So I'm looking for a better/more effective way to organize my growing collection of photos..

(Note: Definitely not a professional photographer so I don't have clients or anything like that...)

I currently have my photos stored as:
\Pictures\YY.MM.DD - Event name\IMG_####.JPG/CR2

This has worked well generally, but I'm looking to do something like:
\Pictures\YYYY\YYMMDD_EventName\[maybe-descriptive-caption]_####.JPG/CR2

There are two main problems I see myself facing:
- What about random/more casual shots that don't really belong to any event?
- What about events that span multiple days/months? If I put it in YYYY folders, new years eve/day photo taking would be difficult to store!

Any suggestions/ideas? I've done lots of searching but they all seem to follow the same guideline and don't account for things like this! How do you organize your photos?

About the same as you are looking into atm. I do it with ZoomBrowser EX though, so it does it all automatically. If I took pictures of New Years party, it'd be in 2 different folders. I don't do any event name/description because that wouldn't help me much since the majority of my "shoots" are random walkabouts including flowers and animals. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a name for each new folder hehe.

\photos\YYYY\MM\YYYY_MM_DD\IMG_XXXX.CR2

It would probably be better to add an event name for when you're trying to figure out what folder that picture of the bald eagle was in, but like you, most of mine don't really fall into an event category. As it stands, ZoomBrowser works really well for me right now since I can browse by the year/month folders and usually find what I'm looking for pretty fast since I don't take 800 pictures a day.

I'm finding it difficult to accept the option of splitting it into separate folders... heh.

It just seems like more of a "mess" when you have photos from new years or have taken a week+ long vacation spanning multiple months or over new years, etc...

Anyone else chime in?

You need a DAM solution. Then you can import your images into a catalogue and assign them to collections, you can do keywording and you can find your images much faster. Digital Asset Management should allow you to have one image in multiple categories and search for it almost instantly.

Gordon

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.

Oh well, the OP got very sound advice in a thread on another forum and apparently she rejected the advice: So frustrated... I need to figure out a folder structure!

FWIW - this helped me tremendously.

I appologize if I am not to post a link.

http://blog.ericscouten.com/2008/10/lightroom-technique-how-i-organize-my-catalog-and-why/

One thing to keep in mind is that the disk folder structure is the foundation for the future. People have mentioned DAM software. If you use DAM software (I use Lightroom), you MUST assume that you will want to replace it with something new in the future. You must also assume that the new software will be totally incompatible with your old software. If the files are in some sort of rational structure on disk, it will be easier to migrate.

I also use the year as the highest level, subdivided by topic
subfolders are named by month-day in number format followed by a topic name such as vacation, xxx birthday, etc.

events spanning across months are not a problem. Just name them with the start date. It is just a way to group things in a logical order so you can find them later. The DAM software allows you to keyword by other tags in order to find things across dates.

agreed... whatever my naming or tagging choices (and they have been known to change) I always base my organization on folders first and foremost. It also makes backing up far easier.
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Using lightroom, I split everything into folders by year. Then the photos are kept in a sub folder with the date I imported the pictures and a one to two word description.

ie. 2009 > 10-29-09_Yosemite