how do you organize your pictures?

[lovemymedic]

Im just wondering what everyone does-- where do you store your pictures? how do you organize them? I have a 500GB external hard drive and I put them on there but Im always afraid something is going to happen to it and I will lose all my pictures, forever!!! Im looking for other ideas...

[Sp00ks]

This has been covered many times, try a search of the forum.

That being said. I organize by date and event. "2007-10-8 Harris lake" Something along those lines. I have a copy local, I have a copy on a 500g external drive and I have a copy on my server for most shots. I definitely have at least 2 copies.

[pmartin4665]

Greetings:
I originally used iPhoto (part of the Mac experience) but after several upgrades and new computers I seemingly lost the appropriate data (dates, etc) that goes along with them. I recently purchased Lightroom and two 750GB Newertech miniStack v3 drives that I access through my wireless connection (Airport Extreme) which I also share several printers over.

I'm attempting to create a logical filing system; currently I'm using a folder for the year the photo was taken and then I'm using subfolders for the particular date of the shoot. I'm also including metadata & keywords to further clarify the photo in case I have to search for it down the road. I picked up a book by Rob Sheppard on LR that seems to help with navigating all the features.

I'm at the point where I need to decide if I should continue to shoot RAW + JPEG or if I should just shoot RAW. I also read in one of the NAPP forums that I should save in DNG vs RAW . . . decisions, decisions.

[cosworth]

I use Lightroom to catalogue my images.

Next you need to buy another 500gb drive and back up your existing 500gb drive. Your data is only as good as your last backup.

[muscleflex]

I'm at the point where I need to decide if I should continue to shoot RAW + JPEG or if I should just shoot RAW. I also read in one of the NAPP forums that I should save in DNG vs RAW . . . decisions, decisions.

i used to shoot raw and jpeg when i first got my 1d but now i've realized it's just a waste of space. i thought i could do with small jpeg for quick emailing to people but i can easily create email jpeg versions in lightroom. so i now just shoot raw and have more space on my computer.

[Thomas Blake]

I have a folder for each year. Inside each year's folder, there is one folder per day of shooting, named by date and then shoot, e.g. 2008-01-02 NYC. Inside each day's folders are finished, full-size jpegs. I also archive all the RAW files in another directory that follows the same organizational scheme. I manage everything with Bridge, and toss copies into iPhoto for casual viewing. When posting to the web, I use Photoshop to batch-resize copies of the jpegs, upload, then delete the copies.

As far as security goes, you're crazy for not backing up your photos. I have a 500 GB internal drive where all my data, including all my photos, live. That's backed up to a 500 GB external drive. Additionally, I burn my photos to DVD.

[dale65bama]

I will add a large external HD soon. In the meantime, I backup my files (RAW and JPG) to DVD and CD. I keep the original RAW files in the sequential camera folder (nnnCANON) and the JPGs in "Year-Mo-Da Location" folders.

I would love to have 500 GB of SOLID STATE non-volatile memory. Not too sure about the longevity of CD's, DVD's, or the mechanical HD's.

Dale

[coralnutz]

I have two drives in my pc, I use the second just for photos and back that up to a portable drive of the same size. I've been trying to get in the habbit of deleting bad photos though. Up till like a few months ago I would just download all the photos into cataloged folders and then save the finished pp'ed ones usually in another folder and also burn those to cd. (It'll be a while before I have enough "keepers" to fill a dvd) I didn't really think about how much space all these photos would take up when I started taking pictures.

[djeuch]

I have a folder on my laptop's second hard drive, D:\Pics, organized like so:

D:\Pics\YYYY\YYYY-MM-DD

After copied there, I send them to my server (RAID-5, hot spare, etc.)

Server uploads them to my website (raw images!) nightly. Website has an automatic raw-to-jpg converter (resized - I wrote it) if I need to browse there.

I'm data-paranoid about my pictures. I lost about a year's worth of pictures once... it will never happen again.

[_aravena]

This has been covered many times, try a search of the forum.

That being said. I organize by date and event. "2007-10-8 Harris lake" Something along those lines. I have a copy local, I have a copy on a 500g external drive and I have a copy on my server for most shots. I definitely have at least 2 copies.

Ditto. Then they are in different folders. Stuff I shoot around my house, Cypress Gardens (since I shoot there a lot), and other locations. Everything is burned to DVD's and saved to an external HD. Some is one my portable, mainly something I share often or tend to work on. Although I started cleaning up useless stuff on my laptop, so some is stored on here as well.

[NeutronBoy]

I place them in folders like Family ... Trips ... Birthdays....

I have a second drive in my machine that I do incremental backups to once a week. I have a large removable third drive that I do a full backup to every few months or so. The third drive is kept in a fireproof safe. I do not want to loose photos.

[vdao1972]

Organized by dates in the computer using a hierichal filing system (year-month-day). I use Photo Mechanic to upload photos to my macbook pro hard drive along with an attached external hard drive. I also use Photo Mechanic to IPTC tag along with keyword and label for submission. From there, submission through iView Media. I also use iView for
cataloguing my photos via IPTC along with keywords. The beaut about iView is it is fast and very powerful in searching a large archive (over 10K images).

[Sp00ks]

I place them in folders like Family ... Trips ... Birthdays....

I have a second drive in my machine that I do incremental backups to once a week. I have a large removable third drive that I do a full backup to every few months or so. The third drive is kept in a fireproof safe. I do not want to loose photos.

I place mine in folders like this after they are edited. I have prints and web edit pics both organized this way. I am most concerned about the RAW files being backed up.

You realize a fire proof safe is not Heat proof, right? This is a lot better than not having it in a safe but dependent on the heat of a fire, you could still loose the drive.

I work as an Engineer in medical Imaging, lets just say I don't trust burned media. Shelf life, finalization of the disk, and verification are crucial. The best thing you could possibly do is store a copy of everything off site. It all depends on how important your data is to you. Hmm, maybe I should take my external drive to the office....

[Mcary]

Also use Lightroom. Image are re-named and key worded during important then placed folders by subject and date. Example shot of a model named Sarah on Jan 2 2008 would be renamed Sarah_02Jan08_XXXX and placed in Folder Sarah_02Jan08. Folders are then backed-up to a second drive on a regular basis.

Mike

[dlpasco]

I keep folders of approximately 4GB each. Only one folder is named "current". I load all original image files into the current folder, renaming the files on the way in. That way, all files are sequence numbered no matter where they came from. When one folder fills up, I assign the name to be a "folder sequence" followed by the date of the last image file. I copy full folders to an archive DVD as well as an external drive. I import current images into a similar folder structure in Lightroom and convert to DNG. I use Lightroom collections to organize the image files. I also copy converted and processed folders to an archive DVD (one folder per DVD volume).

[Michael_Lambert]

Our local computer store had the WD MyBook Premiums (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=276) on sale boxing day for $99 each ( 1 per customer) so i was there with 2 friends so i bought 3 :D

Now it has its own backup software however not sure how well it works but i keep all my images on my primary storage drive 750gig drive where is store everything and install everything keeping my 70 gig raptor drive just for the OS.

I daily have the system setup to mirro all my directories with my images in them to the first drive and then i manually copy them again to a second MyBook and the 3rd one for now is just there for a physical backup if one of the drives crap out.

[EOSAddict]

I do similar to Dan. I import all i mages untouched into LR into an 'unporcessed pics' folder on my HDD. There I sort and remove the duds. The 'keepers' then get renamed with a sequential file number and moved to an Images folder in batches of 200 ...

EOS30D>
Images>>
001-200>>>
201-400>>>

etc

Subject is dealt with by LR Keywords not filename.

[Nouks]

Have been planning on catalogueing my photos in iView for some time, long-term to-do I guess. About storing at my computer:

All pics both external and on internal HD.
Then:

YYYY folders

YYYY-MM-DD *Description* subfolders

RAW
JPEG subfolders

Under JPEG a selection/web size subfolder