How do I label and organize my digital photos?

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Permalink Reply by Suzanne on September 5, 2009 at 8:05pm

Hi David,
I had the same problem awhile back. So decided to organize my photos by year and date. I create a folder for the year that the pictures were taken & inside of that folder are more folders which are dated & given a titled so I can easily identify what pictures are in that folder. Sometimes I create a folder of pictures that does not require a "date stamp". I will give you an example below to get an idea.

Example:

-2009 Pictures
--Jan 20th- Amy's birthday
--Mar 2nd- George & Lisa's Wedding
--Family Pets
--Misc Pictures
--July 4th- party & neighborhood BBQ

Hope this helps you out.
Suzanne

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Permalink Reply by David on September 6, 2009 at 5:31am

Thanks, Suzanne, for the idea. It makes a lot of sense!

David

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Permalink Reply by David on September 6, 2009 at 5:51am

Where on the site can I find the chat area, Geri?

Thanks, David

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Permalink Reply by David on September 6, 2009 at 5:51am

Oops. You gave it to me already.

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on September 6, 2009 at 6:27pm

I take a lot of photos. Like Suzanne, I keep them organized by date because any other method I tried was just too much trouble. Mostly I have folders labeled with the year, then a dash, then the month. If there was a special event and I took a lot of photos, then I will have a subfolder for the event. When we are on vacation I have a subfolder for each day.

The Windows Explorer left pane looks like this:

2009-07
- Luminato
2009-08
- Huntsville
2009-09
- Air Show
2009-10

With several cameras, I try to keep the clocks synchronized, then the program that copies the files from the cards to the computer names them yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss_ so they look like this:

2009-02-07_18-15-54_IMG_3134.CR2
2009-08-02_14-30-52_0K3Q9639.CR2

When the pictures are sorted by name, they come out in chronological order.

The challenge with this scheme is that you need to be able to remember you have a picture and when it was taken. I am exploring keeping thumbnails separately to save the computer some processing time and am also looking at setting up a tagging system which would find photos based on key words. There are some commercial packages which do this but my concern with many of them is that as the software house goes from version to version they change things and sometimes your collection has to be recreated because the new version is not compatible with the old version.

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Permalink Reply by David on September 6, 2009 at 8:12pm

Thanks. cameraclicker for your reply. Over several years, my step father took a lot of color slide photography and developed and mounted the slides himself. To keep track of what was what in each of the photos, he carried around a small journal and noted the date, photo number and a small description.

From what you and Suzanne mentioned, I will probably create folders by month and year for my photos and create sub folders inside of them if need be.

Thanks again.

David

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Permalink Reply by chris randolph on September 6, 2009 at 10:07pm

I like to use folders as well, using all caps for the root folder and more specific sub folders. I dont worry about dates because my main concern is the subject, and the meta tag will tell me when I took them if it really matters. ohh yeah and if you are on a Mac then iphoto can do it all by subject or faces etc.

SURF
-Northshore
----pipeline
----haleiwa
-Southshore

ABSTRACT
-Out of focus
-Light painting
-Flowers


hope this helps

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Permalink Reply by Staale Sannerud on September 8, 2009 at 4:43am

I'd not recommend going for a folder-name solution. Or, at least, not just that.

Consider entering your metadata into the IPTC fields of the image file - it's precisely what they are there for! Software such as Lightroom has built-in support for this and makes it very, very easy to do. I don't know about Picasa though.

The problem with relying on a folder-name solution is that you only have your photos indexed in one particular structure. If you want to find photos taken on the airshow in July 2009 that is fine. If you want to find photos of Jim and John, taken during 2009, in Chicago or New York, it is not so fine. In Lightroom, with data in the IPTC fields, it is a piece of cake.

One added benefit of IPTC is that it is actually part of the JPG or TIFF file itself. Copy the file to a memory stick and read it off another computer and the metadata is still there. In a folder-name system the metadata is separate from the file and is lost once you move the image.

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Permalink Reply by Juan on September 8, 2009 at 6:52am

David,
Here is what I have useed for a few years
YYYY <-----top level year folder i.e.2009

-YYYY_MM <------Month folder i.e. 2009_09

--YYYY_MM_DD_project_name <-----Project folder i.e. 2009_09_05_Labor_day

---YYYY_MM_DD_#####.jpg <------- Original Photo unique name (File name w/frame number - i.e. 2009_09_05_23467.jpg)

For any derivatives of the original photo I use the original file name then I add -e with a random number i.e. 2009_09_05_23467-e987.jpg.

I use IPTC and Exif information extensively to catalog my photos.

I use a catalog software to manage all my photos.

Juan

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