[frogoutofwater]

In connection with the acquisition of a new computer, I'd like to start using a better system for organizing and naming my photo files. I'm curious about how other people with a relatively large volume - who aren't full-time pros - organize and name their photo files. I've read some recommendations that you shouldn't organize your files by date, but that does seem natural to me - although not exclusively date oriented.

I'm thinking of the following approach. My photo shoots consist primarily of the following:

1. Photo shoots for animal rescue and rehabilitation groups where I volunteer as a photographer. I work with 3 groups regularly and several other groups from time to time. I probably have at least one such photo shoot per week. This is by far the largest volume of photos I produce.
2. Photos taken as part of assignments for photography courses or workshops (that don't fit into 1 above). For example, I'll be photographing models for a studio lighting class later this week.
3. Photos taken during trips (e.g., Borneo-2014, upcoming Iceland-2015, Galapagos Islands-2016).
4. Other animals - these probably break down into a two discrete sub-categories and a miscellaneous category: a) My pigeon project; b) Pets (mine and other peoples' pets); and c) Miscellaneous.
5. Other.

I was thinking of using a file structure like this:

> Imported Photos
>>2015
>>>20150328-Mighty Mutts
...
>>>20150621-Iceland

Or would it make more sense to have it like this?
>Imported photos
>>Mighty Mutts
>>>2015
>>>>20150328-Mighty Mutts
...
>>Travel
>>>2015
>>>>20150126-Puerto Vallarta
>>>>20150620-Iceland

Although I'm not 100% consistent about adding metadata to my LR files, I usually add metadata to individual photos (at least the keepers). For example, for a Mighty Mutts shoot I would include the metadata "animals", "dogs", "rescue", "Mighty Mutts" and the animal name.

And the other question I have is about renaming individual files on export (e.g., to Photoshop for further processing). I'm pretty sure I'm doing this wrong, but currently, when I export a file (e.g., from a Mighty Mutts photo shoot),
- I name the photo e.g., Corky-150328-7170, where Corky is the name of the dog, 150328 is the date of the shoot and 7170 is the file number assigned by the camera.
- I export it to a folder called Mighty Mutts that has all of my Mighty Mutts photos (from 2013-present) and they're organized alphabetically by dog name, so that I can see all of the photos I've taken of Corky side by side in a folder on my drive.
- There are usually several versions of that particular photo in my photo folder, labelled with a suffix such as 7170-P (the print file), 7170-W (the web file) or 7170-T (if there is text incorporated into the photo, such as "Adopt me").

So, what do you suggest? Please tell me all the ways I'm doing it wrong and how I can do it better. Thanks.

[jatrax]

Get a copy of lightroom and use a proper keywording methodology.

I import all pictures into directories by date. 2015\2015.03.25\ so anything shot on march 25th goes into that directory.

Files are renamed by lightroom on import to 2015.03.25@10.11.30.dng
Thats yyyy.mm.dd@hh.mm.ss.dng plus sequence number if more than one image was taken in the same second.

That way even without lightroom there is a system.

All files get keywords at import that are then written out to the .dng files. That means you can use the operating system search if you want to.

Manually naming and organizing image files is IMHO foolish when there are good tools available to do the job.

Once in lightroom use the collection and keywords to sort and find whatever you want. Then you can sort it completely differently later any time you want.

[Mistlefoot]

Get a copy of lightroom and use a proper keywording methodology.

Original post already mentions that he keywords them in LR.

I suspect the original poster is loathe to rely on one proprietary method of organizing all his photos. Should the choice ever be made to abandon LR all that metadata would likely be lost.

[Giklab]

Year folder -> month folder -> 100_daymonth (one of the in-camera folder naming options) -> original filenames. Works for me

[SpecialK]

This is how I do it:

2015
>>>20150328-Mighty Mutts
...
>>>20150621-Iceland

Though I drop the "20".

Individual file names start with the date, too.

I organize them into albums (Carshows --> Los Angeles --> Date, etc) on SlickPic, and though I tried tags on 40,000 images, I stopped as it was too time-consuming and mostly irrelevant - I never use them.

[THoog]

I don't bother renaming the files, but my folders are of the form "Date (sequence) Subject Camera", where I use the sequence number to break things up if there were multiple "shoots" in one day, or multiple cameras on one shoot. For example:

2015
>>>2015-01-17 #1 Air Power Park K-S1
>>>2015-01-17 #2 Virginia Air & Space K-5II
>>>2015-01-17 #3 Virginia Air & Space K-S1
>>>2015-01-18 Hampton Train Show K-S1

Then, in a separate "Subjects" folder, I can break things out by subject, like "aviation museums" or "train shows", and have shortcuts back to the dated folders. That's the theory, at least.

[EarlVonTapia]

I thought about this hard a while ago, and the solution I came up with as follows.

A different folder for each camera

(Pentax K30
Pentax Q
Galaxy S3
Canon work camera
Other camera)

Each folder broken down by year - month - day

I don't break it down further than that in the folder structure. It's all in Lightroom, so I use tags to help find things from there.


Keep in mind I'm not a pro, and I don't do professional events so who knows if I'm really bucking any sort of major trends.

At the end of the day, I think people just need to find their own method of organizing things so that they're comfortable with their setup, and they can find what they need with minimum fuss. This probably means combining advice and techniques from different people.

[fb_penpho]

I don't take huge numbers of photos and I don't want to spend much time cataloging them. I put them in folders with date names, e.g. 2015-03-26. The reason for this order is that a filing system will always place them in order, (well Linux will) and so I do not have to worry that one has not jumped out of sequence.

If I do a lot for one day they are put into that days folder. If the occasional shot, when enough are collected together, then they go in the folder of the day they are downloaded. Very basic, very simple.

[Steve.Ledger]

Get a copy of lightroom and use a proper keywording methodology.

'Proper' ??
I didn't realize that LightRoom was the only correct way to do things

One thing comes to mind though, if someone already has thousands of photos on their HDD organised differently then decide to buy Lightroom - how do they manage this conversion to 'proper' keywording for such a huge volume of photos ?

[jatrax]

Original post already mentions that he keywords them in LR. I suspect the original poster is loathe to rely on one proprietary method of organizing all his photos. Should the choice ever be made to abandon LR all that metadata would likely be lost.

But if you save the metadata back to the files then it is searchable using any program, not just Lightroom which was my point. He should not rely on any single method, proprietary or not. I organize everything by date in the file structure, keyword in Lightroom and save the metadata back to the file. So three separate ways of organizing. I don't need Lightroom if I decide to go elsewhere as any program or the operating system will read in the keyword tags.

'Proper' ?? I didn't realize that LightRoom was the only correct way to do things

I meant 'proper' keywording, regardless of whether Lightroom is used. I was typing on my phone and should have been more specific. I use a hierarchical system that adds for example "animal", "canine" and "mammal" if I enter "dog" . But you don't have to use a hierarchal system, just use a system that makes sense to you and document it so you can be consistent and someone else can decipher it if the worst happens.

One thing comes to mind though, if someone already has thousands of photos on their HDD organised differently then decide to buy Lightroom - how do they manage this conversion to 'proper' keywording for such a huge volume of photos ?

It is a challenge. I had about 8,000 files on the computer when I started with Lightroom so I can speak from experience. Fortunately I already had the save by date system in place so at least I could look at them one day at a time. Those files had no keywords at all at the time. Most of the older ones got very rudimentary keywords compared to what I do now but at least all people and places are listed. Most images taken today will have a minimum of 25 keywords, most more.

Lightroom works best if all the image files are located under a single directory: so Photos\2014\2014.01.31 and so on. If you move to a new computer simply copy the entire Photos directory to the new computer, install Lightroom and point it to the new Photos location. In a few seconds you are back up and running. If I was starting on a new set of files I would manually move them into a 'Photos' directory on the computer from wherever they are located. Put them into directories by date and then import one directory at a time into Lightroom. If you have multiple shoots in the same directory then just select the files you want to work with add basic keywords and import. Repeat until done. It took me about 2 months of several hours every night to complete.

I am a big Lightroom fan because it works so well for me. But there are other programs, you can keyword with Irfanview or even with Windows if you want. The only point I am trying to make is that unless you do a "proper" job of keywording and organizing, in 10 years your files will be worthless because you will not be able to find anything. I see this every day with people who shoot and dump things on the computer but have no system so they cannot ever find the file they want.

And it looks like the OP realizes this and is trying. I just do not agree that manually naming directories is a good way to proceed. Use the tools we already have either in Lightroom or some other program. Manually naming directories works great at first, it makes sense and you can see everything. But what happens as time goes on? It quickly gets out of hand and you have a mess of directories that you cannot find anything in.

[narual]

Maybe I'm just lazy.

I have lightroom automatically stuff them into date-specific folders, which themselves are located in year-specific photos.

Until recently, I was using this naming schema for photos:
Photo taken on 2015-03-18 at 173136 - using a RICOH IMAGING COMPANY, LTD. PENTAX K-3 with a smc PENTAX-DA* 50-135mm F2.8 ED [IF] SDM at 50 mm-1-100 sec at f - 2.8-ISO 1250 -_.jpg

The dash at teh end would be followed by GPS data if there was any, but I mostly don't bother geotagging my images anymore.

Now I've changed to this, which takes up a bit less space:
20150321 at 232549-31 mm-5.0 sec at ƒ - 2.5-ISO 8000 - smc PENTAX-FA 31mm F1.8AL Limited.dng
that is, date at time-focal length-shutter speed at aperture- iso rating - lens name

[frogoutofwater]

In LR, besides keywords, I use folders/sub-folders created to fit this hierarchy...

Continent (Europe)
-Country (Italy)
--State (if USA)
---City (Venice)
----Date (YYYY-MM-DD), or (2014-09-26) in sequence for that place.

Once I complete the PP of a file, in LR, I identify the root file (DNG) with one star (*) and the finished PP file (TIFF) with three stars (***). Unfinished files get two stars (**). This allows me to sort on what's been done, or is unfinished. When a file is finalized, intermediate work files are deleted to save disk space. Next, I "export" the finished file out of LR as a JPG to DropBox using the shoot date as the name, plus an identifier word (2014-09-26Gondolier-1), then distribute out of DropBox as an email attachment, or Flickr Upload, etc. Besides giving me a permanent "cloud" back-up, DropBox provides virtual access to work from anywhere I happen to be should someone wish to see something.

That's about it. Works great...

Cheers... M

One of the reasons I rename finished photos on export is because my "clients" (the rescue organizations) find it helpful to have photos that include the animal's name - that makes it easier for them to use the images. In a given weekend's shoot at the farm sanctuary, for example, I might send them 100 images featuring 30 different animals. If they just get files called 15.03.21.CAS.1, ...2, ...3, etc, that's not very helpful for them. I've set up a dropbox folder for them, and some the organizations I volunteer for have images from multiple photo shoots and dates.

So the keywording helps me stay organized and find images in LR, but it's not that helpful for the groups I work with.

[BrianR]

Do you use the other metadata fields? Like Title, Job Identifier, Caption, etc? You could stuff the dog's name in one (title), the name of the shelter in another (Job), and have a re-naming preset that includes this information when you export. These fields can be used just like keywords for sorting within LR, but you have more control over how they are used in the re-naming dialogue. As far as I can see, you can only include a keyword puke in the rename when you export (all keywords get included), but the other fields can be handled individually.

I'm in the camp that doesn't rename directories. I sort them by date and then rely on keywords for most of the sorting. I usually use collections or smart collections for a pseudo directory structure in LR.

[jatrax]

One of the reasons I rename finished photos on export is because my "clients" (the rescue organizations) find it helpful to have photos that include the animal's name - that makes it easier for them to use the images. In a given weekend's shoot at the farm sanctuary, for example, I might send them 100 images featuring 30 different animals. If they just get files called 15.03.21.CAS.1, ...2, ...3, etc, that's not very helpful for them. I've set up a dropbox folder for them, and some the organizations I volunteer for have images from multiple photo shoots and dates. So the keywording helps me stay organized and find images in LR, but it's not that helpful for the groups I work with.

That is a good point but with Lightroom you can rename on export. So if you use a standard naming convention (like I do using the date stamp) and put the dog name or other details into the, for example title field, you can rename the file on export to include the title field as part of the name. I do this for the clients I send files to all the time. In my case the same file might go to more than one agency but some of them have file name specifications I need to follow so I build an export preset that makes the jpeg to what they need, both name and sometimes the colorspace need to be different.

[emalvick]

I use a fairly rigid file naming convention to accommodate version management with my catalogging program (IMatch) as well as provide some ability to find files outside of that software.

Photos
|
|-------YYYY
|-------2015
_____|-----YYYYMMDD Keyword
_____|-----20150225 Everglades NP
_________|
_________| - YYYYMMDD-HHMM_CAM_####.EXT
_________| - 20150225_1403_PK3_5650.DNG
_________| - 20150225_1403_PK3_5650-DXOv1.JPG
_________| - 20150225_1403_PK3_5651.DNG

The software I use links up derivative images to the original raw image.
The #### keeps things unique if I'm shooting a bracketed series and two photos end up at the same time. THe #### is just the original image number out of the camera
The CAM allows me to know what camera took the photo. Between my wife and I, we can end up with up to four bodies shooting while on a trip. I like having photos chronological, so I use the camera ID to avoid overlap in file names while keeping the files integrated together.

The keyword in the date folder allows me to separate images by shoot / location as I see appropriate.


Photography for me is a hobby, so generally I share photos over the internet and count on keywords to help people find files. I personally avoid renaming on export because I count on the file names to get back to originals, which helps if anyone ever asks for a file or even edits to a file. I do however, embed the original file name into the metadata, so that really wouldn't be that big of a deal, but many people (outside photography) don't know how to read metadata, so I try not to count on that.