Disk organization for photos?

[jeremy_c]

Hello,

I have many years worth of photos and I have used IMatch to organize them by categories. I can select, Person>Cowgar>Jeremy, Activity>Flying, Object>Ultralight, Location>Ohio and it will show all pictures of me, flying an ultralight in Ohio. This is great.

However, the problem is I have never standardized on the actual directory naming scheme. I have some directories named 2006-05-12, others 2007/12/15, yet others "My 80 mile bike ride", yet others Camping_OH_Winter and Camping_WV. What a mess!?

Again, with the categories, I can find any image I want quickly, but just looking at things on the HD, it's a bit depressing.

How do you guys organize your HD? I can see date based, or major category based, or location based, or a million other ideas. I am just curious to hear some other ideas of ways that have worked out well for you.

BTW... I am a hobby photographer, so I don't have "jobs" to categorize by.

Thanks!

Jerem

[code4code5]

Originally Posted by jeremy_c

Hello,

I have many years worth of photos and I have used IMatch to organize them by categories. I can select, Person>Cowgar>Jeremy, Activity>Flying, Object>Ultralight, Location>Ohio and it will show all pictures of me, flying an ultralight in Ohio. This is great.

However, the problem is I have never standardized on the actual directory naming scheme. I have some directories named 2006-05-12, others 2007/12/15, yet others "My 80 mile bike ride", yet others Camping_OH_Winter and Camping_WV. What a mess!?

Again, with the categories, I can find any image I want quickly, but just looking at things on the HD, it's a bit depressing.

How do you guys organize your HD? I can see date based, or major category based, or location based, or a million other ideas. I am just curious to hear some other ideas of ways that have worked out well for you.

BTW... I am a hobby photographer, so I don't have "jobs" to categorize by.

Thanks!

Jerem

I have Autoplay on Vista set to automatically import images from the SD card. The default folder name is the date, and you can add a tag to the folder is you like. For example, if you type "Car," The folder would be "11-16-08 Car." Your images would be renamed "Car 001" etc. Works very well for me so that they're all organized by date and a tag if you wish.

[Yale Quan]

I use Adobe Lightroom and Aperture 2 and I keep all my photos organized by
year-month-date-discription (12-25-2005 Holiday Shoot). So if I need to get to photos that I shot three years ago they tend to be easier to find than if I had them organized just by name.

I then assign keywords so when I'm showing them to people I can show all photos I shot at Yosemite or any other event or place.

-Yale

[kerrowdown]

I've done it in an almost a very simplistic way, i.e. people, sub folders, standing, sitting, sub folder again, location etc.

At the end of the day which ever system you work with, it must allow you to find the image or set of images quickly and cleanly with the minium level of fuss.

Go with what ever works for you.

[SpecialK]

Here's one of the older threads about it. I'm sure there are more.

http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/g...-photos-2.html

[emalvick]

Jeremy, like you I am an IMatch user and a hobby photographer. I faced a similar issue to you a year or so ago that I haven't fully finished solving.

Generally, I've gone to a date range system that is sort of by "job" (like you I technically don't have jobs).

My solution is that on import I roughly name a group of image by the first date in the group and a basic description of the group; e.g. location, subject, person. The resulting folder always looks something like: 2008-11-17 - San Francisco (Art Museum).

With Imatch, generally, the folder doesn't matter too much because IMatch makes the folders almost unneeded, so I am not terribly picky about what files are in the folder. If I end up with two distinctly different topics in the same day, my images will still be in one folder with both topics given for the description part of the folder name. Random photos I often put into a folder close to the right date (i.e. with the previous or following shoot) just because IMatch does a better job of dealing with photos with the categories anyway.

As for getting the folders set up, when I initially started reorganizing, my folders were already roughly grouped the way I wanted them, so I merely renamed them in IMatch. Some folders were bigger masses, so I used a file renaming script to give them folder names that were the date only. I then went through and added my little descriptor to the end of each folder through manual renaming.

It takes time, but I like manually doing this as it makes it a lot easier to understand why folders get certain names, and choosing a specific category to include in a naming scheme is almost impossible when you have multiple categories for each image.

Now that I am complete, I just be sure to copy all the images on a card to a folder named by the date and then rename the folder to include my description as I begin categorizing images.