After submitting some images for a new field guide, I was pleased to have a half dozen accepted, my next step was to send the publishers full size files. Now I had to find them. Some were on my internal hard drive, some were on an external hard drive and perhaps they were on some of the many CDs and DVDs I had in my office. I finally found them after hours of work but I realized I was in an organizational mess.
I had a copy of Lightroom and I had Bridge with my Photoshop software. Both pieces of software had excellent search and keywording facilities if I could set them up right. Here are the steps I took.
Get all of the images accessible on my computer.
Storage in the form of large external hard drives has become very inexpensive. I found I would have plenty of space for eight years of photography on two 500gb External drives. To this I added a 1 Terabyte drive to regularly back everything up to. It would be easy to add additional memory to the system as I needed it if I had things set up in a logical and consistent manner. That was the next step.
Setting up a Logical Directory System.
The next step was to move all the files into a logical system of folders. I decided to use the date they were taken. I set up a folder for each year (eg. 2008). I then set up 12 sub folders, one for each month (eg, 2008-03) Under each monthly sub folder I set up a daily sub folder for each day’s set of images I had (eg. 2008-03-22). This took me many weeks, working a few hours at a time, but it worked like a charm.
The default sorting for my computer operating system automatically was from oldest files to newest files, and when I loaded them into Lightroom or Bridge, it maintained this order. Have a look at the folders in the Lightroom screen shot above and you’ll see it is automatically in this order.
The only thing I added to the this structure was that on the daily folder names, I would often add the name of a place if I had gone away, for example Amherst was added to the 2008-12-11 folder. This serves as an easy visual reference to a special days shooting.
After each new days shooting, it was an easy matter to dowload the files to a new daily folder, and use Lightroom or Bridge to upload the new folder with its contents.
My next step was to have a system of rating and keywording.
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