Photograph inventories and how to organize them.

Being able to access your photos is an important part of taking them.
I have lots of photos.  Thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of them.  Millions would be an exaggeration, but you get the idea.  Tons, heaps, piles, or my favourite Back to the Future reference, a googleplex of them.  So, what do I do with all these pictures, and how do I find the one I am looking for?

I have a system that I have developed over the years.  I organize them into two groups, the originals, and the special ones.  The originals are all the photos I have taken, the good and the bad, the ones I have processed (I shoot in RAW file mode), and the ones I have not.  They are saved in a folder with the event name.  We were just in Princeton and my photos there are in a folder named Princeton.  That folder then is nested in another folder called Summer 2020.  It has folders in it with other events I was involved with during that time.  Altogether, there are four folders (or there will be by the end of the year) labeled Winter, Spring, Summer, and Spring that themselves are nested in another folder called 2020.  Have a look at the image below.

The filing system I use to organize images.
The images I processed are copied and stored in another place so that I have two copies of it.  The first copy is in the file system above, the second copy is in a separate folder I label Special images.  I actually have two such folders, one stores smaller images suitable for use on the web or in Powerpoint shows.  The second holds extra special ones that are enlargement sized TIFFs.  If I am making a print I go to the file in the full-size special image folder.  If I only need a small image, I go to the small version folder.  

The advantage of this system is that I have access to every photo I have ever taken.  Each special image photo is saved with a name describing it and why it may be important.  Those names can end up being long.  I include the names of people, locations, types of animals, and important aspects of how I may use an image (framing, rule of thirds, backlighting).  A quick search reveals all photos with those related criteria and I choose from there.

If I want to go to a particular folder, the creation date of any special image tells me where I might find it.  I can localize it by year and season then hunt it up in whatever event folder it may be in.  I can then take the original RAW image and reprocess is, or find another shot that I never worked on which better suits my needs.

Every year I take the hard drive (currently a 5 TB drive about 1/2 full) and duplicate it and store it off-site in case the drive crashes, is stolen, or destroyed.  This backup idea is important as you can lose a lifetimes worth of work in a millisecond.  Do yourself a favour, back up your images!

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com   Eric Svendsen

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