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That’s exciting to see you catching on to the snowflake photography! That’s better than any snowflake shot I have ever taken. 🙂
It’s also exciting to see you putting together an organization strategy!
I would recommend you go with portable hard drives. One hard drive that stores your originals and edited files, and a second one (the exact same size) to use as a backup. At your current rate, it would keep you going for years . . . but I have a feeling your current rate will speed up very quickly; the more you learn, the more time you’ll spend at it, and thus, the more pictures you’ll have. Plus hard drives are harder to lose, and you won’t have to be plugging in and unplugging thumbdrives all the time.
As a general rule to keep your pictures findable, never have more than 10-20 folders in a folder! This is why I do the Year > Month > Event strategy. It will be more than 20 years before there’s more than 20 folders in My Photos folder, there will never be more than 12 folders in each Year folder (one folder for each month), and I never shoot more than 20 events in one month. For you, based on subject or location, your structure will be different, but you will have to re-arrange every time any one folder grows to more than 20 folders.
- * It sounds like on the hard drive you will want two folders, one for Originals, another for Edited.
* In the Originals folder, I suggest you organize by photoshoot.
* I would rename all photos via batch re-name after moving them into the Originals folder.
* Then, after editing a picture, save it in the Edited folder organized by subject or location.
* Back up your main hard drive every so often….I normally do after I’ve done a lot of work on it.
Those are a few tips for starters!