How do you manage your photos?

Zascar

I'm starting to take a lot more pix now and my antiquated way of managing my photos is no longer appropriate. What could you recommend as a good way to deal with the pix you take, organising them in a proper way? What is best practice or what through experience have you setted on doing?

Zombrex

Zascar wrote: »

I'm starting to take a lot more pix now and my antiquated way of managing my photos is no longer appropriate. What could you recommend as a good way to deal with the pix you take, organising them in a proper way? What is best practice or what through experience have you setted on doing?

Do you use any software?

Lightroom is quite popular, though a bit expensive. It allows you to form quiet complex libraries based on various tags.

As for how I manage the files, I dump everything into one big folder, and name the files based on date (which helps if the file time stamps get lost for some reason). So something like

2013-01-12-The_Park-011_of_339.dng

This makes it easier to both do backups and to see what you have. I hate going down nested directories.

Kenny Logins

I really love Lightroom, and I know my photo management would be disastrous without it. It's not terribly expensive; it was as low as £69 recently, but back to ~£90 now.

Paulw

I use Lightroom to catalogue my images.

But, file structure wise -

/year/month/event_name/file

Most events, I would know the year and roughly the month. Then it is simple to find the event, and then the filename.

This works for me, but to each their own.

pullandbang

At this stage I'd be lost without Lightroom. Apart from using it to process 99% of my stuff it's ability to catalogue and file pics is awesome - provided you've tagged them to begin with.

Currently looking at 55,445 images in the catalogue and it's easy enough to find whatever I want.

Borderfox

Yeah light room here too with the catalogue in an 8tb Drobo

challengemaster

Watched Kevin Kubota on creative live during photoshop week, have since adopted his method.

He built his own software for helping with cataloguing of images (that's free), pretty simple to work. Just requires a bit of user input. You end up getting a folder number like x0001 where x stands for personal work. So you name the folder "x0001 Relavent name", and then finder/explorer auto-groups all same-type shots together. w would be wedding, etc etc.

Inside that folder, there's a number of other folders. Mainly : 0 - Original cards, 1 - Masters (Photoshop), 2 - jpg, etc. Again, these get auto-sorted.

Sounds a bit roundabout-y, but it works.

Daveysil15

I just keep them in various folders. I have the organiser in photoshop but I don't bother using that. I mostly do model portfolios, so any models I've photogtaphed more than once, I just create a folder with their name on it and pop them in there. The rest I just put into a seperate folder called "my portfolio."

Zascar

Thanks I will give lightroom a try, I downloaded the trial - having a play but its a bit daunting. Anyone know any good tutorials?

Cookie P74

I found the previous version of this book very good for getting to grips with Lightroom:

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers

Best tip I got was to have 1 main photo folder and then put all your photos into their relevant subfolders within this, otherwise it can get messy to manage.

Kenny Logins

Yeah, I was the same at first. I was trying to load up a set of pics at a time for editing, and I didn't think to import ALL of my photos to create one big catalog..

If you haven't already, sign up to Lynda.com and use the free week to get up and running. You can cancel before the actual subscription begins.

http://www.lynda.com/Lightroom-tutorials/Getting-Started-Lightroom-4/123504-2.html

M5

Lightroom for me also.

I do have some folder organisation too. I folder by year and location (if i travel)