How do you organize your photos locally?

[ChrisMc73]

I'm just getting started into my photography hobby/passion/obsession/profession...and want to find out how some of you are organizing your photos on your local computers.

I know most of you use tools such as Light Room 2, Aperture 2, Bridge, etc...which I'm about to start using one myself, haven't decided. But right now my process is I put the CF card in a reader, and import the photos using Picasa 3. For some reason my wife organized each folder of pictures with the year in front of the title, so that they are in order from oldest to newest on the side of this tool and grouped by year as well. I think it also renamed the actual folders on the Windows file system with the year in front of them too so they are listed in year order as well when we are browsing the files on the Windows system, not inside a software tool.

I think Picasa 3 will put the imported or taken date of the pictures into the named folder when importing from the CF card. So a date isn't really necessary in the title of the folder? I guess she likes them dated because when you are on some web sites and want to post a picture it lets you pick them from the file system, so if you have a folder just labeled "Christmas" how do you know which Christmas it is? And how does it handle Christmas in multiple years? I guess you have to some how put a date? Besides just being the date when the photos were taken?

Do you ever just import pictures into already existing folders, or does every import get its own new folder?

Is there one of these organizing programs you feel is better than another because of its organization format? Care to share which one? Care to share your workflow for the importing and organizing the photos?

[tracknut]

I'm decidedly low tech I suppose. I have folders for common themes like "landscape", "Family", "Dog Events" etc, and within those I have a folder named the year ("090705" or sometimes "090705 Aunt Margaret") for shots taken today. I do not use any program to manage these folders, just the file system.

I duplicate the drive with photos both onto another hard drive and onto DVD.

Dave

[aram535]

I use lightroom, but this should be doable with almost anything that can do keywording.

First stage, I have three catalogs in Lightroom: TranquilPhotos, Personal, and Temp. All "snapshots" or family events go into Personal, Temp is just were I do training and "testing" of actions, scripts, and if anyone ever sends me an image that I want to work on. Everything else goes into my work catalog.

From there, "Year" Folder, than Month-Day-Event Type Folder, all images end up here. Each folder gets a set of generic keywords, including date, place, type of photography, contracts or freelance, etc. Each photo inside is than keyworded specifically in more detail.

If a single event contains multiple types of photography -- baseball game and there is a fireworks show afterwards, I break them into two "events" so 2009/0704-Baseball-LIDvsBPC-Game vs. 2009/0704-Baseball-LIDvsBPC-Fireworks.

I do have to mention that "Sports" images are usually archived off of the main system as a catalog of their own and burnt to a couple of DVDs and removed from the live system. However their keywords are kept in the system. This reduces the size of the catalog.

I hope that helps. It's worked for me so far.

[The Moose]

I have a folder for each month and in each month, I have a folder for each date that I took a photo on. Even if it was just one photo.

I leave the photos as the file name and I don't do any tagging or anything. If I shoot multiple bands in a day, I'll make a folder a band. My workflow is really simple and I don't think it's worth changing with what I shoot for now. So pretty much everything I've shot is in date order and if I can't remember when I shot something, I'll have fun looking for it for a while!