 256), but just keep it in mind.

Thanks for the note. I never thought of that, but it's good to know. Hopefully, I'll never go that deep :P

Originally Posted by kirbinster

Why reinvent the wheel when you can use a product like Lightroom that does this all for you. When I import into lightroom it puts the photos in a folder by date taken. Then it uses key words to organize the photos in its database. If I ever want to find a picture I just type in the key words and search.

I see what you're saying, but there are some downsides IMO. First, Lightroom isn't free (not everyone needs it), and second, it relies on software. I don't see how using many folders is reinventing the wheel. If anything, tagging all the pics is. I'm not against tagging, but I think it gets messy at times.

Originally Posted by private

PSE6 does that too, but I cannot be bothered with all of the tagging, but I am SURE when my folders are no longer managable, I will be so mad at myself for not tagging my photos...

Do it for New Year's!

[morts]

I maintain my method is possibly cleaner and simpler:

[year]/[date] [description]/
Example: "2008/2008-10-27 An Example Folder/"

When I want to publish a few, I use another "Exports" directory outside the dates and in there I have several "bins" for my presets like "Facebook" and "Flickr" and "DeviantArt" to which LightRoom exports with different settings and different sizes. Full-size, 100% JPEG goes to flickr, 1000px on longest side goes to DA and 600px 80% to Facebook!

When I finish uploading, I clear the directories. If I ever need to get at the images again, they are in LR and I can re-export them whenever I need to!

[newPerspective]

Originally Posted by morts

I maintain my method is possibly cleaner and simpler:

[year]/[date] [description]/
Example: "2008/2008-10-27 An Example Folder/"

When I want to publish a few, I use another "Exports" directory outside the dates and in there I have several "bins" for my presets like "Facebook" and "Flickr" and "DeviantArt" to which LightRoom exports with different settings and different sizes. Full-size, 100% JPEG goes to flickr, 1000px on longest side goes to DA and 600px 80% to Facebook!

When I finish uploading, I clear the directories. If I ever need to get at the images again, they are in LR and I can re-export them whenever I need to!

OMG! I think we have the same gray cells or we are related! LOL - I do the EXACT same thing, even the 80% compression for Facebook - its funny.

[rediguana]

Originally Posted by Daniel591992

The first thing you do is create a few general folders. Mine are: "Anniverseries and Birthdays," "Concert and Shows," "Holidays," "Misc.," "Photos Emailed to Us," "School," "Sports," "Vacation and Trips," and "Weddings."

So how do you file a photo that was taken at a show, whilst you were on vacation and occurred on a holiday? (Here in NZ a vacation and holiday have the same meaning, so that would add to the confusion)

My tip is not to hardcode metadata such as tags into directories and filenames. Go for something simple and factual. My directories are...

yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/yyyymmdd-hhmmss.[dng|jpg]

Each folder then has a few sub-folders. The Vacations and Trips folder, for example, has a folder for each place. Each place is then divided by year, if necessary, which is then divided by location. For example, I go to Brazil every year and take many pictures. Instead of placing all the photos in a folder named "Brazil", I have a folder for the year, another folder for the state, another folder for the city, and another folder for the name of the place (for example, Ipanema Beach). My Vacations and Trips folder can goes over 6 levels deep!

I have this automated for imports in Lightroom so I don't even have to care about the file structure.

And it is always going to be only two folders deep - year and yyyy-mm-dd. Six levels deep just sounds really really messy and hard to maintain.

Metadata is really a far better way of encoding this information than creating it using a directory structure to embed information about an image.

The biggest problem goes back to my first example - the directory/file metaphor does not work well when assigning multiple terms (e.g. the high-level folders you outline above).

[acr4]

Spaces are the devil - I strong suggest against using white-space in a filename or directory. 'Course, I like unix/linux and do my browsing from the command line, meaning the qualified path needs to be put in double-quotes, or all spaces need to be preceeded by a blackslash.

Also, if you ever make a webpage from your directory structure, all spaces will show up as "%20" and that's dern hard to read out loud. "file:///c:\Documents%20and%20Settings\firstname%20lastname \My%20Pictures\This%20was%20a%20bad%20idea.jpg"
[edit: and I still have spaces in there when I view from my computer.... :P ]
ugly.

Also, databases are often much easier than an ordered file structure, so long as you always use the database/metatags to find your files. In other words, if you want to use iPhoto or Lightroom or Picasa, etc., make sure you know what you're getting in to, and have a way of backing out or migrating to other software. (Generally not that difficult, but important to remember)

All that said, thanks for the original post - I find a lot of my filesystems end up very structured like this. You spend a lot of time browsing to the destination, but the file is nearly always where you think it should be. I do find now that newer OSes and software (google mail, OS X spotlight, I think Vista's new searching features) make finding things much quicker.

[Daniel591992]

Originally Posted by rediguana

So how do you file a photo that was taken at a show, whilst you were on vacation and occurred on a holiday? (Here in NZ a vacation and holiday have the same meaning, so that would add to the confusion)

My tip is not to hardcode metadata such as tags into directories and filenames. Go for something simple and factual. My directories are...

yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/yyyymmdd-hhmmss.[dng|jpg]



I have this automated for imports in Lightroom so I don't even have to care about the file structure.

And it is always going to be only two folders deep - year and yyyy-mm-dd. Six levels deep just sounds really really messy and hard to maintain.

Metadata is really a far better way of encoding this information than creating it using a directory structure to embed information about an image.

The biggest problem goes back to my first example - the directory/file metaphor does not work well when assigning multiple terms (e.g. the high-level folders you outline above).

Thanks for the comments. Of course, there are always some problems like the one you mentioned. Depends on which is more important. For example, if I went to a party while on vacation, I'd put it in the Vacation and Trips folders because that folder is more important, IMO. Although, I got to say, I wish there was someway around that. It bothers me a lot :X

I tried making shortcuts, but that doesn't work well since I'm always changing the structure.

Originally Posted by acr4

Spaces are the devil - I strong suggest against using white-space in a filename or directory. 'Course, I like unix/linux and do my browsing from the command line, meaning the qualified path needs to be put in double-quotes, or all spaces need to be preceeded by a blackslash.

Also, if you ever make a webpage from your directory structure, all spaces will show up as "%20" and that's dern hard to read out loud. "file:///c:\Documents%20and%20Settings\firstname%20lastname \My%20Pictures\This%20was%20a%20bad%20idea.jpg"
[edit: and I still have spaces in there when I view from my computer.... :P ]
ugly.

Also, databases are often much easier than an ordered file structure, so long as you always use the database/metatags to find your files. In other words, if you want to use iPhoto or Lightroom or Picasa, etc., make sure you know what you're getting in to, and have a way of backing out or migrating to other software. (Generally not that difficult, but important to remember)

All that said, thanks for the original post - I find a lot of my filesystems end up very structured like this. You spend a lot of time browsing to the destination, but the file is nearly always where you think it should be. I do find now that newer OSes and software (google mail, OS X spotlight, I think Vista's new searching features) make finding things much quicker.

Thanks for the comment

Yes, spaces are the devil. lol

I learned that when I decided to play around with linux, but I found ways around it using the quotation makes. Also, I don't plan to put it online, and if I ever did, I would probably only do it for backup, so that's not that big of a problem.