Organize Photos

Organize Photos

Basic Principles

Below are some basic principles behind the widely accepted best practices of digital asset management. Consider these as you develop your own workable solution for photos storage and management.
  • Scalable—your filing system needs to be capable of growing with you, without having to go back and change it.
      • If you organize your photos by topic, and your “Animals” folder is on a disconnected drive, you must reconnect the drive every time you photograph some animals. Multiply that by multiple drives and you have a headache!
      • If you add photos to a date/time-based folder structure of some description, then only one small area of your photo archive is updated when you import new photos.
  • Easy Backup & Restore—Your folder structure needs to be easy to back up, otherwise you may miss some photos, and it needs to be easy to restore if you ever have a disaster.
    • Store ALL photos in a single parent folder(per drive) rather than scattering photos around your hard drives.
  • No duplication—Each photo should be stored in a single location (in addition to your backups).
  • Standard characters—When naming your folders, stick to standard characters—A-Z, 0-9, hyphens (-) and underscores (_)  This will accommodate ALL platforms for present & future.
  • Consistent—You should always know where a photo goes without having to think about it.

Why use a date/time-based folder structure?

The simplest option is to use one of Lightroom’s default dated folder structures, or “per-shoot” coder with date added. This satisfies all the criteria above automatically.
  • It’s scalable, because you just keep adding new dates to the end.
  • It’s easy to back up the original photos because you’re adding new photos to the latest folders.
  • It’s easy to restore from a good backup. In the event of a disaster, it’s even possible to rebuild the folder structure from files rescued by recovery software, because the capture dates are stored in the file metadata.
  • It uses standard characters, which are accepted by all operating systems.
  • The folders can be nested, so you don’t have a long unwieldy list of folders.
  • Lightroom can create the folder structure for you automatically on import, so you don’t even have to organize it manually.
  • It’s easy to go back and move older photos into the same folder structure, especially if you’re only using one folder per month.