Where are YOUR images? A beginners guide to organizing.
Thursday, February 24th 2011 @ 4:29 PM (not yet rated)
Storing and backing up your photographs is a subject that will make your eyes cross and send you running screaming from the room. At least that is my reaction as a right brained creative person. There are thick books written on the subject and if you really want to get into it, read "The DAM Book" by Peter Kroegh.
If you do not want to read a whole book, here is a simple system to get started.
The first thing to think about when setting up your system is, "How am I going to find these images again?"
Folders and Tags
The simplest thing to do is simply start a folder tree arranged by date. If you want the folders to stay in chronological order, start with the year first. I will often add some text after the date to tell me something about what is in the folder:
2011-02-23 Dads birthday party
It is important to avoid any characters other than dashes and underscores in your folder and file naming because many programs cannot handle other characters like apostrophes or slashes. With this system, I can skim through folders and find what I am looking for without too much difficulty, providing I have some idea of when a photograph was taken and don't have too many photographs to sort through.
What if I want to find all the pictures I have ever taken of waterfalls? With the folder system, I have to look at multiple folders and remember when and where I might have some photographs of waterfalls. It reminds me a lot of digging through shoe boxes.
Here is where tagging comes in. There are various programs that will allow you to add tags or key words to your photographs. I use Adobe Lightroom but Photoshop Elements has a system built in, as well. You can add keywords that will be saved in the metadata of your image and you can search for the images with the keyword "waterfall." Voila, you have them all!
Hard Drives and DVDs
Do not store your images long term on the C drive of your computer. You are going to find that your hard drive will fill up and your computer will get really s...l...o...o...o...w!
I recommend that you buy two portable hard drives and store your images on those. Why two? because you need to back everything up. What if hard drive number one goes bad or gets stolen? It does happen, you know. I also recommend that your backup drive be a different make than your number one drive just in case there was a problem in manufacturing one particular lot of drives.
If you really want to be safe, you will also back up everything by burning to a CD, DVD or Blue Ray in addition to the 2 hard drives. Next, store your back ups in two completely different buildings from your main drive.
My final recommendation is to get started organizing your images today. You know that if you keep putting it off it will only get worse and you risk losing your precious photographs!
