How To Organize Your Digital Photos

A common question we get asked by readers is what is the best way to organize your digital photographs? There is no easy answer to this question as everyone’s needs are different. Below I”ll explain how I organize my digital photographs.

I Store all My photos within one folder

Perhaps the most common problem I see with the people who ask for advice on this subject is not storing all of their photographs in one folder. Chaos will soon reign if you have folders dotted all over your computer with photographs in. Common places to store photographs seem to be on the desktop, in My Documents > My Pictures, On External Hard Drives or in any folder your Cameras software chooses to import them to.

By having so many folders scattered all over your computer where photographs are stored, it becomes easy to lose track of where your photographs are. Not only does it make it hard to find the photographs you want when you want them but it also makes it much harder to create a simple backup routine in order to help you prevent losing your photo collection should something go wrong. Check out my last post about creating easy photo back ups.

I Use a Standard Naming Convention

I use a simple naming convention for the folders I store my photos in. Each month I create a folder with the following format: ‘YYYY-MM-DD’ which I use for general, unrelated photos taken throughout the month. If I have a series of photographs from a specific event (such as a birthday, holiday or a photo shoot)  i keep them in a separate directory called YYYY-MM-DD EVENT.

I Use Adobe Lightroom

If you are not familiar with it Adobe Lightroom is an incredibly powerful piece of software designed specifically for professional photographers. With pro level cameras being more accessible to enthusiasts this software is becoming increasingly used by hobbyists.

Lightroom is not just a photo browser/viewer, it is a complete photo management application and database designed as a one stop shop for photographers. For me, it’s key features are:

• Library: This functionality lets you quickly browse your photographs, add keywords, ratings, create virtual collections and much more. A key feature is that like iTunes does for your music collection, you initially import your photos to your Library. Essentially Lightroom is storing your images and all their data (name, keywords, previews etc) in a database. This means that searching,locating and organizing your photographs is lightening quick.

• Developing: The develop module in Lightroom allows you to quickly edit both RAW and JPG images. The amazingly slick interface makes editing things such as exposure, contrast. saturation, curves, spot removal incredibly easy. It also contains more advanced features such as an adjustment brush. All this means there is very little need for me to edit my photographs in a separate application such as Photoshop.

• Other: There are numerous other features available within Lightroom which I wont go into here including slide shows, publish to web, contact sheets etc.

I take time to sort and tag my photos

It is all to easy to get back from a shoot, dump all of the photos from your memory card to the PC, have a quick scan through, maybe do something with the good ones (some editing, flickr, email them maybe) then leave them all to rot on your hard drive. Doing this it is very easy to quickly amass vast quantities of photos you’ll never use or be able to find that simply clog up your hard drive.

Here is the mini work flow I follow to help keep things organized:

• First I import all images from the memory card to my Lightroom Library

• Preview them all in Lightroom. As I go through them one by one I mark those that I obviously need to delete a 1 rating and those I am really pleased with a 5 rating.

• Next I delete all of those I marked as a 1

• Run through all the remaining photos again marking the bad ones with a 1 and the good ones 5

• Again delete all of those I marked as a 1

• Then add high level keywords to all the remaining images such as “2009-06 Italy Holiday”, “2010-10 Mr & Mrs Smith Wedding” or “2010-11 Mikes Birthday”

• Because I always shoot in Raw format I convert all of the ‘unrated’ photos to JPEG format and delete the RAW versions. These are the photos I may want to view again in the future but won’t sell, publish or edit further. Saving them in Jpeg format (as opposed to RAW) allows me to save a huge amount of space on my hard drive.

• The really good photos will be those marked as a 5 and still in RAW format. I will now go ahead and add some more detailed keywords to these images to allow me to easily find specific images in the future. These are the images I intend to use in the future (sell as stock photography, put into exhibitions, upload to flickr, sell to clients etc).

• If I have time I may start editing the above images, if not I’l leave them safe in the knowledge that they are nicely organized and tagged ready to be edited later.

Following the above work flow has made a massive difference to my photo collection. Of the many thousands of images in my photo library it never takes me more than just a few seconds to find the exact image I am looking for.

Do you have any tips to help others organize their digital photo collections? If so we’d love to hear them – just leave a comment below.

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Tagged as: backup, lightroom, post processing, Tips & Tutorals