Digital Photos--How do you organize them?

Another vote for Adobe Lightroom. We create filenames using date-time stamp and then store them in a directory structure in Lightroom using year-month-day. DH does most of the photography- he is very good about adding keywords to the photos which allows him to easily locate photos by topic, location, person, etc. It takes a fair amount of time up front, but sure makes it easier to find something later on.

Another option to look at is OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite. It allows similar capabilities for tagging and labeling photos but does not have a central database. The metadata is stored with the photos unlike Lightroom which uses its centralized database.

MissouriBird wrote:
I have literally thousands of digital photos.

You may find about 75-90% of them are not worth keeping. That makes the filing job much easier.

Taking pics is the easy and fun part. Storing, not so much. My GF just leaves them on the phone, forever, never to be seen again.

I use Adobe's Lightroom. While a very good image editor, it also organizes your images. You can search by almost any EXIF data, add keywords, show photo locations on a map (providing you recorded GPS data when taking the image), Along with the Library, Develop, and Map functions, it has a Book (Blurb) Slideshow, Print & Web page generator.

I have over 100,000 images indexed, and can usually find what I'm looking for in seconds.

I name a laptop folder first with a number. This keeps the folders in chronological order without sorting for dates. I then add the "where." One folder may contain several days like the one named "Denali Highway" If 2 places are named, that day was most likely travel time.

26 Folders were used for our 8-week trip last year. I'm still happy with the organization.

For instance,
1 Tahuya-Prince Rupert (several days actually; the "1" is in folder name)
2 Prince Rupert-Ketchikan (our first Alaska Ferry leg)
3 Ketchikan
4 Ketchikan-PWI (another ferry leg)
.
.
14 Denali Highway (more than 14 days to get here, of course)
15 Denali NP
.
.
26 Yellowhead, etc. to Tahuya

Here's how we did it this summer:

http://goo.gl/2tNP1v

DutchmenSport wrote:
All my photos are on my laptop and a back-up secondary hard drive. As we take photos with our Iphones, our digital camera, and I scan actual photos (on paper), I organize by date and then a subject. For Example: Year folder > month folder > day folder > Subject folder (if I need to drill down that far)

2000
2001
...

2015
Under that:
2015_10 (month folder)
2015_10_01 First day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Train Station
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Winery visit
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - KOA Campground
2015_10_03 Third day of trip to Ohio

All photos can be renamed to make them understandable.

I have found doing it this way, it creates a time-line diary in photos. I try to keep them in order by date and time. It's amazing how many times I have gone back to look at something we did on a specific date.

I've been doing it this way all my life now. Now everything is digitized. I've scanned all my photos from, before the day of digital, and have them stored by date. It's fun going back exactly 1 year and see what you did on that date, or go back 2 years and see what you did on today's date. As long as you have a description in your photo file name of where you were at or what the event was, it's easy to pull up when you want to look at them again.

You can also create a spreadsheet and keep a log of your photos and then to find anything, you can sort by date, by subject, by topic, or any way you want. This takes time, but the end result is great! You're actually creating a data base of your photos. Just as long as each photo can be identified and retrieved easily, this works great!

We organize our photos in a similar way. That way we can go back and find what we want. We use Picssa for most of the organizing and viewing. For making photo books we use Publisher. My wife has made many with that service to sell at a local artists gallery.

All of our pictures are finely edited using Photo Shop. Thousands have been tossed. We only keep the best of each area. We arrange by state and place - no dates. We have a screen saver on the computer so we view each state in sequence, changing the state every couple weeks. It's always running so every time we walk by we'll sit a spell and review memories. We were full-timers for 16 years and traveled constantly and repeated places often so you can imagine that it would be a nightmare if we saved every single one!

We sometimes wonder if all the folks we see snapping pic after pic with a ton of strangers in the background, really go back and look at those pictures. :)

byrdr1 wrote:

I do this also. and I look at them but only when I am looking for something I took a picture and want to see if I can find again. but true about never looking again at them.
randy

When I was on my 6 month trip last winter I really enjoyed scrolling back through the pics on my phone and remembering the places I had been. But now that they are in the cloud, yeah, I never look.

I make a folder for the year, then I make a date folder OR a trip folder. If a trip folder, I then make date folders for each day of the trip OR folders for each stop of the trip. If folders for each stop, I then make date folders for each day of the stop.

For example, after a trip to Nova Scotia several years back, my folders look like:

2008
Nova Scotia
Halifax
August 23
August 24
August 25
Peggy's Cove
August 26
Lunenburg
August 27
August 28

I found for trips,this works really well because I don't have to go through 2+ weeks of date folders to find the photo I took at Peggy's Cove, but I keep things in date order so it's consistent with my other photo folders.

For software, I use Lightroom and Photoshop. Lightroom makes it easy to do most of my processing (I shoot RAW) and easily search my library. Photoshop is reserved for more detailed work.

I have made multiple books and calendars. I use Lulu.com. The quality is great and they stand by any printing messups (only happened once in over 4 years). The photo books are terrific - you use their online software to layout the book to your satisfaction, then they print them on demand. They usually have coupon codes that make prices even more affordable.

I also print blank note cards. I use psprint.com for those. I will print 50 to 100 cards of a given photo and use them for everything as well as share them with others.

Please back your photos up on-line. I use Flickr.