Weakness

Organization is not my strong suit. I hate the feeling of being unorganized, but that doesn't change the fact that I am. This trait seeps into most areas of my life until I decide I can't take it anymore. Usually by the time I get fed up the work requires such a chunk of time that I feel overwhelmed. Cleaning my closet, organizing the mail and paperwork that is laying on the floor of my office, and straightening the basement storage are things I routinely put off until I feel totally buried. And I think I've hit that point with ALL THESE digital photos. They are pouring out of every corner of my computer and there are stacks of cds in my closet. It's time for me to take control of my files and come up with a system of keeping them organized. I need help. I do keep them on an external hardrive! And I always back up my clients' photos on discs. But beyond that, I'm clueless.

I know there must be some sisters out there that can offer me some advice. And maybe I'm not alone in my ways and you can help someone else too. So what's your system?

Comments

[maz]

I'll be watching this one with interest; I have precisely the same problem. I am a total slut when it comes to file management. Hopefully someone out there has 'The Answer'......!

[Marcie]

Altho I am typically very organized...I do find the management and storage of thousands of photos to be a challenge. I name each 'project' with a title and date. I back the entire project (even those photos that I might not like) onto two external hard-drives, before eliminating them from my main computer.

For those images that I actually use - I back the original (straight out of the camera) and the final (post processed) image onto a CD with a little thumbnail photo of the image itself and then file that CD in a box designed for exactly that purpose.

I then can easily flip thru the little thumbnail images that become like file folder tabs to find what I'm looking for.

It's tremendously time-consuming, and not my favorite part of what I do..but I do try to keep up.Eveytime I let it go..it does become an overwhelming task.

Hope that helps....

[shelli]

Funny you should post this right now because I have been forced to begin organizing my photos because my hard drive is completely full. How I wish I had begun deleting the bad photos way back when! But my son was a baby, and I had a hard time deleting anything....

Anyway, now I have everything backed up on two external hard drives. I have some on CDs, but those are completely unorganized. I have the external hard drive photos organized by year and month.

Now I'm going through my photos in iPhoto, and I'm deleting all but the very best. It's so time consuming...over 15,000 photos!! I don't know when I'll finish. I do a little everyday. Once I do that I may back these up on something else. We'll see how much space I free up.

But for now on, once I download photos, I'm going to be heavy-handed with the delete key. And I'm just going to back them up after I've post-processed them.

[lora]

I use terabytes. They are hard drives of storage space at 1000 gigs a pop. I run them through a server in my basement that runs a midnight backup everyday, dragging anything new I've added to my computers in the house into a second storage space. When I have too much on my main pc i just drag and drop files to the server. When I need to access anything off the servers I just pull up the file from the server on what ever computer i am using and i can have it without having to bare the weight (or space) of it on each pc. Everything is connected wirelessly, and though that wouldn't be necessary, it's not always convenient to run the wires to each pc and laptop you have.
No cds. No drama. Simple and clean. =)

[brittany]

i make a file for each year. my 2008 file has 12 files inside, one for each month. then, i just put that month's photos in the corresponding file. for example, i took a bunch of pictures of my son the other day at the park with the big cross, so when i unloaded those onto the computer, i immediately put them in a file called "cross park" and placed it in the november file for 2008. that way, i dont have a pile of files that are all named like this: 11-3-08. those dated files are so hard to sort through, and i can never find what i need. now that i file everything by the month that it was taken, it is much easier to find the pictures that i am looking for.

[littlepurplecow]

I too have an organization issue and cleaning the closet has finally made it to the top of my list of to do's for the day. Re photo organization, I just recently purchased Aperture to organize my photos. And while I haven't gone through the tutorial yet, I did get a great demo at the Apple Store. You can set up lists of categories and tags to easily assign to each of your images or use their extensive list of default options (e.g., portrait, interior, exterior, hands, flowers, season,, etc.) . So rather than dumping photos into a single folder by "project" or "date" each image can have its own metadata, making it easy to sort and and search for a specific type of image.

[Lu]

lightroom, LIghtRooM, LIGHTROOM! This program organizes my photos for me. I have tons of them, too and I am what I called Chaotically Organized. I have a method to my madness. Putting all of my stuff on CD was not working because I had to search for the CD and hope the image I wanted was there.

I have been tagging my photos which makes searching so much easier...go figure! Wish I had done it when I first started. Now, I tag everything.

[camerashymomma]

first of all, i LOVE that photo!!

secondly, i really want to be organized, but i'm much to lazy.
but with photos, this is what i strive to do: download only the photos that are keepers (i'm on a laptop) i make file folders for each month. so right now (since i'm behind) i have "Oct." and 'Nov.' on my desktop. as i download photos, if for clients i'll burn them onto disc for them and onto disc for me. and for my own personal photos i put them into the monthly folder. then i make each monthly folder a cd for myself and usually go print up photos from it for my photos box (family or portfolio, etc) then i drag the desktop folders onto an external hard drive for back up.

so i also have stacks of cds everywhere, but i also print them up. i'm a big 'print' fan. i love seeing them in print and really want to pass that along to my son. i always love digging through my parents photos when i visit. and i was freaking out a bit that all he'd have to dig through was some shiny cd's :)

[margie]

i was visiting my sister, she prints contact sheets. duh! i don't. i see people organizing photos with BRIDGE, duh, i hardly ever open it. time for me to sit and read the manual. rtfm. as in read the .... manual. i'll do that right after i clean out the bathroom drawers.

[spread your wings]

I just went through some frustration last night trying to find an old photo. I try to be organized but I get slack- it seems I never quite get it right. My photographer friend and I constantly talk about this - what is the best system. He bought Lightroom to try to get some organization to his photo shoots and I think I'm going to buy it as well. I really think tagging is the key and I am bad at doing that.
I will be following these comments for sure.
Thanks for bringing up this discussion.

[Lori]

I was having this problem too. What has worked for me is a program that Creative Memories sells. It's called memory manager and I love it. You can organize your pictures in multiple folders but the program only saves it once. Then you can pull up the pictures according to specific searches. I love it. You can purchase it here. http://www.mycmsite.com/sites/brendafawcett/catalog-index?event=productdetails&eventId=1465&productGroupId=&categoryId=337&categoryIdParm=|335|336|&pageTitle=Memory+Manager+2.0+CD&relatedItem=N&qtyOrdered=&productId=&itemSku=&act=&selectedCategory=337

[Marcy]

I'm struggling with this, too. So far I have photos organized by year, then within each year the folders are named by even and date, so they come up organized by month. I keep my son's photos in a separate folder, organized by month (he's 9 months old... not sure how this system will work for future years).

I'm trying to be more selective about the photos I save, since I take hundreds each month of my son, but the few times I've gotten more heavy-handed with the delete button I've found I sometimes regretted doing so. Ugh. The packrat mentality just does not help.

[Marcy]

ps- I'm getting Lightroom and am wanting to use the tagging feature to help with organizing photos, but the idea of going back through years' worth of photos and tagging them is kinda daunting. =(

[Kyla]

I too, suffer from this problem. I have found that if I set a timer for 15 minutes and just dig in, I can get quite a few sorted. Granted it's just a drop in the bucket, but maybe 15 minutes at a time, I'll get it done someday. I plan to take Stacy Julian's Library of Memories class this coming February, with hopes that I can finally get them done. I've heard some really great things about her organizing system.

http://www.bigpicturescrapbooking.com/

[Diane Schuller]

I agree with someone above who said, "Lightroom, Lightroom, LIGHTROOM!" -- She is so right. I suffered from the exact problem you describe. When I got Lightroom recently I also bought Scott Kelby's book on how to best use Lightroom -- what a lifesaver that has been! Really.

I'm using his system with Lightroom and can't believe I didn't think of it myself ... long ago! The great thing is that Lightroom 'absorbed' all my other photos and now it's a lot easier to go back into them and weed.

Using Scott's system he had figured out how to streamline and make it as time efficient as possible and I can see how it works now that I've adopted it. (One central folder, then subfolders by year and within them folders either named or by date -- with Lightroom you can pick and choose according to what works better for a specific type of shoot. It's a very efficient system.

I too have a 1TB external hard drive and now that I'm doing some client shoots, I now also back up each shoot separately on CD 'just incase". Oh dear, this got very long -- sorry. :)

Diane

[Debbie Schinker]

Creative Memories' MEMORY MANAGER is what you all need! It is $40 (compared to Lightroom, which is $300) and organizes like no other software on the market. Plus, upgrades are free! I have over 12,000 photos organized and can find the image or SET of images I want in literally 30 seconds or less. Read more about it here: http://12amusings.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/memory-management/

and download it now here: http://www.mycmsite.com/sites/debs/catalog-index?event=productdetails&eventId=1466&productGroupId=&categoryId=337&categoryIdParm=|335|336|&pageTitle=Memory+Manager+2.0+Download&relatedItem=N&qtyOrdered=&productId=&itemSku=&act=&selectedCategory=337

[Jodyangel]

Diane,
Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers
by Scott Kelby

Is this the book you're referring to? I actually Have Lightroom2 but don't know how to use it lol. And I've
been wanting to buy something to help me but didn't know which book to buy.
I'm in the same boat as everyone and have no answer to orginazation. I don't even want to Know how many
files I have on my external Harddrive. I'll be watching!
Jody

[Diane Schuller]

Jody, just change that title to "Lightroom2" like this:
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers
http://tinyurl.com/5dq3kx

and you have it!

[Kerstin]

Phew. I so relate to this. I've tried quite a few systems, including iPhoto and Aperture but I am not happy that they store everything in their own library using some complicated file structure. Meaning, I am stuck with those applications. I prefer to store everything in folders of my choice on my hard drive and process it from there.

If you are a PC user I would go with Picasa. It's free and fabulous. It reads the folders on your hard drive and allows you to easily import, view, browse and enhance photos. I so wish they would develop a version for MAC users! This is the only program that makes me jealous of PC users!

But since I am a MAC user I have Bridge for organizing and PS Elements for editing. My folders are structured as follows: Year / Originals or Edited / Month / Day + Event. For instance:

2008 / Originals / 2008 10 / 1025 Lost Souls Parade
2008 / Edited / 2008 10 / 1025 Lost Souls Parade

I download all originals into the respective folder and rename them at the same time after the event, e.g. LostSoulsParade_01. I then use Bridge to browse them and those that I choose to edit in Photoshop I save in the respective Edited folder as TIF files. I usually rename those photos as I save them to reflect the actual subject, rather than the event, e.g. GreenGhost.TIF.

But like you I still have 1000s of photos on different computers and my external hard drive from before I started this system and I feel quite overwhelmed at needing to organize them all. I think I will adopt the 15 minute timer method, that sounds like it might be the only realistic way to go.

Great photo by the way!

[Puna]

I bought my first hard drive two weeks ago. I just started this whole photography thing this August. I see myself with stacks and stacks of hard drives and cds.

[Robin]

I'm so glad to hear about this, I need (desperately) a way to organize because folders and backups are not enough for me. I need to be able to tag and sort easily. I may try out the Memory one.

[nyjlm]

for my personal photos I use a folder for each month of the year. I mostly use Picasa, and am happy with the way the dated folders, Picasa, and my brain interact :) I would love to use more advanced software, but I also have to be realistic about my time, so Picasa it is for now.
My Dad is a pro nature photographer. He uses something called Breeze Browser and DownloaderPro (http://www.breezesys.com/) to import and organize his raw images. His main subjects are birds, so most of his folders are named after bird families, with species folders inside. When images are converted they go into a converted sub-folder for that species.
We have four external drives (and two backup sets) for image storage. He does a lot of editing in the field so that when he comes home he is only moving images that are keepers into the external drives.
Good luck creating a system that works for you, it is definitely a critical piece of the digital workflow.

[melicia evans]

There's lots of good ideas here. Now can someone just give me the 'want to'.

[Diane]

For those of you recommending Creative Memories product known as Memory Manager, it would be nice if you mentioned that it's not compatible with the Mac Operating System. It only runs on Windows.

But iPhoto is an excellent option. Check out what it can do at: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/