Picture Organizing - Normal Household Stuff

(Wauchula, FL) Hi 66 Lo 41  --  It got in the 40's last night, but I got up a little later today so it had warmed up some by the time I got up. We turned on our little heater in the bedroom last night instead of running the furnace, and Jim ran the fireplace this morning to take the chill off.

We didn't do a lot today.  Jim did the laundry and I got groceries.  There were so many people at Walmart that it was hard to even find a parking space, so I went to Winn Dixie instead. It's a little more expensive for most items, but it was worth not having to deal with the crowds.

Our son Rick is an amateur photographer and has written some about how he organizes his photos. I thought I'd share it today. This is how I'm doing them, and it seems to work really well.  Thanks Rick.

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How I organize my digital pictures
by Rick Walter on Thursday, March 10, 2011


Many people have asked me how I organize all my pictures. And I've done lots of reading on how others organize their pictures. I think there are many efficient methods, and it really depends on how you reference or search for your pictures.


Some people want to search by keyword, i.e. "North Carolina vacation". Others like to search by person, i.e. "Find me all pictures of Jack". Still others like to search by date.


Each of these could potentially lead to different methods of storing your pictures. But the method I use seems to work for me and has many benefits for many types of searches and sorting as well as being well structured for uploading easily to photo websites.


All my pictures are imported from my camera using a COPY at first. I leave them on the camera until I am sure they are backed up on my hard drives. I never change the actual filenames. I think it's a HUGE waste of time, especially when I take hundreds of pictures at a time, to rename files or even to use import software to rename the files. The standard numbering that all cameras use works for me. It's just cleaner looking.


I copy all files to one folder and sort through them from there. I group all of my pictures by event. If I went on a 3 day vacation, I would put all three days worth of pictures in the same folder just to keep them together.


NAMING STRUCTURE AND FOLDER ORGANIZATION


My folder naming standard is as follows:


yyyymmdd-short-description-with-dashes-between-words


This makes all folders sort by date nicely. If I put month first I will get January for every year lumped together. And if I use only two digits for year, I will get 2000 before 1999.


Using dashes between words, no special characters and NO spaces allows me to easy upload a folder to a website and not have issues with the URL since URLs hate spaces and special characters.


The descriptions I use are brief and to the point:


jack-birthday
parents-visit
bahamas-vacation


A quick scan of the folders finds what I want easily.


On top of that naming standard, I put each of these folders in a parent folder by year:


- 2009
   |__ 20090112-parents-visit
   |__ 20090220-chicago-downtown
- 2010
   |__ 20100312-description1
   |__ 20100520-bahamas-vacation


And since I will edit pictures from time to time I don't ever want to overwrite the originals, so I separate my raw files from my finished files by putting the raw files in a 'raw' folder and any edited pictures in a 'final' folder:


- raw
   |__ 2009
        |__ 20090112-blah-blah
        |__ 20090220-folder-2
   |__ 2010
        |__ 20100312-description1
        |__ 20100520-folder-5
- final
   |__ 2009
        |__ 20090112-blah-blah


If I did no processing of files for a given folder I don't add it to the final folder. But I keep the structure the same so they are in sync.


ARCHIVING / BACKUP


As mentioned before, I copy all files to my computer using simple Windows Explorer (or Finder on my Mac) and leave them on my camera until I know they are all backed up successfully. I immediately copy the raw image files using the folder structure above to TWO separate external drives. I then do all my post processing on the local computer copies of the files (using Adobe Lightroom 3) and then copy those up to the 'final' folder on both external drives. Only then do I delete the copies on my computer and then format the flash card in my camera.


One external drives sits at home and the other is usually in my bag with me so I can pull them up at work or wherever.  I don't mess with online storage or remote locations. But it really is a matter of how important your pictures are to you. You can can spend lots of money in backups and replication if it's that important. I just feel two external hard drives are sufficient. (I did get very nervous when I only had one so I bought a second one recently to have two copies of everything)


SEARCHING


I know many people would like to do a quick search using windows for a certain picture. With the filenames being the default numbered names, that's useless, but with the directory names having short descriptions, it usually works for me. I have a general ideal when the picture(s) I am looking for was taken so if I search for 'Jack' I will get the folder names, which include the date in them, return back and I can quickly flip through the pictures in that folder.


I don't do this yet because I am lazy, but I do recommend Picasa or some other software TAG your images. Heck, Windows has that built in now. When you import your images, put a few tags on them using Windows Explorer or the default photo app. Don't go crazy with the tags unless you want to spend the time. For example, I'd tag ALL the pictures in a given folder/event the same. But you might add tags for individual pictures that people are in. That's really cool if you then search for 'jack' and it will pull up specific pictures that Jack is in rather than just the folder names.


Bottom line, tagging is powerful and you should look into it. Makes searching super easy.


I think that's it. Clearly there's no single right way. My way just works for me.


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We're planning on some fun tomorrow, something different for us.

25 Days left until we head North.