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How to organize your photos
1. Introduction
First of all excuse me for the rahter akward placing of this 'tutorial'. It has nothing to do with photoshop, but because I see it as a tutorial and not as an article, I placed it here.
In the past organizing your negatives was easy. They all went in boxes or into special books. But with the upcoming of digital photography we encountered a different problem.
How do we organize our pictures ?
There is not only the problem of CD's and DVD's going bad over the years (a problem which I won't though in this tutorial). But there is also the problem with naming all those different files, often in different formats (.jpg, .psd, .tiff) and different sizes.
After 2 years of digital photography my folders in windows were a complete disaster. The folders and files had all kinds of different names which made it almost impossible to sort them. Some folders were cleaned up (read : selected the best) others were just CF dumps. In some I had processed the best, others were untouched. But the worst was I hadn't any idea in which folder I had done what.
Last year I decided that this chaos had to stop. I would make a logical system in which I could order my photos and find them back with relative ease. All this should not cost to much, so the programs I would use should be preferable freeware.
Underneath you can find the method I use at this moment. I don't say you have to follow my method completely, but I'm sure many will find valuable information in it.
2.The CF dump
okay, let's go !!
When I had a shoot I make a new folder with the following format :
NEW_yymmdd_description
and I copy all images from the CF card into that folder.
You should have a folder looking like this :
Let's breakdown that folder name.
* The "NEW" tag tells me that this folder is a CF dump. Nothing else has be done with it.
* The "yymmdd" format enables me to sort the folders by date using the windows explorer (and you'll see later that this helps us to sort the images itself). You could or even should use yyyy (2007) in stead of yy (07) if you have folders before 2000. But because I started organizing this way in 2005, I use yy (and no, I don't expect to go beyond 2100)
* The last 'field' is a description of what the shoot is about. Try not to make it to long, around 5 letters will do (we will add different tags later on, and otherwise our filename will become too long.) If I've done different shoots on one day, I'll make an other folder.
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