I had an email from a friend recently asking how I keep my files organized. With the coming of the new year, what better time to look at the system you use to manage your images and see if there might be a better way.
Most of you know that a big part of what I do is teach workshops. And a question I always get is "How do you organize your files?" The first response I have to that is that there's no one perfect way. Unless you work for an organization with a standardized workflow, how you manage your files is best decided by you, based on how you think and what makes sense to you. On the other hand, there are both easy and difficult ways to do that.
Anyone that's talked to me about this knows that I'm a big fan of keeping photos organized by date shot. To me it's a simple system to use, and I can always fall back to calendars when trying to find something, if I'm having a problem with my catalog. So here's the system I use:
- Inside the My Pictures folder (or the "Pictures" folder on Apple systems) I create a "to Archive" folder, where all images downloaded to that computer go. That way if I'm working on the road with a laptop, I only have to go to one place when I get home to offload the images to my primary computer system.
- Every day I shoot anything, there's a folder that gets created with that day's date, inside that "to Archive" folder. I use an eight-digit name, starting with the year, then month and day. For instance, today would be labeled 20070114.
- Inside that folder will be a folder for each shoot I had that day, usually just one, but sometimes as many as three or four. I use a simple name, such as "Chiefs v Jacksonville" for the shoot.
- Every image in that folder is renamed on download with a unique name that ties in the date and assignment. For the Chiefs game on New Year's eve against Jacksonville, the files were named "20061231_Chiefs_001" and up from there.
That's my basic system, and it works well for me. The browser Photo Mechanic (www.camerabits.com) does all the folder creation, file renaming and batch captioning (every file has a complete IPTC/XMP caption within it).
The other thing I tell people is that the whole process of managing images is a culling process. You don't want to go through everything you've shot every time you want to find a picture. So my next step is to copy my best photos to a separate collection of the best photos of that year. Now I'm working on one called "2007 Best of." Also, every big job or trip I do has the best shots sorted out into a separate collection as well, which makes it easy for me to create web galleries, slideshows or pull images from that shoot. That group tends to be a larger selection than what ends up in the "Best of" folder.
Finally, images that I take the time to prep with Photoshop as PSD or Layered TIFFs, or as NEF files with Instruction Sets, I save to a "Master FIles" folder. This way if I need to do something with an image I've already turned out, I can go to one folder and find it.
The key with any system is that it makes sense to you, and that you stick with it. I've been using this one since 2000, and can find any image I've shot since then within a few minutes. If you don't have a good system in place yet, take some time to think about what would work well for you. Map it out on some paper and think about how it would hold up over the long term. If you don't have a system yet, there's no time like the present. It's a new year, go ahead and make a new start!
