A Luddite’s Guide To Photo Organization

La Colònia Güell, #31 (Dreaming In Layers), Catalunya, 2020

So, how many of you have your digital photos scattered all over your computer, hiding away in various, unrelated files and folders?

I thought I’d tell you what I do in case you are looking for ideas. Of course, there is no “right way” to do any of this–and mine is very, very… uh… well, basic.

So, take what you can use and leave the rest.

Basic Photo Organization

First, a brief word on the big picture (so to speak). Whether you use Adobe Lightroom, or just normal files/folders, a simple, very elementary system might look something like the screen shot below. You have a primary location you could call “Images”, then a series of folders for each year. Within each year, you have each month listed. Within each month, you can put the date along with a brief description of each photo shoot. It is here where I keep the original, full res raw and jpeg files (I shoot and keep both.)

For each year, I also have a BEST JPEGs file in which I put web-sized versions of the photos I have worked up in post. By the end of the year there might be 500-1000 images in this file. This is for quick access when I want to post something to my blog.

Below all the year/month folders in this screen shot, I have additional miscellaneous folders, the ones I tend to use regularly, like “Barcelona Structures Project”, “JPEGs for Website Portfolios”, “iPhone Photos”, “Sales and Donations”, et cetera.

Without Lightroom (considered the standard for this sort o’ thing), or something similar with the convenient ability to tag pictures with keywords and/or stars, finding specific images within these folders can be a challenge. In my case, a lot of my photographs are online in my blogs or in my website portfolios, so I can just use the search function there to find what I need. Once I know the date of the image, I can easily find the full res files in my computer. If I had to do it all again, though, I’d probably just get smart with Lightroom rather than suffering my somewhat cumbersome system. Call me a Neo-Luddite. Or just lazy.

One important detail: Make sure you have all of your files copied onto at least one more hard drive somewhere off-site, just in case. I have two separate 5TB portable hard drives as backups on which I have all of my pictures–so, in total, three separate copies of everything. A portable hard drive is also a handy, compact way to carry all your images with you when you travel.

Naming Your Photos For Storage

Now lets look at how we might “name” a photograph to be saved to your files.

In the screen shot below, you’ll see a super-long, apparently random, number, then the image name. Here is what it all means:

     201403024599 = The Year/Month/Day (March 2, 2014)/Camera Photo Number (image number out of the camera was 4599)

     BW = Black and white (I leave this off if in color.)

     e (before title) = Means, to me, an “electronic” or web-sized version, typically 2000 pixels max on longest side, resolution of 120.

     Sugarloaf Summit at Dawn, #2 = The name of the photograph.

     30×20 = The dimensions of the image in inches, usually at 300ppi.

If you use multiple cameras, you may want to add some sort of code for each machine (or leave the original complete lettering and numbering from the camera file). If you don’t, you will have issues when the same image number crops up in two places from two different cameras. 

When you create various versions of the same picture, you could add additional code, or simply Ver 2, Ver 3, Ver 4, etc.

Final Words

These are just some simpleton ideas to stimulate your little gray cells. You’ll likely come up with something more personal that best works for you. Again, Lightroom (the acme, the zenith, the crown!) will give you the option of automatically renaming your files in accordance with whatever system you devise.

Like I said, I’m a Luddite. Once again: Take what you like and leave the rest.

For a summary of what King Lightroom is all about (both photo editing and organizing), here is Ed (YouTube: Photos in Color) with a nice 8 1/2 minute summary. If you are just interested in the organizing function of the software, that starts at about 4:15: