How to Organize Digital Photos Like The Professionals

Posted by David  •  Oct 26th, 2009 6:47:27 pm - Subscribe | Mood: good | Music: Reggie and the Full Effect - Playing Dead (320Kbps)

So we all have hundreds if not thousands of digital photo's on our internal and external hard drives, but the questions is how do we organize them like the pro's do? Here is how I plan on doing it.

How to Organize Digital Photos Like The Professionals
Right now I have an I:\ drive where I store all of my photo's along with other needful items that I do not plan on listing here. Well one of my directories is:

Pictures

Inside of my pictures directories I have:

Photo's

PSD's

Wallpaper

Web

Photo's is what we are looking at in this entry. Well I figured that the easiest way to organize your pictures is by creating a directory. (which I have) that describes the images stored with in it. eg: Halloween 2008 Inside of my Halloween 2008 folder I have pictures of Milani trick-or-treating (my daughter). Well rather than labeling the directory, 'Halloween 2008'...I plan on listing it as:

2008-10-31 - Halloween Windows will recognize the year 2008 first, the month, and final the day and place them in sequential order.

Once you have placed all your pictures in directories, and properly labeled them by year, month, day. It is now time to use your favorite photo management software. Many of the pro's use expression, but personally I enjoy using Adobe Light Room for meta labeling, and Google Picasa for facial remembrance.

Either path you choose to take, Adobe Light Room, Google Picasa, or another 3rd party program always label the directories of the images that you purge from your camera on to your PC.

Here is a list of my primary directories in my Picture folder. Your are more than welcomed to use this as an outline for your digital photo organization.

1. Animals
   
2. Architecture
   
3. Environment
   
4. Events
   
5. Family
   
6. Friends
   
7. Home
   
8. Objects
   
9. Office
   
10. Screenshots
    
11. Travel
    
12. Work

Eventually I plan on revamping / optimizing my primary directories by year, but for now this suites me well. Should you have any recommendations or suggestions I welcome you to comment below. Thanks

External Links

Adobe Light Room
A photography software program developed by Adobe Systems for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, designed to assist professional photographers in managing thousands of digital images and doing post production work.

Google's Picasa
Picasa is a software download from Google that helps you organize, edit, and share your photos. It's free, and easy to use.

Comments 2  •  Oct 26th, 2009 6:47:27 pm - Subscribe  •  Tweet this entry | Post a comment

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