How do you organize your photos?

H

hulagirl

Member
Okay...feeling a little overwhelmed by this. ; Right now, I have all of our photos on the computer in Aperture and am just beginning to actually learn to use it. ; But I feel like I have all my photos tossed in a box in a jumble (figuratively speaking..you know what I mean?) and I'm finding it tough to even find what I shot over the last 5 years, unless it is associated with a certain month..like Christmas, or our usual WDW trips. ; It's a mess. ; It's funny, because in real life, I am the most organized person you will ever meet, but in my cyberlife...oy! ; What a disaster! ; (you should see my iTunes account - yikes)

Where do I even start getting this organized folks? ; Help!
 
Smart Albums in Aperture are you friend. Especially, if you only have one ore two aperture libraries. ; You could Create a smart album for each year. Include other criteria as you may need need such as occasions or even specific import dates.
 
I use Aperture, and I keep my albums by import or major project. ; But then I tag the files (used to be better about this when I was using ACDSee Pro, but that's only for Windows) so I can search by person, place, Disney park land, etc.

iPhoto has something similar, not as powerful, but it is a good start.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/#organize
 
Once I knew I'd be getting hundreds of thousands of photos stored, back when I first started digital photography, I decided to just use the native Windows folder systems with a standardized naming convention for the files, since I have always been familiar with the Windows folder systems and find it very quick and easy to navigate.

Each batch of photos are loaded to a new folder in the main Photos folder, named for the place or event and date. ; For example, C:/Photos/Disney World 2010-01 (4-digit year, and 2-digit month). ; That allows the photo folders to sort by subject, and further to stay in date order.

Then when I load all the photos from the camera to the newly named folder, I batch name the photos similarly: Disney World 2010-01 001, Disney World 2010-01 002, etc.

If the subject is one I shoot often, I may use subfolders to separate what may be dozens of folders from the same place...so I have a main Disney World folder, a main Wakodahatchee (my bird place) folder, a main Cruises folder, etc...then under each of those, I have the subfolders for each trip (Disney 2009-01, Disney 2009-06, Disney 2009-09, Disney 2009-12, etc).

Then for the final separation...I leave all original photos in each of those files untouched, in case I ever want to go back and reprocess or rework a shot...as I process shots, I load them into a subfolder called 'Processed'. ; When I want to slideshow my final processed shots, that's the folder I'll use.

The whole thing lets me keep all my photos in one folder called 'Photos', yet separated within by subject and date, original and processed. ; Using basic Windows search capabilities, I can search through the folders by date, name, subject, or camera used. ; Some photos I took the time to tag for additional searches, but I get a little lazy with that.
 
I use a system similar to Justin's, but using a strictly chronological system.

Under My Pictures, I have a folder for each year. Under the year's folder, I have a folder for each day when I took pictures. Since I don't shoot much (compared to some around here!), most years only have 20-30 day folders in them.

After taking pics, I copy them from the camera into a Downloads folder. I then copy them into their proper day folder under the current year. This gives me an untouched copy of the pics, in case something goes wrong during post-processing.

Post-processing on the pics includes renaming (my standard date format is yyyy-mm-dd_###.jpg), then batch processing in Photoshop Elements for color correction and sharpening, then noise reduction with Noise Ninja.

Once the pics are processed, I back them up to my online photo storage AND two laptops. Only then can I clear my memory cards and delete the untouched version in Downloads.

After the pics are processed and backed up, I manually add a line to an index that I keep, so I can look up the pics later by subject or location.

Indexing can be done in many ways; if you have a program like ACDSee, you can add comments to each individual photo, allowing the program to automatically locate any pics you might have by keywords. I don't bother with this at the moment, but eventually I'll have to, as I add more and more pics to my collection.
 
I also use a system similar to Justin's. ; I use the windows folder system, but I organize everything by location. ; I have a separate folder for each attraction, show, restaurant, shop, etc that I have taken photos of at WDW. ; For example, photos of POTC would go in:

C:\Photos\WDW\Magic Kingdom\Adventureland\Pirates of the Caribbean

All of the Raw Files stay in the attraction folder, the edited copy is saved as a photoshop file and goes in a sub-folder called "Edited." ; The images are then flattened and saved as a JPEG in another sub-folder called "JPEG"
 
Since you're on a Mac (as am I), I'll tell you what I do.

First off, when I attach a camera or plug in a card reader, my computer is set to automatically open iPhoto.

Then, the photos are imported, and iPhoto is set to automatically separate photos by "event". ; My event criteria are set so that each day's shots are one event. ; After the import, I give each event some name (like "Epcot", or I'll put in the initials of whichever family member is in the shots), that way, I can search my photos without having to have a keyword for each photo -- I just larger groups of photos with whatever I named the event.

Additionally, the events are kept in chronological order, so it's pretty easy to find them if I have some idea of when they were taken.

Finally, when I get done importing (from say, my last trip to Disney), I will create an Album (with a title like "Florida 2009"). ; Then, I drag all my photos from that trip into that album, and delete the ones I don't want to touch up and/or print. ; Then I do the post processing on those photos.

Hope that helps,

Boris
 
I usually use the date stamp of when the photo's were taken, BUT if it is something special or a vacation, then I separate them and put them in a folder of their own, so I can find them easier.
 
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