How do you organise processed photos?

Fenster

This is kind of a tough one for me; I'm looking for an optimal way to organise photos I've processed. I typically don't keep a jpeg copy with the master final (be it a tiff or raw file), so I save them by subject. It doesn't work out all that well unless I start using symlinked folders as many photos can easily fall into more than one subject. The watermarked photo for the web I usually throw out after it's uploaded as I don't really need it thereafter.

How do you manage them?

DadaKopf

I should probably start tagging photos, making them archivable through Adobe Bridge. Although, I don't know how well this works, or what good practice is.

I lump all my RAW files wherever Bridge throws them, and back them up in that state on an external drive.

Photos I've worked on that I want to keep I save in a 'archive' folder. Suppose I took photos at a wedding today, I'd make a folder called 071114WED. All photos inside that folder would correspondingly be: 071114WED01, 071114WED02, etc.

I'm not sure how well it works yet, but I nicked it off this guy, sort of.

beans

I organise them in a tree structure:

MonthYear -> day holding all the RAWs for the day, then off the day i have two folders, a Work folder for the converted RAWs that i want to process further and a Done folder for the finished articles.

I'm new to this digital imaging thing, but it works ok for now. I do need to improve it though, of that i'm sure.

Rob_T

I use Lightroom as it makes it easy to not only tag your images as necessary but it also allows you to group them and rate them in multiple ways on top of that you can stack images together and thats all before you get into Develop mode. Superb program can't recommend it enough.

Culann

I have a folder for each year. As I don't take a massive amount of photos it works for now. I have a separate folder for conversions (from RAW to TIFF), split into years as well. I also have another folder for JPEG conversions for uploading to my blog. I use Picasa to view all the folders, which is great as it's very fast...and free.

JMcL

Lightroom for me. I import the photos into a "year/month/day" directory hierarchy, then name all the images based on timestamp. After that it's all down to tagging and rating

snellers

I use a combination of Lightroom and Extensis Portfolio......am only starting to use the Extensis product....have to say it has some amazing features....it's worth going onto their site and checking out the short video example for photographers......I know this might be overkill but after losing a load of data a year or so ago i now backup, backup backup!!

Hugh_C

Another vote for LightRoom. It's just bloody brilliant.

I rename all files from (say)

DSC_1974.NEF
to
2007-11-03_DSC_1974.NEF

which is very easy using Mac and an app called Automator.

I store everything on an external drive by month, and on occasion spearate folders within those months if there's a huge amount of project-related images pertaining. Then make monthly DVDs as well as another backup. Lightroom makes it easy to find any particular image or set of images based on date, tags, rating or whatever you determine yourself.

What OS are you using Fenster?

snellers

hughchal - Lightroom can batch rename to whatever format you need...unless automator does something else as well you have no need to use it.