Help organise me !

Hi I am starting to get lots of photos in all different places on my computer and would like to know how to organise it all , ok now some info on me, I use an acer i7 laptop ,photoshop cs6, adobe bridge, Lightroom 4 ( I don't very much ) , 1 terabyte backup external hard drive. I am going to at some time down the road start selling prints and thinking of portraits as well !
Cheers
Greg

I too have a hard time with organizing. I sorted out my files once. I made file names to match the photos. Like: Bugs, Birds, Landscapes, people, and family. then I went through all my pictures and put them in each category. This also gave me the chance to get rid of ones I didn't like. N ow I have to do it again.

If you used light room, you could specify folder destination on output. Easy as pie.
I agree with previous poster too, just create folders named accordingly on your external and just move them over to their corresponding folder upon export. That's the easiest thing I've found.

You could also batch export in light room. Say you go on a road trip to a winery. You take landscapes portraits and some of food. So, you could work on and export all the food pics to your food backup folder on your external, then work on the portraits, etc, rinse and repeat.

There's hundreds of good tips and thousands of bad tips to help anyone get organised..., whatever is good for me might not be good for you!!!
Organization comes from organizational skills, and if you don't have 'em, everything is pointless!!

I have long created my own method of organizing: Create a folder "2013", then inside this one you create folders "Jan", Feb", Mar" and so on, and within each month you create folders with a specific date. Sometimes, within a specific folder I also create a simple "Notes" text file where I add my own notes, comments, whatever.

A lot of my friends have copied this method and they're coping well with it, so you might as well try and see how it goes!!!

Have fun organizing...!

The features in Lightroom probably helped me the most with my organizing. Before I got LR, my photos were everywhere!

I use LR to download photos from camera to hard drive according to date of capture (set up in LR file manager on import screen) As I'm going through the photos, I rate them (stars) As I'm processing them and the ones I really like or think I want to do more, I add them to the quick collection. This also works well if you've taken photos for a client. Once you're done, save your "quick collection" under a name that's appropriate like MW Wedding or whatever.

Probably one of the most powerful features in Lr is the ability to add keywords (using the "spraycan") for each image. Then you can simply do a search in the library without going through a bunch of files.

If you are using Adobe CS you can use Bridge and it works wonders , even though I use Adobe CS4, I personally do not use Bridge having done what I have professionaly for so many years now. I am used to navigating a hierarchal file system and know where all my images are and It is much easier for me to open Photoshop and navigate to the location of my files which I know very well than to use a program to sort things for me. I am not saying this is for you or anyone here because people can and do get lost if they are not used to dealing with a directory tree and know exactly where everything is. It is just how I personally do it. Lightroom does work well as Helene has stated and would be a good alternative for most people. Whatever you do though I can tell you this make it part of your regular workflow and try not to deviate from it. It makes processing your images much easier when you develop an efficient workflow for YOU.

Thanks all I have now made a file in my hard drive with files for categories and will output to corresponding file ! Cheers

I'm a huge fan of Lightroom as an organizer, but my understanding is Bridge works well as well. The fact that Lightroom is not migrating to the "Creative Cloud" for the forseeable future cements it in my mind as the tool of choice for doing this. Add to that Lightroom 5's ability to edit photos on detached drives that are currently detached (i.e. unplug your big external and you can still apply edits to the photos on there when it is detached - like when it's at home and you're away on business or at the office or in an airplane) and if you're looking to start somewhere I would say pour yourself into Lightroom 5 and leave Bridge to the cloud users.

Lightroom with keywords has been my biggest organisational advance in the last 12 months. I tried bridge and concluded that Lightroom is better for still photographers which is what Adobe says as well.

Build yourself a directory with the name "images" or something like that and then build subdirectories by image type, ie. landscape, nature, people, etc. In each of these sub-directories, go one step further and make more directories and either name them by date or place, etc. That is how I do it. My "images" folder is now about 350 GB. Lucky for me, I have a 1 TB hard drive on my desktop!

STM said:

Build yourself a directory with the name "images" or something like that and then build subdirectories by image type, ie. landscape, nature, people, etc. In each of these sub-directories, go one step further and make more directories and either name them by date or place, etc. That is how I do it. My "images" folder is now about 350 GB. Lucky for me, I have a 1 TB hard drive on my desktop!

Click to expand...

That's essentially how I organize my photos, too. Also, I back everything up using that same directory structure. It makes it very easy to find things. In addition, I put something useful in the file name, along with the date the photo was taken. For instance, when I took a photo of a crow today, the file name was crow-130601-01.

I upload my photos daily and quickly go through and cull out the really yucky ones. Then I can go back and take my time and peruse through the remaining photos and mark those I consider really good, and others as extras, and delete those that don't pass muster.

Really, You have to organize your photos that works the way you think. Everyone is diffierent, and as mentioned in some other posts, what works for one person may not work for someone else.

Ok, I have gone with Lightroom and am happy with it ! I thank everyone for there comments ! Cheers all Greg

Agh. This is my biggest problem, too. I find time to move images around every few months, but I'm really bad at it. Most images sit in the folder that Nikon transfer copies them into. I might start using Bridge to rearrange them... Some of the tips in this thread are helpful to me.

Lightroom!

EDIT: With Tagging used well!

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Well hello again my Nikonite friends ! It's been a bit over two months now since I started this thread and your answers have been helpful , as I said I have gone with lightroom and about two thousand photos later and tagged each one , every time I put images onto my computer I they go into lightroom I give them a tag and if I have time I do a little editing and now I can find any photo that I set out to find ! And my daughter ( yes the Panasonic girl ) is doing the same ! Thanks to all

Oscariotrix said:

There's hundreds of good tips and thousands of bad tips to help anyone get organised..., whatever is good for me might not be good for you!!! Organization comes from organizational skills, and if you don't have 'em, everything is pointless!!

Click to expand...

Hi there,

Personally, I hate the catalogues proposed by many apps (now even by my favourite!),
I got myself a system that works well with the HUGE amount of pictures I have to
manage every month!

The truth is the time you invest in your archiving system is not lost time!

Have a good day…

My system is put shots into a folder with a short title and date. I use Bridge "Review Mode" to quickly move through all my shots and rate the really good ones with 5-Stars (Ctrl+5) and mark the dogs as rejects (Alt+Delete). I then filter on "Rejected", do a Select All and delete them. This eliminates the really crummy shots that aren't going to do anything but waste hard drive space and leaves me with only the mediocre shots and the really killer shots. Later, I can filter by rating and easily pull up the very best shots in that folder, which is typically what I'm after. Fast and easy!

Im using the Nikon tool & Picasa.
I can see the login in using timestamp as filename except that isnt timestamp part of the metadata on the image anyway?
Picasa seems to like to sort by date.
It seems to me its a good idea to include the original filename if only because i dont think that IS in the metatdat and so would otherwise be irretrievably lost.
Im also wondering if camera/phone make/model should be in the name. (I have pictures from some 7 cameras and a phone)