Dennis Dietz
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Upload & Sell: On
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 p.1 #5 · How do you organize your photos? | |
Well, I by no means have a great system but I'll share anyway.
I am not a professional, as such I have a wide range of image types. Everything from family photos, bird/nature photography, macro, holiday parties and even some semi-pro work that I do for friends bands, websites, business, etc. This does not count the random images of lenses, test shots, DIY projects, etc, etc. All this diversity is a real pain to organize but I have settled with the following system.
First, I use Lightroom, but my folder structure is not dependent on LR in that folder names, dates and structure are on my file system, LR simply places the images where I tell it to and shows the images to me later.
I start by organizing images in a top folder Images. Next, this main "library" is broken down into folders based on a broad theme: Macro, Wife, Nature, Family, Friends, Honeymoon, Boston, etc. I will place most images into the general folder they belong to. All my macro shots go in macro, all birds/animals/etc into Nature, images of the wife in "Studio" setting into Wife. If I have a specific event that does not quite fit a general theme, I make a new folder for that; hence, Boston, Honeymoon, Walker Wedding (father-in-law got remarried). This solves the issue of what to do about New Years as I label the folder New Years 08. Sure, some are technically from 2009 but since I did not go to bed yet.....
Inside each theme/event folder the images are imported to a folder named by the date; ei., 10.22.2009 (I always do mmddyy). I have two cameras but images imported from both have very different img numbers (I do not reset this in the camera) and obviously the date/time is part of the exif data so sorting is very easy within a specific folder.
When I import using Lightroom, I import related images and keyword them on import, placing them in an existing folder or creating anew one as necessary So, shots from a macro session will go into the folder Macro, into a folder with the date the shots were taken. If I try to import images at the same time but from more than one data, Lightroom makes folders necessary to cover each date. These images I import will also get globally keyworded at import time. So a photo of a bumblebee might get keywords like; bee, insect, nature, flower, macro, "lens used", "maybe the location", "maybe insect name", etc.
In my main library I have about 6000 images spread into 20-25 folders. These are easy to sort through if I am looking for a specific image as I generally know what the image was related to. If I don't exactly know, I can guess by a key word search or generally narrow down my memory to 2-3 general folders/events.
This has worked out very well for me. When I started, I tried to be more general with folder topics and focused on keywords for later retrieval but this turned out to be a bad system for me. My current file structure may not work for everyone, but it does work great with Lightroom because for each folder, I can see a large contact sheet of thumbnail images with single click. This makes finding a specific image pretty easy. The folder names help guide the search.
I also have a few specific Catalogs/libraries in Lightroom. For example, I worked on a series of images for a field identification guide. These images have no use to me in my regular catalog so I created seperate one for that. The images and catalog are permanently stored in a folder on my computer called TreeGuide, with sub-folders broken down by Gymnosperm, Deciduous, herbacious and each image in these folders is again imported into afolder with the capture data. In this situation, I rely mostly on keywords (the "scientific name", "common name") and there are only 400-500 images in this catalog. I have another catalog dedicated to images related to my wife's business. These are imported to BuisnessName, folder for year, Name_Date of event, capturedate.
I realize I have written this around lightroom. In my opinion, the way I am going it would work fine using any viewing method. I think the key is setting up a structure you can use effeciently. I feel that general folders plus specific event folders offers the best all round organization. One can always have a CameraMisc (for tests shots, lens sales images, etc) or other generalized misc folders. I do think that any organization system will only get you so far if there is not some way of also keywording or tagging your images. I just wish I could figure out how to do more keywording using the import dialog of Lightroom. I hate painting in keywords after import.
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