file management

[muscleflex]

hello,
how do you guys file your pics? do you keep the RAW copies and edited versions separately?
where do you store them?
sorry if it's been asked before....

[RinkRat]

This is what I do:


I usually date the folder, & add a brief description of what is in it.

i.e. For my nephew's 1st baseball game, the folder is called "2005-06-16 Zach's 1st Baseball Game"

Underneath that, I copy the RAW folders directly from the cards, and I make a folder just for the jpegs, which I usually post on the web.

When I'm done, I copy the entire folder to a duplicate Hard Drive, and also burn a CD, as my backups.

[the.digital.guy]

I use Photoshop Elelments 3.0 to organize all my pics.(did it this way before I got CS2)
I use CS2 to process them.

[EricKonieczny]

After a photo shoot, I make a folder with 20050706_PhotoShootName

In this folder I Make 3 folders -
RAW/ Originals- This is where I copy all files from the card to - and only delete the really bad ones that are not usuable or many doubles . I may have a JPG folder or RAW folder in here depending on what type of image I shot.
Edited - I copy all usuable photos here, and then edit the ones I want, and then send the resized, edited, watermarked photos to Output folder
Output - In this folder I make 2 other folders, one for Print, and one for my Website.

[Longwatcher]

- I copy all images into a folder labeled with date "YYYYMMDD" and subject.
- Then I move all Jpegs to a folder within that labled with date and jpeg versions.
- Then I archive all pictures to DVD.
- Then I create a folder called edited images and all edited images go into this folder.
- If doing a project then I will create a seprate project folder(s) with copies or edited versions of all images.
- When done editing all pictures that I care about from a particular shoot/Project then I will copy this data to another CD or DVD depending on folder size. If it is taking me more then a month for a particular project then I make a backup copy of all edited work at that point (note I only work on weekends usually so at most only a few days work is lost in a computer crash).
- And finally if for non-commercial purposes I delete from drive after re-verifying I have a good DVD copy. If for money making purposes it goes onto an external drive, which when full get reviewed to see if I actually need to keep the content and then put into off-line storage.
And as I am now doing for CDs, at a point when I feel a new technology is better I start converting old data to new storage (like copying multiple CDs to single DVD) thus giving me multiple copies of the data.

Just what I do.

[calgaryphotographer]

I make a folder with a description and a date (2005_07_06 - YYC Spotting)
Then I copy all raws into the RAW folder
All JPEGS into the JPEG folder
Then i'll go in and make an edited folder - and put all my processed pictures in there.

[Poco]

Interesting... I also make a folder starting with the date (year-month-day so they are always sorted correctly) but I just put all the photos in one directory. Makes things easier to navigate with Picasa. I've never bothered to separate the files into multiple folders as I can tell the type of file from the extension (Jpeg, Tiff, or RAW). I always make copies (filename_1.jpg, filename_2.jpg) for my edits, but leave them all together in one place.

Now that I'm using Picasa for navigation there are a lot of photos that I don't even edit in Photoshop - I just do some quick fixes in Picasa (it keeps a list of changes for each file without editing the original) and export them from Picasa to a mem card, CD for printing, or post them to my blog or email.

It is interesting to see how many people organize in sub folders. Is there a reason you do that? Like some past experience that made you regret not doing it that way and caused you to switch, or have you just always done it like that?

[muscleflex]

Wow! thanks for the replies...Seems i will be needing lots and lots of DVDs or a bigger hard drive!