Philbrow Loc: Peachtree City GA

I'm a fairly new armature photographer but have accumulated a substantial number of photos. I'd like your advice on an easy way to organize them. I currently have them on my iMac computer and a 1TB external hard drive but in in no particular order. Is there a reasonably easy- to-use software that would solve my issue? In advance thanks for your help

Jack47 Loc: Ontario

Do you have any pp software on your Mac? Almost all have some form of
An organizer on them.

Searcher Loc: Kent, England

I would always recommend Lightroom - even though the photos on your hard drives are in random order, the facilities in LR with keywords and collections make finding photographs easy.

HEART Loc: God's Country - COLORADO

Phil - the following links are for previous discussions on the topic of organizing. Using the "Search" tab above can help you locate more topics.

Welcome to the forum - there are lots of help available to the novice, as well as the experienced.

http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/search.jsp?q=organize+photos&u=&s=0

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

I recommend you don't rename your pictures. Use a good photo cataloging program like ACDSee or Lightroom to assign keywords. Every digital camera I've owned names your photo files with a chronological number preceded by letter(s) identifying the camera. This way your files are stored numerically and by camera, with or without a cataloging program.

When you take your pictures, go through them with the organizer program and delete the ones you don't want, and assign keywords to every picture, even if it is other, or misc. This is really easy to do with ACDSee and I assume lightroom as well.

This way, you might have a key word Birds with sub keywords Cardinals, Bluebirds, other, and Pets, with sub-key words Dogs, sub-keywords Cats and each with sub-key words with your pet names. You can then instantly locate all pictures with your dog Scooter, and your cat Kooga also in the picture. You can also rate your pictures, so you can locate all pictures of your wife that you rated as a 5, for example.

If you edit a picture, leave the original in it's own folder and have a custom folder(s) for edited pictures. Rename the edited picture by appending a letter to the name, like E or C for custom or Edited. This way, if you are looking at an editied picture and want to find the original, it is easy. Also easy to locate every picture on your drive just by searching for that name without the appended letter.

Also, it is a good idea to have two back ups. I have 4 copies my self, the original on my HD, two back up USD drives one of those backs up everything once a month with incrementals daily, and one does a daily of only data files, like pictures.

I also back up all my pictures to DVD disks. For this I store all my originals in separate folders that have just over 4 gigs of files. That way each folder has one dvd disk worth of files. When it gets to that size, I start a new folder, and copy that folder to a DVD disk. The DVD disk never changes. No matter what, the DVD will have all the files as they were when copied. The other hard drives files are at my mercy, never know when I might change them accidentally or on purpose. You can't change the DVD disk even if you wanted to, so that's a good safety idea.

ACDSee17 is around $50, they have had sales for $35. It does a million things, so it has a learning curve. I never used Lightroom, but if it is as robust as ACDSee, it also will have a learning curve. Most people on the hog seem to use lightroom, and like it. Lightroom costs a lot more. Both have 30 day free trials.

Philbrow Loc: Peachtree City GA

Many thanks for your quick replies. Really appreciate it. Philbrow

Millismote Loc: Massachusetts

I organize my photos in the following way. A folder named pictures, inside are category folders, Family, friends, trips, misc, etc. Inside those folders are folders with events corresponding to each photographic outing. For example: trips, sub folder trip to Maine_2006 in that way I can find any picture by the category and sub folder very quickly. This also has the advantage if I want to back up my entire photo collection I just copy the picture folder to another hard drive and I get the entire works.

SueMac Loc: Box Elder, SD

You can organize by subject: Birthdays, Weddings, Trips, etc. The problem some times is "Which goes into what folder?" A birthday on a trip...which one.

Or you can organize by date. Have a year folder, then month. I do rename my pictures with the date: 2014-03-01 then a very abbreviated description, and a sequence #. Now, the date will be in the exif info from the camera and for a lot of people that is enough. I rename my photos with the date and descrip. because some day someone in the family is going to get all the photos I have restored and they may not have a photo program that will read the exif info. I scanned, restored and organized over 10,000 family photos from my sister-in-law and no one in her family had anything to read a date. So...the dates that were known were put into the photo name.

Some folks may date each file and put the photos from that outing in the dated file. I do mine by months.

Then each photo is key worded. Makes it easy to find all the photos, say of Mt. Rushmore. Our home state and area is the Black Hills, so we have lots of photos of Mt. R. You can key word anyway you like.

Your iMac comes with iPhoto which is a basic organizing program and post processing program. Works ok,....but will only handle so many key words.

When you import into iPhoto it can separate each event by date. Then you can make albums and organize the photos your way inside of the albums.

For my organizing I use Lightroom, but iPhoto is ok if you're starting out and don't need as much organizing and post processing .

radiumjohn Loc: Pulaski, Virginia, USA

I'll second the Lightroom. By the way I was using Lightroom and had multiple catalogs; what a mess. A neighbor of mine is a computer expert, and she suggested putting all my old catalogs into a super catalog. It worked great.

Saleavitt10 Loc: Maine

I highly recommend Lightroom. Great photo manager and not a bad PP either. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles as Photoshop but a great place to get your feet wet. The develop module is "non-destructive" so you can always go back to the original if you don't like what you've done.