Organising Photo Storage

Where is that picture???

One of the most useful pieces of advice that I think can be given to someone starting out in digital photography is, "figure out how you are going to organise your picture files". I well remember sitting waiting whilst a "professional" photographer tried to find a particular picture to show me. After several minutes it became embarrassingly obvious he didn't have a clue where it was on his computer!

The ease and lack of cost with which digital images can be taken means collections of pictures can grow at a very fast rate. What starts out as an easy exercise finding a picture amongst a selection of several hundred, starts to become harder when it grows to several thousand, and a major task when it becomes tens of thousands! That is unless some form of system is employed. It is therefore a good idea to spend some time early on figuring out how you are going to best store your pictures. It's a case of a little extra time spent here can save a whole lot of time later!

PC Directory List

Starting out

In its simplest form your organising can consist of nothing more than a hierarchy of directories on your computer nested according to subject. For example, an overall [photos] directory could have an [animals] one inside, and within that could be various others [dogs] [cats] etc each containing pictures of that subject, even perhaps with breed directories within each of them! It's a workable solution, but not perfect as some directories could still end up containing a huge amount of pictures, and also where would you store a picture of a cat and a dog! Fortunately there is another way of cataloging your files.

DAM software!

Yes it's an exclamation we've all probably used at our computers, but in this case it stands for Digital Asset Management, and as the name suggests, is a type of software that is used to manage and catalogue various types of digital files. It can be anything such as music, documents, video, and importantly for us it can also be image files. There are a number of different programs available for image organising and they all generally work in much the same way. By far the most popular is Adobe Lightroom which as of writing has matured into its 6th major version. This software is an all round image processing powerhouse, allowing you to edit, print, and do many other functions, however it's the cataloging function we are interested in here.

Keywords in Lightroom

Keywording

The ability to search for a specific image is based on keywords. These are words that describe an image and can be added automatically during import or easily at a later time. Each picture can  consist of as many or few descriptive words as you wish, however the more you have the more precise your searches can be. For example the previously mentioned cat and dog picture could have the keywords, cat, dog, Alsatian, Siamese, animal, pet. A search using any one or more of those words will bring up that picture, along with any other matching ones. Keywords are just one of the many powerful cataloging options available and I will probably look at them more in a later blog. However it still leaves the question, "where do I store the pictures on my system?"

Well now the DAM software is doing the hard work of searching, the files themselves can be pretty much anywhere you wish. However there are still good reasons to have some form of organisation to where they are kept. The good news is this need not be at all complex. Putting all the files in one directory will work, but having some sort of sub divisions will help in making broad selections within the software. Everyone needs to work out what is going to work best for them, but as an example I will outline my own system, along with the reasons I have set it up that way. Hopefully it may give some insight into things you might wish to consider for your own setup.

Computer directories seen in Lightroom

My System

My images are initially stored on my main computer, before being moved to accessible storage on my network, once I have finished my immediate work on them. On both devices they are stored in a directory called Photos. Within these directories I have a sub directory for each month of the year. You will notice from the top picture I format the name "year-month" which ensures the directories will be in chronological order in any lists. Each time I shoot during a month, I will add a descriptive titled sub directory to hold the resulting files. My file path is therefore only three branches deep. For example [C:Photos/16-03/Party]. Having the files organised like this makes it easier for me to back them up etc. They are also displayed in this way in Lightroom, which makes it easy to select, based on a month or year, which would not be covered by keywords.

Lightroom Import Dialogue

It also makes life easy when it comes to importing my images into Lightroom. As you can see in the final picture of the import dialogue, at the top is the year-month directory. The first time I import pictures in a month, I will change this to the current month and then will not have to adjust it until I start importing the following month. Further down you will see the "Place in folder" box is ticked and it is here that I will type in a descriptive title for the pictures. Once started the program will automatically make a new directory with that name within the year-month directory and place all the pictures in there. As you can see the dialogue also gives you the opportunity to add keywords, meta data, and adjustments automatically as the pictures are imported.

With a little bit of thought at the start, and the relevant software you should be able to set up a flexible, long term system to enable you to easily find any of your masterpieces!