how do you keep your photos organized?

like stated in the title, in the past month, since i bought my cam i have taken 900+ pic in roughly ~2.5GB+

disk space aint an issue, but how do you guys keep your photos organized? Mine are currently named DSFC0001 to 1250+ lol, in a single folder... its getting crowded there.

Should i name them according the shooting object, location, or make separate folders for each shooting session or?? or how?

i thought i should ask some more experienced photographers.

 

I sort mine out into months and have them backed up on disk by year.
I rename them simply by number in which they were taken, 001 to what ever.

 

I have a folder on my hard drive called "Photos." Within that folder are subfolders for each subject, with further subfolders as necessary. For example, I have a folder for my daughter, and in that folder I have a folder labeled for the day or event. So her folder looks like this:
C:\Photos\(her name)\Thanksgiving 2007; C:\Photos\(her name)\11-15-07; etc.

Inside each subject's folder is a folder for all the raw images (C:\Photos\(her name)\Thanksgiving 2007\Raw) and a folder for the processed images. All of the raw images retain their original naming convention (I have my camera set to continual counting).

As I fill up space I burn the folders to a DVD. One of these days I'll just break down and buy an external drive to back stuff up.

It might not be elegant, but it makes total sense in my mind.

-monkey

 

It's a big mess, thats all I can say.

I'm looking into an external hard drive, I'm tired of DVD's.

 

this make sense to me, i have an external disk, or i can copy it to home file server at regular basis.
only problem with this aproach is, what to do with some "random photos" i have 3-5 pics of really random subjects. and i have lot of such photos...

 

Mine just go in folders by date by shoot.

20060728 - Birthday
20071120 - Gatwick Sunset
20071122 - Decay

etc etc. One of these days I'll get round to installing Extensis Portfolio, as discussed in a previous thread: sorting photos...

So long as I know roughly when I shot it - which I generally do - it's not too hard to locate anything. I used to have a big folder hierarchy by type but it just didn't work. Especially when things crossed over. I thought about implementing some kind of local tagging system, but I don't like Bridge for that and Portfolio's meant to be great.

 

I used to use the sub-folder system others have mentioned, but now I use Lightroom. Lightroom automatically handles the sub-folders, as well as keywords, metadata etc. I then back the folders up to DVD as and when I reach ~4GB of non backed up data, but keep the data on the HD. This way I can access all of my photos at all times quickly and easily - and still have a backup should things go horribly wrong.

Google Picasa does much the same for free.

 

For the random photos, I just put them in the "Photos" folder in a folder identified by the subject. I, too, have a few folders with only a handful of images. I have a horrid memory for dates, so I generally use a short descriptive term to identify the folders. I find it's easier for me to remember where things are that way. Your mileage may vary.

-monkey

 

Separate folder per location or subject.

 

Adobe Lightroom! Everything in one folder, but sorted by exif data and keywords.

 

/external_disk/year/YYYYMMDD/Subject/CRW*

I really want to find a decent managing program for linux. I rarely need to use tags or anything because I usually know where a particular shot will be, but it might be nice to have.

 

Lightroom, sorted into collections, but all the files are in one folder.

 

Photos/Year/YYYY_MM_DD/

The canon software can do this automatically on import. Then when I've edited shots, I put them in an "Edited" subfolder so i can keep the originals.

Then I use Windows Photo Gallery on Vista to add tags etc. This is really handy, because I can put multiple tags on each photo, so they'll show up in separate sections.

 

Using Apple Aperture. I have one project folder called "Unsorted" that I import to if pictures haven't been shot for a dedicated project. Those shot for a project have their own project folder.
I then star rate those I like and sometimes find the will to tag them.

All this means is that if I need to find a memorable picture I use Aperture to display the star rated ones. And if I want to look through a project then it's pretty straight forward.

I don't see why I would sort in folders with the date in the name (used to do that on Windows) as you can always just search and sort your pics by date.

I can really recommend using tags, but tagging can just take sooo much time that I find it difficult to bother

Then again I only have 1905 pictures in my Aperture Library so far, so I might have to come up with another system some time later on.

After becoming familiar with Aperture on the mac I can't really say I want to keep my pictures on the PC for anything but backup

 

I use folders:
- Unprocessed (.jpg or .raw originals out of camera)
- Processing (my last shoot(s), just to be sure I don't edit the originals in the unprocessed folder)
- Processed Print (images optimized for Printing; 300dpi CMYK .. )
- Processed Web (images optimized for Internet; 72dpi sRGB .. )
- Gallery's (webgallery's from a shoot; internet)

In each folder there are subfolders for each shoot (shoot name + date), subject or project.
The originals are never touched.

... L

PS: All of this is on external HD, atm it's only about 4GB though.
Quite a few of the processed images and gallery's are on my main drive of the MBP as well.

 

I start with a new folder, named by job number-client-shoot. Then import the folder into Iveiw Media Pro. Batch rename to 001-job number-client. Then I have a subfolder named JPG or TIFF depending on what file type I deliver. When done, I keep the JPGs and other files (brief, invoice, etc.) then zip the RAWs and burn them to DVD as a back up.

For personal stuff, I just stick with 001-yyyymmdd-blurb.JPG

 

Lightroom, though I've used Aperture and iPhoto as well (and Picasa on the Windows side). Aside from the general bloat, there are a couple things about Aperture that made me switch to LR, and I wish I'd done it earlier. The only thing that really bugs me about it is the ugly CS3-style icon.

 

Please share your reasons what things? I haven't tried lightroom yet but would like to hear why I should

 

Firstly, both Aperture and iPhoto use a big library file to store everything. Ick. Ordinarily I wouldn't care much, but this causes the contents to not show up in a spotlight search. Much more importantly, the naming scheme that Aperture uses in the folders contains @ signs. Huh? Well, if you've got a NAS that contains an NTFS drive (as I do), you're SOL trying to back up your Aperture library as it's an invalid character in file and folder names.

By and large, I've also found LR to be a lot speedier than Aperture. iPhoto is snappy enough (and I do love the scrubbing thing), but it just doesn't offer me enough control for quick post-processing. LR seems to offer much more control than Aperture, and the organization just feels more natural to me. The interface feels somewhat more refined - according to Adobe, they dealt with a lot of photogs in creating the software to get the framework of what people needed, what they wanted, and what would go unused (and therefore waste resources and screen real estate), and really used the public beta to refine things. It's one of the rare instances where a third party seemed to really beat the pants off of Apple's offering for usability.

Mostly, I just feel more secure in the way the LR handles the back-end stuff. I've got a Lightroom folder, and it's just the original raw/jpegs and a single catalog file that stores all of the non-destructive editing data. For 8GB of photos (about a thousand photos), the entire catalog file is just 15MB. Granted, most pics don't have a ton of edits, but there you go. I can easily back things up without having to worry about the filesystem and such, and it automatically makes a backup of the catalog file every week or so. With my Aperture library, I can't even SEE any of my actual photos from a Windows box - the library is over 16GB, and viewing it from a network share has it weighing in at under 2GB (so, not only am I not seeing ANY of the actual photos, there's a TON of overhead that LR doesn't produce)

 

Forgot to mention I have at least one sub-folder within each YYYYMMDD - Subject folder named DNG which stores the original shots, be them RAW (.CR2) or JPG. That means in the top level of each folder are my processed images named "original image name, resolution, subject" which looks something like _IMG_XXXX_1800x1200_subject.jpg. Keeping the original image name as the prefix helps me easily locate the original shot if I need to.

I prefer having it this way round than a sub folder with the edits as it means the first time I open the folder I get the highlights of that shoot and the processed shots rather than ALL of them then clicking through to edits.

I might have some other sub-folders if there's a lot of images for different media, but generally they're thrown in together.

To each their own, but I find this works well for me.