Dback4430 Loc: Lockport Il

I use aperture 3 , i am trying to find simple organization tree. what do you do ?

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

Just bought Lightroom 3.6, waiting on the free upgrade to LR4 to get here, then will spend a month re-organizing! LOL

MsJ Loc: Northern Indiana

One I just started to use is to make a folder for each year and import/renaming them by date (2012_3_27) of shot.

Dback4430 Loc: Lockport Il

LOL , MT Shooter , Practice then ill box up a hard drive full of em .

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

With almost 40 years of shots to file, the date doesn't help me a heck of a lot.

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

I have 3 HDs full right now, just bought 2 new 2TB externals a week or so ago, hopefully they will help.

snowbear

I use subject categories, such as architecture, abstracts, florals, pets, portraits, etc. I also have a "special projects" category.

Nikonian72 Loc: Chico CA

Make sure that your camera has the correct date/time for imbedding into Exif. This is to help you later, when you need to find a folder with same date.

I name each folder based on date. Today would be 12-03-27, year-month-day, which keeps folders in perpetual shooting order.

Once images are uploaded, I create a new folder (within original folder) named 12-0327 Prime. I review each image, and copy-&-paste usable photos to "Prime". After last image, I open "Prime" and create a new folder named 12-0327 Best. Now I select best of similar photos, then copy-&-paste to "Best". I open "Best" and create a new folder named 12-0327 Tweaked. I Post Process (no cropping) each individual image, and save as a new image (usually "1" added to image name), and transfer to "Tweaked". I open "Tweaked" and create a new folder named 12-0327 Cropped. I copy all tweaked images, and paste to "Cropped". I crop each image as needed, and rename (usually adding "-1" to each name).

Printing is done from "Tweaked" (various formats), and uploading to internet from "Cropped".

Redundant folders "Prime" & "Best" can be deleted.

Dback4430 Loc: Lockport Il

When do you have time to shoot ? lol . It sounds a lot more complicated than it is , i am sure , thanks all for your " input "

Nikonian72 Loc: Chico CA

I shoot in the daytime, usually weekends. I do all of my uploading, filing, sorting, and Post Processing in the evening, while watching the tube.

ziggykor Loc: East Texas

I'd begin with it now and when your copy of LR4 arrives you can import th elibrary into it.

Roger Hicks Loc: Aquitaine

Date, plus a brief description, e.g. 2012-03-19 Birthday. This works with real negatives (in a neg file -- about 45 years now) as well as digital images. If I can't remember the shots with those clues, they probably weren't important anyway.

Raw shots are stored in Raw directories (by year) and, when processed, TIFFs are filed in a TIFF directories with the same names as the raw directories. Both are stored and backed up on separate external hard drives.

Prints are however stored in boxes, by country/region or subject matter, e.g. "France", "India", "Civil War", "Portraits."

AND: published stuff is stored with the relevant magazine article, book, etc., as well as in its original locations.

The trouble is, a lot depends on how your mind works. MT Shooter says, "With almost 40 years of shots to file, the date doesn't help me a heck of a lot" and no doubt he is telling the truth for him -- but with over 40 years' pics, dates are what work for me.

Cheers,

R.

bobmcculloch Loc: NYC, NY

I use a similar system , however I have started to add a description, some times I have three or more folders with the same date and descriptions say, 3-27 Liberty, 3-27 Gulls, 3-27 Ferry, Bob.

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

I do all my organizing via Lightroom.

I just use folders based on event like "Wild Animal Park trip 2-1-2012."

I also have an "unsorted" folder and an "archive these" folder.

Iduno Loc: Near Tampa Florida

I am still spending more time organizing (and reorganizing) in an effort to find a system that works for me. Does anyone make a distinction between their "photography" and "snapshots" taken at family events, etc.?

For what it's worth, and I'm not sure how much it's worth, my current strategy is to seperate photography from Family/Friends in two directories. With each category I have a year subdirectory and then within each year photos go into a folder labeled with the date and a brief shoot name.

Please see my seperate post on Face Recognition if you have some thoughts on this feature. Apologies to Dback for not adding anything substantial to your original query but thanks for the post.