Best way to organise photos

Pthree

What is the best way to organise your photos?

So far I have done it by year, date and then place which works 90% of the time but of course there are times when I dont clear my card every time and I have various dates and places on my memory card and stuff gets muddled.

I know a lot of this is down to my organisation of it, but while trying to "tidy" stuff up a bit, I was thinking maybe there was an easier way.

I use Lightroom and tend to add in folders rather than catalogues (if I am honest I am still not sure what the difference is!)

How do you do yours?

Thanks in advance
P3

googler

No software like Lightroom required.

Create folder(s) named with dates, and occasions or themes

1998-07-06 Trip to Timbuctu
1999-12-25 Christmas 1999
2001-02-02 Auntie Jemimah's Birthday

and put photos in corresponding folders.

... and make sure you duplicate them on different drives for backup....

wongataa

How you organise is really personal preference.

I use Lightroom.
All my photos go into folders by date taken.
I have a folder called 2014. In that I have sub folders of the days I have taken photos(such as 2014-01-05 being the folder for January 5th 2014). In each subfolder is the photos I took on that date. All dates are in the format YYYY-MM-DD as that automatically sorts everything in date order.

Photos are keyworded in Lightroom so I can easily find photos by keyword if I wish and so I can make use of smart collections.

When all the photos are copied of my camera and are safely on my computer the memory card is formatted.

googler

wongataa wrote: »

When all the photos are copied of my camera and are safely on my computer the memory card is formatted.

So, unless you've made another copy from your computer, you'll be stuffed if your hard drive fails ....

[Deleted User]

Mine just go in folders like this..

2014/2014-05 May/2014-15-05 Trip to the seaside/

I've got 50k+ photos organised that way living on an external HD. I occasionally copy them over to my home NAS as a secondary backup.

My wife is more sensible and will print out a load of photos every 6 months

InsideInsurance

The advantage of using something like lightroom or any other photo database is the fact you can tag photos and thus organise things by different metrics.

We have a small amount of top level folders - Holidays, Xmas, Days Out, Work etc and then under that will go folders for individual events like NYC 2013 Dec, India 2013 Oct

Of cause with the meta data the database stores we can also reorganise it by a simple date taken, by the people that are in the photo, by the country/ area they were taken etc


Year/Month/ date or event as a folder structure is fine if you remember when you do things but if you want to find a photo you took one time that you went to the Tate Modern and its somewhere you go fairly often then it'd be a challenge to find all instances and then find the photo within it.

googler

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Year/Month/ date or event as a folder structure is fine if you remember when you do things but if you want to find a photo you took one time that you went to the Tate Modern and its somewhere you go fairly often then it'd be a challenge to find all instances and then find the photo within it.

Surely if you visit the Tate frequently, you're doing so to see new and different exhibits, and each visit has a purpose ... ?

2001-10-01 Slapdash painting at The Tate
2002-06-07 Emin's Messy Bed at The Tate
2004-08-03 Pickled Cows at The Tate

Pthree

Thanks for all the suggestions, I guess it is down to personal preference and as on the whole I am not the most organized I suppose I was hoping someone out there had a fool proof way for minimum effort (I should be so lucky!)

I did start with using keyword and tags in LightRoom but I didn't keep it up for very long ...............now there is a job for a rainy afternoon :cool:

Thanks
P3

wongataa

googler wrote: »

So, unless you've made another copy from your computer, you'll be stuffed if your hard drive fails ....

I do back up so that is not an issue. As this was about organising I didn't mention backing up. Everyone should be doing that anyway.

InsideInsurance

googler wrote: »

Surely if you visit the Tate frequently, you're doing so to see new and different exhibits, and each visit has a purpose ... ?

2001-10-01 Slapdash painting at The Tate
2002-06-07 Emin's Messy Bed at The Tate
2004-08-03 Pickled Cows at The Tate

Which is fine if that photo was of the reason you were going there but if you go to see the pickled cows exhibition but happen to take a photo of a messy bed else whilst you are there then finding that picture remains challenging.

Likewise, how granular do you make your folders? If you have a day trip somewhere do you do it at day level or do you break the day down to each activity. So if you had a trip to London with a relative do you simply have "2004-08-03 London trip with Gran" in which case you may "lose" the fact you took in a trip to the Tate and a stop at the British Museum

Of cause you can still use the search facility of Windows/Spotlight etc rather than bespoke software but bespoke software allows you to capture more information, some of it automatically from the Exif data in the photos, which can make searching easier.

Inevitably this is fairly hypothetical and for the average user it probably isnt much an issue. With the Mrs' work she does want to be able to find individual photos from the 50+ a day she takes and so the additional automatic and tagged data tools like lightroom and aperture allow you to add is helpful for her.