One of the conversations I seem to have over and over again is talking about how I organize my photo files on my computer. I’ve met people with everything from very complex systems involving dates, locations, subjects, etc to having all their photos in one directory on their computer (usually My Photos or My Pictures). And one thing many of them have in common is they can never find a particular photo they want without lots of searching.
Over the years, Bill and I have developed a system that works for us – so I thought I’d start sharing it with you today – in case it will help any of you organize your photos on your computer and make it easier for you to find your photos on your computer. I’d originally thought to describe my entire system in one newsletter – but realized that would be way too long – so I’m going to split it up over several newsletter. Today, I’ll be sharing how I structure the file directory on my computer.
Since I weed through my photos and delete ones I know I’ll never process, I have two sets of directories of photos – one of unweeded photos – and the other of ones that I have sorted through. I see no point in adding files that I know I’ll never process to my archives since they’ll only take up more space on my drives. As of early September, I have over 66,000 files in my unweeded file system. My guess is at least 40-50% of these files will be deleted before I add them to my main image filing system.
In my permanent directories of image files I have over 88,000 images.
Within my directory of Original Image Files – my first sorting of files is by year.
Within each year – files are sorted by month
And then within the month folder – by date and topic. Originally I just stored all the photos from specific date within a single folder. But over time I realized those folders could be a bit overwhelming – especially at times like when I head to Longwood Gardens in December.
What I do now is separate the photos into folder by date and subject and put enough info in the name of the folder so I have a good idea what is in the folder.
Once I’ve sorted the photos into these folders, I add them into Adobe Lightroom, the program I use to index my files and do preliminary edits on them. I’ll share more about how I use Lightroom in another post soon.
But even without adding the photos to Lightroom and indexing them, the file structure I’ve set up lets me find photos reasonably easily – especially photos of flowers that bloom at a specific time of year. If I want to see my photographs of Virginia Bluebells – all I have to do is go back to the April folder for each year – and look for folders labeled bluebells.
I hope this peek at how I organize my photo files on my computer is helpful. If you have any questions about how I organize then, leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them.