How do you organise your photographs?

DarkShadow

DarkShadow

DarkShadow

Soldato
Joined
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UK
Hey guys,

I'll be starting off with my 400D soon and since I only have 1 pic that I've taken, I've thought it would be best if I started organising my folders now.

Now, how do you guys sort your photos and which ones do you keep? Do you store both the jpeg and RAW along with possibly a processed image?

Do you categorise your photographs by subject, date or both?

Just thinking of ideas, thanks :)
 
Errrm, not very well :o Folders look kinda like this:

1. Concorde Stuff --> Aircraft Photos/Videos --> Each Aircraft --> Year ---> Date

2. Photos/Videos --> Different Folder Names such as "Random, Holidays, Places (which is broken up into area name). Then into date.


Always been able to find a photo :D
 
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I let Adobe Lightroom do all the hard work. As soon as I plug in the memory card, lightroom loads up and transfers the images. It sets up the folder structure (By date) and detects duplicate images. Once its copied everything, I go through them all and rate them with stars. Anything with 0 stars (shots out of focus, very under or overexposed) I delete from the pc. Once ive gone through and processed and rated all the shots, I export the ones with 4 or 5 stars to a seperate 'portfolio' folder and upload them to my deviantart page. :)
 
I use Lightroom too, great program, does all the sorting for you so stores the originals as well as the edits you made. Well worth the money imo.

Edit: you could try the 30 day trial too see how you get on with it.
 
Yearly folder then in that folder have dates with the subject as the title, with all the photos in there, Then a favorites folder with all the edited and completed photos in.

e.g.

Code: 
2006
2007--->
             050407 Cousins
             120407 Lake District
             270407 Church
Favorites
 
messiah khan said:
I let Adobe Lightroom do all the hard work. As soon as I plug in the memory card, lightroom loads up and transfers the images. It sets up the folder structure (By date) and detects duplicate images. Once its copied everything, I go through them all and rate them with stars. Anything with 0 stars (shots out of focus, very under or overexposed) I delete from the pc. Once ive gone through and processed and rated all the shots, I export the ones with 4 or 5 stars to a seperate 'portfolio' folder and upload them to my deviantart page. :)
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Looks a bit complicated to me especially as (Bill Gates) at MS Windows kindly included a folder called "My Pictures" in the operating system. Couldn't you just have put them all in there and be done with it? It would certainly have been less time consuming :D

Lightroom does looks interesting and you seem to have it well under control. ACD See could be an alternative
 
Belly said:
Looks a bit complicated to me especially as (Bill Gates) at MS Windows kindly included a folder called "My Pictures" in the operating system. Couldn't you just have put them all in there and be done with it? It would certainly have been less time consuming :D

Lightroom does looks interesting and you seem to have it well under control. ACD See could be an alternative
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Lol, "My Pictures" is the last place I would put them. If windows was ever to go fubar, then I wouldn't want my photos on the same drive as windows. Also C:\Documents and Settings\Messiah Khan\My Documents\My Pictures is hardly the most memorable location should I ever have to recover the files in an emergency. Also after 5 weeks of doing photography, I have racked up 4200 pictures (Not inluding the ones I deleted straight off) So finding specific ones if I dumped them all in the same folder would be far more work than organising them well in the first place. My system using Lightroom may look complicated, but trust me once you get a good workflow going, its extremely efficient.
 
messiah khan said:
Lol, "My Pictures" is the last place I would put them. If windows was ever to go fubar, then I wouldn't want my photos on the same drive as windows. Also C:\Documents and Settings\Messiah Khan\My Documents\My Pictures is hardly the most memorable location should I ever have to recover the files in an emergency. Also after 5 weeks of doing photography, I have racked up 4200 pictures (Not inluding the ones I deleted straight off) So finding specific ones if I dumped them all in the same folder would be far more work than organising them well in the first place. My system using Lightroom may look complicated, but trust me once you get a good workflow going, its extremely efficient.
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Very true, my favorite pictures are in the My Pictures folder along with personal ones (ie pics of nights out and the like) but the actual photographic pictures with the Tiff edited images are randomly in a folder somewhere else (organised as shown in my previous post). That way I have good pictures in the My Pictures folder, and all the crud and repeats are somewhere else out of the way unless I want to do something to them.

Neither My Pictures or the other folder are on the same drive as windows and neither are on the same drive as each other. They are also copied to DVD so if one drive should go I still have 2 other places that have the pictures on. I didn't do that on purpose, it just sort of happened. :confused:
 
I go by type > year > yyyy-mm-yy - Shoot title > photos

So Raw > 2007 > 2007-02-10 - Snow in Troodos > _MG0001.CR2 etc.
 
Here's my way...which is better than others because you can see everything at once :p



After copying, I open the NEFs (RAWs) folder in Lightroom, then after processing export to 'Image Library\Lightroom Exports' then move the pics to the day directory folder.
And when I've got 4gbs worth I back-up to DVD.
 
messiah khan said:
I let Adobe Lightroom do all the hard work. As soon as I plug in the memory card, lightroom loads up and transfers the images. It sets up the folder structure (By date) and detects duplicate images. Once its copied everything, I go through them all and rate them with stars. Anything with 0 stars (shots out of focus, very under or overexposed) I delete from the pc. Once ive gone through and processed and rated all the shots, I export the ones with 4 or 5 stars to a seperate 'portfolio' folder and upload them to my deviantart page. :)
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Does Lightroom deal with RAW dude?.
 
benneh said:
Does Lightroom deal with RAW dude?.
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admirably :)

Best thing i find about Lightroom are the metadata tags, so even though it sorts all my pictures into folders based upon

-> Year
-> Date taken

Which is great for storage and backup but no so great for locating a particular image unless you know the exact date it was taken. Instead I find stamping all my images (at the time of import) with relevant meta data the best option, I can then easily locate all my images of a particular topic using a key word search, so no longer do I have to trawl though folder after folder of images.
 
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benneh said:
Does Lightroom deal with RAW dude?.
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As sepulchre has said.. yes. Having said that, I can't use RAW with it at the moment, as Adobe RAW4 doesn't support the Nikon D40x yet as its such a new model. Im shooting in jpg for the moment, until there is full support for RAW.
 
I have two folders which follows the following structure.

Photos > Year > Date and Location > Photos (RAW Format)

I then get lightroom to copy the photos to a Edited Photos folder which has the same structure. I only work on the files in the edited photos folder.
All the original RAW files are backed up on an external hard-drive and a separate PC (just in case). Call me paranoid all you want :p
 
It might be worth pointing out that lightroom does not edit the image you are working on, the original image remains intact, changes made are stored internally in lightroom as a series of instructions, only if you export the image from lightroom will those instructions be applied to the image or a new version of it.

I'm sure someone can explain it better than that though.
 
sepulchre said:
It might be worth pointing out that lightroom does not edit the image you are working on, the original image remains intact, changes made are stored internally in lightroom as a series of instructions, only if you export the image from lightroom will those instructions be applied to the image or a new version of it.

I'm sure someone can explain it better than that though.
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Lightroom uses 100% non destructive editing! That any better sepulchre? :p
 
Mr.Orb said:
I have two folders which ...............
:p
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Yes I agree with you too. Two folders are best, the ones I prefer are: "My Pictures" and "Recycle Bin" :D

Sorry!

Edit: Typo!
 
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