Categorizing/Organizing Photos

[LIPstudio]

I would like to know how everyone categorize or organize their photos. I'm talking about every photo from every category from business to personal.
For example, I've taken photos for business, commercial, portraits, weddings, but I’ve also taken personal photos for myself on vacation and family gatherings and church functions.
So, do you arrange and categorize files by year and then subdivide folders under that? Or do you create folders (i.e. portraits, weddings, senior portraits, my family, landscape) and file them by year?

Need help on how YOU organize and categorize your photo files.
Thanks.

[bgpro611]

I bought Adobe Lightroom for just that purpose a month ago. Its very fast to load and rate you photo cd backups. There is a image editing side to it but I bought it strictly to organize my cds and dvds. You can download memory cards directly into Lightroom but I prefer to copy to a cd or dvd first. It stores each cd as a folder of thumbnails. It also tracks all metadata and keeps totals such as lens used, iso used, apeture etc, Great program.

[TxKent]

I've recently undertaken a project in image management - with the goal of eliminating dupes. I have 2 laptops and 2 desktops, and somehow ended up with up to 8 copies of the same image in different places. (Backups, backups of backups, etc...)

I created a folder for each year, then 12 folders inside each year for the month. I use ACDSee Photo Manager to manage my images. Using ACDsee, I would view ALL IMAGES on the drive -- excluding the folders I was moving files into (you catalog all of the pics first, and can view all of them at once - in a list, or thumbs), sort by EXIF image creation date, then I would tag all of the May 2007 images for example, and move them to the appropriate folder, like \2007\05-May\. When doing this, ACDsee will pause on any files with duplicate names, and display the images side-by-side for your evaluation and action. I would choose which image to keep - usually by size. I often re-size to send to family, and keep the same names. Or I should say I USED to do that.

I did all of that work on the original computer the images lived on, then moved those files to an external drive. (in a folder for each computer.) I haven't done the final pass - going through all of the images on the external drive, to create my master repository, but I may get to that this week.

Later, I'm going to build a LINUX server and make that my primary file repository with backups being burned to DVD and sent off-site, as well as on an external hard drive.

It's all a work in progress. The hardest part for me was deleting duplicate pics of my son. It was a good exercise however, I found missing images, found some corrupt images, and others that I just plain needed to get rid of. I'm sure the results will be very worthwhile.

[janetg]

i keep my business files on a separate drive from my personal files. my personal files are like the other persons...in folders, by year, then month, and then i go a step further and do it by day. if it was a special event - the folder gets a '-fall color' or 'niagara' something to identify it differently than just my putzing.

my business photos stored on a seperate drive are divided into folders, ie, weddings, engagements, seniors...etc. within that they are just in folders with the yy/mm/dd structure - with a dash to the side as well for identifying.

acdsee is an incredible program - if you don't have it, you should. the pro version will also allow you to almost one click categorize your photos, and once you have done that, you can batch edit the itpc info so it's permanently attached to the file, not just the acdsee database. (i think)

[LIPstudio]

Thanks everyone sounds like ACDSee is the way to go.
Its just ridiculous how many pictures I have collected and stored; now I'm wondering if I'll ever have the time to go back and use half of what I’ve shot.

Anyways, thanks again.

[studiocygnet]

Binders on bookshelves
You know, 120 b&w negs with contact sheet in one set, 120 color negs with contact in another, 35mm b&w negs with contact in another, 35mm color negs with contact in another, and color slides all divided into events, portraits, still life, architecture, landscape, etc. with the most recent ones in the front. Is that what you meant?

[bondarnes]

Digital filing is much like film filing was. A sequentially numbered session envelope is created for every job. Into that envelope goes the DVD of the original unedited RAW and jpeg camera files. The jpegs are copied to the imaging computer into a folder labeled with the clients last name and the session number. Then they are renamed, resized, and edited using ACDSee and burned to a CD. We also print sheets of 12up thumbnails. After the order is completed and delivered to the client, another DVD is burned containing the PSD and jpegs of all processed images then the folder is deleted from the computer. That DVD along with the edited CD, thumbnails, and a copy of the clients order are filed into the original session envelope. These are filed in numerical order which is usually also chronological order.

[TxKent]

Originally Posted by LIPstudio

Thanks everyone sounds like ACDSee is the way to go.
Its just ridiculous how many pictures I have collected and stored; now I'm wondering if I'll ever have the time to go back and use half of what I’ve shot.

Anyways, thanks again.

Yeah, I only had a few thousand... I bet I deleted over 50% easily. ACDSee has turned out to be a great purchase.