How do you file images ?

[boikman]

I was having a discussion with another photographer and he asked me how do I file my images and how long do I keep them . I told him for sports it is two years, for weddings it's nearly indefinite.
How I file was based on year then topic, with sub folders inside of that.
How long do you folks keep your images ?

[thecackster]

I'm a bit of a packrat, so I keep them for quite a long time. I try to clean stuff out after 2 years, but I'm working on moving all my work into year breakdowns, but I don't have a high enough volume of work until now to do it.

[tim]

I was having a discussion with another photographer and he asked me how do I file my images and how long do I keep them . I told him for sports it is two years, for weddings it's nearly indefinite.
How I file was based on year then topic, with sub folders inside of that.
How long do you folks keep your images ?

I do much the same as you, for weddings it's by year then name, with subdirectories for various outputs. Once i'm doing with a wedding, everything delivered, I archive the keepers in two places, one as RAW one as DNG, both with jpeg copies and psd copies of the album layout. Since an album layout is 1GB or so I might switch to jpeg versions some time.

[bjyoder]

I'll normally title my folders with the date, then who then where. For concerts, the who and where are switched: for instance, last weekend I was at a concert for a few local bands and had the main folder name of "2010-03-20 Newport Music Hall." In that folder, I had the breakdown of then bands in similarly-named folders (like "2010-03-20 Newport Music Hall - Lovesick Radio.")

Either way, this lets me search by date, place and/or name to find what I need. As of yet, I just let the camera's file names stay, though that will probably be changing in the near future.