File System ?

[stevedevil]

Hi gang

 

Just got myself a new 2TB Passport Drive to use purely for all my Pictures that I have taken over the Digital Years, and looking through the folders I have on the old drive that Im Backing Up, I thought... What A Mess !!!!

 

So looking at starting a File System for all the pics etc, Raw and Jpegs, and thought OK do it in Years, then sub folder to what and where, but then if its Landscape, Portrait, then who what !!!!!!!!  AAARRRRGGGHHHHH

 

So thought to myself....  How do you store them, what system works best for you !!!!

 

So had to ask !!!

 

Cheers

 

Steve

[Black Pearl]

I store them by place name or event - that way I can easily search for them with key words at a later date.

[Martyn]

I've tried various methods but ended up using a folder for each year. Within those folders are sub folders that are named date/subject  ie, 2015-01-22 Morecambe, that's where I store my raw files from that day. Any edits that I do are stored as JPGs in another sub folder called Exports.

 

I use Adobe Lightroom as my main editor and filing system, so I can add keywords such as landscape, portrait, clouds, horses etc which makes it very easy to search for images at a later date. It's a very simple system because that's how I need it to be.

[ChrisLumix]

iPhoto already stores them by both date and Event, so to narrow it further, I add keywords and create 'smart albums' of particular keywords. iPhoto also tries its best to recognise 'faces' (with mixed results!) but once you've corrected its mistakes, that's another way to filter them.

 

The only real nuisance is when I think of another keyword to use - I then have to trawl my collection to assign the keyword. All in all, iPhoto saves me much more work than it costs. It's also a depository of all the pre-digital shots I've scanned to date and digitised.

[Barbara]

Mine is just a shambles      now where did I put the car keys??????????????????????????????????????

[Phil]

Mine is just a shambles      now where did I put the car keys??????????????????????????????????????

 

Ha ha, welcome to my world!

[fuzzyedges]

Ha ha, welcome to my world!

You must live just round the corner from me

Drop in for coffee some time

[FUJI]

I'm with Blackrox and Phil here........chaotic storage....twenty years of digital photographs.....but.....thanks to PICASA......they are in Date order, with a little help from the alphabetical sorting and my quirky titles that jog my old memory banks.

FUJI

[colinb]

much the same as many I will create a folder such as 'Holidays' then within that folder I create a sub-folder for each year.

 

I also create folders for 'areas' such as Sleaford, then with subfolders for each village or event in that area -well it works for me.

[Guest]

Same way I have for years, raw and jpeg (processed images) stored in separate year folders,everything else done with IPTC keywords and my Dam program of choice, works for me and I can usually find any image in seconds.

[DBT85]

I go

 

Year > YYYY-MM-DD - Subject(s) > files

 

I then use Lightroom to worry about what are landscapes, who's in them, where they are taken etc using keywords. 

 

I then use Collections to group all of a certain type together. So one collection of pictures with me in, one for landscapes or one for images that I've rated at 5 star. One picture can be in multiple collections, so I never have to worry about "Ohh, this is a landscape, but its also got a sunset in, and a bald eagle, and it's black and white. Where do I put it?".

 

That way the images on my HDD always stay in one clean folder stored by date they were taken, and my Lightroom catalog can deal with everything else.