Organize your photos

So you've taken some pictures with your new digital camera, and now it's time to copy them to your computer. Where will you put them? For starters, if you don't have another plan, "My Pictures" is not a bad place. You'll find that as a folder under "My Documents" if you're using any recent flavor of Microsoft Windows. If you have multiple accounts on your computer, each account will have a "My Pictures" folder to itself.

Folder Structure

Now that I have many thousands of photos on my computer, I have added a separate disk drive just for photos. And I created a folder at the top level of that disk drive called "Photos" (imaginative, huh?).

My photo folder structure is based on the date I took the picture. I used to keep a separate folder for each month. And I would somtimes break out special events, like vacations or holidays, like this:

My Pictures
2009
    2009-01
    2009-02
    2009-03
    2009-04
       George's Birthday Party
    2009-05
    2009-06
    2009-07
       Grand Canyon Vacation
    2009-08

The photo import program that came with your camera probably can put the photos into separate folders by date. If you don't take a lot of photos, organizing them by month is probably adequate.

I take more picture now. In fact, so many that if I organize by month, many months have too many pictures to wade through. So, now I break them down by day. I use Adobe Lightroom to import the photos from my camera, and it will do this automatically for me:

Photos
2009
    2009-01
      2009-01-01
      2009-01-10
      2009-01-11
      2009-01-20
      2009-01-21
    2009-02
      2009-02-01

To keep from having too many folders at the root level (after all, my photos now span over 50 years because I also have photos my dad took), I have created a folder for each decade of pictures. I have up to 10 "year" folders in each "decade" folder. There may be fewer if I don't have any pictures for a year - which occurs for many years before I was shooting digital. Eventually I hope to digitize many of my slides and negatives, which will fill in most of these gaps. Each "year" folder then has (up to) 12 month folders. And each month folder may have up to 31 day folders. My older photos are only broken down by month, or I may possibly create a subfolder in a "month" folder for a specific event, as you can see above. This is mostly a carryover from what I did in the past. With today's tools it should not be necessary (more about that later).

Once you've come up with a folder structure that works for you, put your image files into this structure. You probably should move the files with the program you use for cataloging and viewing your photos. If it has saved information about the photos and their locations, moving the files outside the program, for instance, with Windows Explorer, may cause the photos to lose their association with the information. Therefore, you should always move your photos using your viewing software, if that option is available.

File Naming

I have also standardized on a naming convention for my files. This way I can quickly identify my files, and when displayed sorted by name, they are also in chronological order. I have used the file naming convention written about in The Digital Asset Management book. My files are named like this:

gbs_20070924_4567.jpg

Of course, the ".jpg" may vary, depending on the file type. The file name begins with my initials, "gbs", followed by an underscore. It is followed by the date in the form yyyymmdd (so it will sort correctly), followed by another underscore and the camera sequence number. If I include pictures shot by someone else in my folders (which does occur), I identify those pictures by prefixing the file with their initials in place of my own. If I shoot with more than one camera in a day, the two cameras' sequence numbers are independent. So far, I've never had an occurrence where the sequence numbers from two cameras conflicted in one day. With two cameras, the files may not sort completely in the order shot. However, my viewing software takes care of that by displaying the pictures in order by the EXIF Date information (more about that later), instead of file name order. As long as I keep the clock in my cameras set accurately, the pictures display in thye proper chronological order.

Cataloging

Now that the files are located where you want them, we should consider cataloging them so we can locate the photo(s) we are looking for later. Here's more information on cataloging your photos.

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