How Do You Organize Your Files?

[Fotomiguel]

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I’m new in digital photography and I feel a bit confuse about how to keep my files. I would like to know which files and how do you keep them? I’m not asking about the hardware you use, but the way and the quantity.

In four month in digital photography I realize that I keep too many pictures. Some of them in different formats: Firstly I keep the DNG because it is the original one (like a negative), after I edit in PS and then I keep a TIF one, because has different layers and I can reedit it easily. Finally I convert the final result in JPG because it’s easy to transport, send and carry.

I know that in a few years I’m going to get mad.

Should I keep just what I consider my best pictures and which format should I finally use to storage?

Any idea will be wellcome!

Thank you very much!

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[Guest stnami]

Just like my life its chaos. ..................... converted everything computer based, except my life into into DNG

[stunsworth]

Miguel, I dump all of the DNG files to a folder after running them through the Adobe DNG convertor. I have an external with a folder called "Digital 2007". Within that I have sub-folders called "Vol 001", "Vol 002" etc. When a folder has 100 or so images in it I create a new one - currently up to "Vol 034 or so :-). I don't throw any files away unless there are gross technical problems.

 

When I convert a file I put the Tiff into a folder called "Photo Masters", this too has sub folders. Any Jpegs go into a folder called "Internet Jpegs" which just has a single folder for year - so there are folders for 2006 and 2007 at the moment.

[Laki]

usually i create folders for each day with a name like "20070219 - Museum in Frankfurt" so they are all sorted by date when i open the main folder, also i have then some quick overview about the contents. in the folder itself i usually have the raw's and in subfolders the worked over files.

[eudemian]

I am a humble amateur so like to keep life simple.

 

First I only use DNG, I download a card to a folder marked M8 Photographs, then subfolders consequetivley M8-3, M8-4 etc. All files are renamed using the date and time stamp in Lightroom.

 

How you organise your collection then is easy in lightroom or Imatch, I use a lot of tagwords. I probably should junk a lot of my DNG's but I learn from my mistakes so even the bad can help me improve.

 

Finally backup, backup and backup, I use external hard drives and if I wasn't so lazy I should triplicate with DVD's.

 

Hope this helps

 

Tom

[Shootist]

I create a folder called "Pictures (Year)" and then subfolders under that with the month and day (04-22). I download all shots take on the particular date to that particular folder. I then open Bridge and go through all the images for that date and then place different images into collections, without moving them from the original dated folder, like people, landscapes, flowers, events and so on.

That way I have a record of what was shot on any particular date and a categorized collection.

Of course I go through all the images and throw out the ones I don't like.

If I have taken a trip to someplace I create a subfolder with the name of the place/area and the date. But I do the same categorizing of those images.

 

Works for me.

[Eoin]

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I manage all my DNG in Apple's Aperture (no surprise), I keep the master (camera) DNGs for when the official support arrives archived on an external storage drive.

 

I pass the images I wish to import into Aperture through Adobe DNG converter and then bring the converted images into Aperture applying keywords on import. Then it's just a matter of using smart albums to find images by keywords, ratings, dates, lens type, and so on.

 

It (aperture) has an excellent database structure for storing, sorting, grouping and retrieving images. It's made my life a lot more easy with regard to a central depository for digital images.

[Jager]

My process is similar to Laki's. On my computer, under a general folder called "Photos", I have subfolders which further differentiate based upon camera or type - e.g. B&W (black and white images from my film M's), MF (medium format), D200 (Nikon DSLR), M8, etc. I then create a new subsubfolder each time I have new images. Like Laki, that subsubfolder name will start with the date that I loaded them on the computer and will end with a high-level description of what the folder contents are (oftentimes, that might be as simple and generic as "misc").

 

Once they're loaded onto the computer, raw images then get pulled into Lightroom for assessment and keywording. Any that warrant further attention are pulled up in Photoshop, where the first thing I do is save a fresh PSD file. Multiple iterations of that file may then evolve (different output treatments/formats/sizes, etc.). All of those PSD files and variations are saved to the same subsubfolder as the original DNG.

 

This process allows me to use Lightroom as a central hub for image management, while at the same time allowing me to do backups at an operating system level (and at the granularity I want - i.e. I can easily make a snapshot of all my images, just my M8 images, just my M8 images from 2007, etc.).

 

Jeff

[rwfreund]

For pseudo-originals (some have been converted to dng)

One directory per year,

one sub directory per 4GB of files that pass the first culling. (one dvd's worth)

These are re-named in lightroom to year-dvdnr-sequence and once the directory is full, a dvd is burned.

 

All files are dng and many have been geocoded (lat/lon metadata attached)

 

I have a separate structure for what I consider to be final work

directory by year

subdirectory by (shoot, trip, event)

subdirectory by final result image title containing copies of all original images, psd's and output formats that comprise the final work.

 

This works for me.

-bob

[neelin]

Fascinating question. For me two basic ways, they both start by downloading the photos off the camera to a central folder, then immediately renaming the digi-file to date (i.e. 20070317_1417_45, YYYYMMDD_HHMM_SS) using SetNameToTime | StorckSoftware. This provides a future generic way to find files via date, how my mind works best with computers (my computer has no way to scan for the visual picture I have in my mind).

 

Professionally, photos are put into job files (I'm in construction so a job boils down to a job number and everything photo is file, and can be tracked back later quickly.) A large/complex job will have subdirectories of photos within it, with descriptive folder names.

 

Amateur/hobby digital photos are put in a central directory, then put into YYYY subfolders or YYYY_MAJOR_EVENT name subdirectories. I keep these in the same subdirectory as the YYYY subdirectory, not within the YYYY subd. For my usage, I want the stuff relatively easy to scan later (i.e. I don't want to have to remember 2007 was the year of the Paris photos, it will sort in view of the general 2007 photo directory via 2007_Paris. I'm an old fart & consider spaces in file names taboo . I don't have too many MAJOR_EVENTS per year so the directory doesn't get overwhelmed.

 

The organization of amateur photos is way "harder" than professional photos, unless you're incredibly boring & take only flower photos. I use ThumbsPlus for keyword organization but it's getting a little long in the tooth and it may be time to start using Lightroom for more organization/rating, perhaps as soon as "controlled vocabulary" is efficeintly (sp) implemented.

 

Robert

[erl]

Every image is given the days date, a letter designating the camera, then a frame number.

eg. 070422L-24 would be frame 24 shot on the Leica today. All images for client 'X' go in a folder called 'X' or similar relevant name. All folders for this year are in a directory called 'Imagebank2007'. Personal stuff is treated similarly. Sub folders, where relevant, are created in the main ones. The actual image numbering is inflexible so that regardless who the image is for, the numbers still run consecutively through the day.

[robertwright]

As many kinds of photographers as there are, as many ways to organize..

 

for me I am either shooting for a client or shooting for myself. the stuff for clients goes in a folder with the job name. I may or may not rename the photos for them, but if I do, usually it is on export. It would probably do me better to rename them on import so that when I get an internet jpeg back yanked from a web gallery with no metadata left I can at least tell byt the file name which picture they are referring to.

 

For myself I tend to only be working on two or three ideas at once, so I dump like pictures into folders based on those ideas, currently there are three. I don't see the rationale behind renaming pictures to day/month/year when the metadata contains that information anyway, and usually I don't care when a picture was taken, I care if it is any good or not. Aperture takes care of all of that anyway. I have had to get into Lightroom with the M8, so right now I am astride two canoes going down the lazy river, I think I am going to get wet soon...

Programs like Aperture and Lightroom have made this much easier than before, comparing them to Bridge or the Finder or Iview shows us how far we have come. Aperture in particular would let you just dump everything into the Library and sort after, which is a powerful way to do it.

Both Aperture and Lr let you stack pictures, so the psd's or layered tiffs can get stacked with the original dng's. jpegs are something that only get made for specific uses on export, and I see no reason to keep them around. Once the jpeg is uploaded or sent, I delete'em, knowing I have the layered tiff and the dng stacked together.

[Guest WPalank]

Amazon.com: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio): Books: Peter Krogh

[dspeltz]

Amazon.com: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O'Reilly Digital Studio): Books: Peter Krogh

 

I do it the DAM way. there may be better ways, but it works. And my children know the system so some day (if they care) they will know how to find what is important to them.

[adan]

Here's mine (BTW the book looks interesting):

 

A folder for "Pictures" - the default one that comes from Apple

 

Within that, a folder for each year: e.g. "2007 pictures"

 

Within that, a folder for each month: e.g. "2007 01 January"

 

Within that, two or three folders - Digital Originals MM_YY, Digital Reworks MM_YY, Film Scans MM_YY (Not using that last much anymore).

 

Original DNGs get copied from the flash card to my desktop, still in the "Leica 101xxxx" folder, which I then rename to something useful, like "M8 Botanic Gdn 4_07" and then drag to the appropriate month/digital originals folder.

 

Not unlike Shootist, except that I don't bother with days because some days I have multiple subjects to file separately, some days I don't shoot at all, and sometimes I collect multiple shoots on one card over several days before getting around to a download.

 

OCCASIONALLY I will do some swapping or combining of folders within one month to keep similar subject matter together - especially if my editing has reduced some folders to under 10 shots each.

 

Pictures that have been "worked" well beyond the DNG original state (dust removal, dodging/burning, B&W conversion, etc.) get saved as Photoshop documents into the "Digital Reworks" folder for the month they were shot.

 

I use Adobe Bridge to navigate the folders.

 

The "Pictures" folder gets two progressive backups onto two external 250G drives once a week.

[DaveSee]

I copy DNG files to a directory named YYYYMMDD, and if I have more than one card--using 1 card to 1 lens--or have more than one outing in a given day, I'll create subdirectories 1, 2 ,3, etc under this timestamp-based directory. I then run a small script that pulls the "thumbnail" image out of the DNGs in a given directory and creates a JPEG named "index.jpg" with all of these thumbnails, each with the DNG file name, pixel dimensions and size(OK, it's usually 10MiB ). I'll take DVD "snaphots" of these directories, with volume names reflecting the date range recorded to them.

 

Working on a metadata system to manage files by EXIF and user added records, but that's slow going while family, the day job and making images occupies most of my time when not sleeping.

 

rgds,

Dave

[gwelland]

I do it the DAM way. there may be better ways, but it works. And my children know the system so some day (if they care) they will know how to find what is important to them.

 

I follow the same workflow but also use a great tool - Image Ingester Pro.

[hammam]

I had some sort of a way to organize my pictures in folders on an external HD using Nikon View. Folders have names like «Emily downloads», «Emily converted», «Emily Photoshop» (once retouched) and «Emily archives». Or just «M8 downloads», «D2X downloads» and « Photoshop docs» and «General archives» (you don't want to go see in there.) It worked... somehow. Actually, I can find almost anything in my personal untidiness. Then, I regularly archive on DVDs, usually with undecipherable names like «Jean - tif part one - March 07» Now, this is hell. LOL!

 

Now, I bought Lightroom and I'm trying to put things in some order. But so far, it's mostly a mess Granted, I haven't had time to read the «manual» yet and I'm still trying to figure out an automatic way to keep some tab on the converted DNGs. I keep at it.

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[MarcRochkind]

However you organize, you can use my free ImageIngester utility to automatically place the image files in the folder arrangement of your choice (arranged by date, subject, or whatever you like), and also rename the files if you like (e.g., to put the date in the file name). It can also make a backup at ingestion time, apply metadata (e.g., copyright notice), and much, much more.

 

I like to run my M8's DNGs through Adobe DNG Converter to compress them, create JPEG previews, and apply metadata, but that's completely optional.

 

Peter Krogh's site thedambook.com (already mentioned in this thread) is a great place to get advice.

 

You can download the free ImageIngester at ImageIngester.com.

 

--Marc

[wparsonsgisnet]

windoze user, here. Disclosure: I do not use Bridge.

 

I keep my pictures in a file called PIX.

Under that, I have directories called Digilux-2 and Leica M8.

Under those, I have directories named for the subject matter, e.g., the last name of the person in the portrait shoot, or a location, or an event.

In those directories I keep the dng's (or D2 raw's).

In that directory is also a directory called JPEGS containing all the corresponding jpg's.

 

Since beginning to use C1, I keep ALL the processed files in the Phase One/.../Images directory, and have pointed PS to this directory as well.

 

When I am editing, I save the cropped version, then in PS I save any other version that has had changes, and finally I save the version that has the noise reduction applied. Writing about this, I think I should delete all the noise reduced files and jpg copies. They can be easily replaced (---- don't lose that copy of the noise reduction sw ----).

 

Now, deleting files, that's a horse of a different color! Fortunately, storage is cheap and you only need three places to store files (one offsite).