MFNman Loc: The QC, NC

I am a long time reader and appreciate all of the knowledge I have gleaned from this site. I am about to embark on retirement and all of the time and freedom that accompanies it. I have been a long time amateur picture taker since using my dad’s Nikkormat as a teen. I have since acquired more upadated equipment. My problem? I have never organized the thousands of pictures (slides, prints and now digital files) and don’t know where and how to start. I have also acquired thousands of slides (years of precious memories)from my dad ‘s collection. I have at least started having them digitized by Scan Cafe. I have a LR subscription that I haven’t utilized yet and don’t really know how to use. My photos are scattered all over the place (CF/SD cards, hard drives, envelopes, boxes, etc.). Is there any sage advice on how to go about organizing all of this? Additionally, I have been shooting JPEG+Raw much of the time over the past few years (thought I would eventually get hooked on PP!)
I appreciate any and all advice!

pendennis

I had/have the same "problem" as you, and I chose to sort my files by year (YYYY/MM), then subject. Where there were single images, I usually file by title.

There is no perfect filing system. I'd suggest you try a few scans, create a temporary filing system, and see what works. You can also try cross-referencing using Excel as an index. Once you get to a filing system you like, stay with it.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

ADVICE:

1) START. Divide the work into achievable chunks and put those chunks in a logical order.

2) Lightroom Classic is a great tool for organization. Find videos on YouTube, Adobe's site, etc. and learn to use the tools in it. You can have one huge catalog, or break up your collection by drive, or by year, by using multiple catalogs.

3) Have a backup plan! If you're organizing things digitally, you need your working drive, plus two local backup drives and a cloud backup or off-site backup.

Working drives should be SSDs. Longer term backup can be enterprise grade spinning hard drives, which are relatively large and inexpensive.

4) Consider doing your own digitizing of slides and even negatives. I've attached a 20-page PDF I wrote a few years ago, explaining how I do it. Most of that "white paper" is sample images.

Attached file:
(Download)

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Bill (above) offers good advice.

LR is great for organizing. Since your photopile is heavy on family photos I would recommend that in the process of entering your photos into the organized system you give them meaningful file names. Either that, or teach all of your family to use LR. LR doesn't care what the file name is, you find things by filtering with keywords. It works quickly and easily but unless you know how to use LR it will be difficult to find things. For that reason I think a dual organization system (LR and meaningful file names) will help your family to find photos if you are not around to do it. For digital photos, it's fairly easy to rename them when you download them to LR. If someone else is digitizing slides for you, you will have to do the sorting first so you can put reasonable names on the files. I use a descriptive text string followed by date and time, but there are as many different ways to do it as there are UHH members (or maybe more), so you can develop your own. For old slides, you will have to estimate the date and probably use an index number instead of the time.

When I first started digital the pile of photos got really large. One advantage of digital files is that you can sort them by date. So when I got to about 65,000 files (many duplicates and junk photos with no keywords) I sorted them by date and made several catalogs based on year. That way it became small chunks and I could just do them sequentially and keep track of where I was. After organizing all the annual catalogs I combined them into a master catalog. Got it down to about 15,000 photos.

If you're digitizing prints with a scanner, the file date will not be the same as the date the photo was taken so you will have to change (estimate) the date. In LR you can change the date in the metadata. I have a lot of old prints and don't know the date but can usually estimate it within a year or three.

I put my photos into folders based on year, then by subject. So the path will be something like: Documents/Photo Archive/2018/Suzie's Birthday/RAW. The raw files go into the RAW folder and the edited photos go into the Suzie's Birthday folder. Then I can back up the Suzie's Birthday folder and since the raw files are in a subfolder they get backed up too. If I only have a jpg, it goes into .../Suzie's Birthday/JPG, and gets backed up the same way the raw files do.

I have a description of my LR workflow at https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1584

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

I found that having 2 sets of data is best for me. The first is the straight out of camera (SOOC) (or scanner) by date and the most obvious. Keeping the SOOC copies allows me to completely re-process from scratch. I found using a scanner to be the best way to do it myself.

Then I have the copies after processing. These caused me the most issue in deciding how. Say I have a photo I took at a music event. I could categorize it by date, singer, venue, or event. The ability to do this and cover all categories requires a good program. The one most people here seem to use is LightRoom. I wound up doing it in Smugmug online before I heard of Lightroom.

ELNikkor

I make folders specific to existing groups and subgroups, (family/members of family; travel/ specific trips etc) Don't rely at all on any type of machine AI.

Bultaco Loc: Aiken, SC

Great info!

Ruthlessrider

If you have an Adobe account try Bridge. It may not help with all of you loose photos, but the one still on so/cf stuff can be organized in any number of ways. I alway use the date of capture. For those you want to categorize in other ways, you can just create a new folder and move the file into that folder. Don’t forget to get a backup system of some sort for just photos.

Good luck and enjoy your new found freedom to do whatever trip your trigger.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Great comments so far about getting your files into a common folder organization and then importing into your LR catalog. Don't let the totality of the work stop you from getting started on the smaller steps. You don't need to edit and keyword 100%, just start with the folder organizing and then the mass-import into LR. Once they're cataloged and copied onto a back-up media, you can work on the next steps as time and interest allow, including the remaining scanning process of slides / negatives into a JPEG (digital) format.

Use the training videos in the Support / Training section of the Adobe.com site that you access with your Adobe credentials. These are "free" with your subscription. Free "free" is a wealth of videos on u-tube too. A simple google will lead you to a list to watch:

google adobe lightroom getting started u-tube

Use the "save" option at u-tube to keep any title / author you find useful to re-access. You just need to create a free google ID / profile to retain this save-list.

DaveyDitzer Loc: Western PA

My work flow with old slides is to first sort by date, then view on a screen to decide what to reproduce and what to store or discard, then I copy with a slide holder and macro lens to record in JPG and RAW, and then post process the RAW. I need the RAW because often there are color shifts in the slide film itself as a result of aging. If the JPG is acceptable, I file that electronically.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Organize first, then digitize. I organize by year and month, then subject. Slides usually have a date label, prints may be marked or have subject matter that indicates their date. I put my original digital and digitized files on an external drive and into a folder labeled "yyyy mm subject descriptor" and then copy that folder to my PC for editing. I use Elements 14 for its Organizer and Editor. I shoot RAW+JPEG but only keep the RAW. Don’t ask me why I shoot both. Probably because my D7200 has two card slots.

photoman43

Look at some of Peter Krough's books and articles on DAM. Digital Asset Management.

Regarding the old 35mm slides, throw out most of them. Save the ones with people in them tat mean something to you and your family.


https://thedambook.com/

delder Loc: Maryland

As others have suggested, a duplicate set of images is a GREAT idea. The easiest to get started with is
[Pardon old School]by digital 'Roll' out of the camera. I sort by camera brand & model.
This might be the index you use for your Photo index program, but allows you to know where your shots are.
I then have folders seprately organized by catagory Holiday, Cruise, Family, Friends, Subject [Transportation etc] Season.
This works for my contest photos, when we are usually asked to submit a set of photos based on some selected subject. You may have other requirements.

I also back this work up to a second Hard Drive for data redundency.

nikon123 Loc: Toronto, Canada

Its overwhelming!
I have 60 albums of family and travel images and hundreds of loose photos inherited. About 6 years ago I devised a plan, which I have temporarily put on hold due to the inability to throw out original photos and devote the time.
First step: I digitized the loose photos by actually making photos of each one. i have not completed the cropping yet.
Second step: i donated about 250 photos to an archive and then volunteered to create a ‘fond’. (Father in law)DONE
Third step: I created a book of photos and narratives on the centenary of my father’s birth date and made copies for my children, brother and surviving aunt and uncle. DONE
Fourth step: this is the step on hold as the sheer volume and decision making are diverting me from the goal. Also, where is the time for this, but I must do it!!
Fifth step: the slides which number in the high hundreds. Throw them out and just forget them or painstakingly look at them?

What I do know: my children will throw the whole lot out if I were not to create a more wtconcise and readable product:
Resolved: to set aside a few hours a week - same day and time frame to move this project along.

Thank you for posing the question. I did not answer your query but you inspired me to get this done and soon!!

bjojade Loc: Wausau, WI

My archival process is for every digital card, the first thing I do is copy the entire contents of the card into a folder, organized by date. Yes, everything, even the potential throw aways. The folder dates are based on import date. I separate it by card so I can sort of keep track of how much each card has been used. The only time I need to go back to this is would be for extreme emergencies, but knowing it's there is great peace of mind.

If I've shot for a particular project, that project gets its own library created separately. The library is named and stored accordingly. How much detail I enter into each photo depends on what might be needed to sort through the library. If it's a one off shoot for a customer where I won't likely need to search for more, I'm not spending a lot of time cataloging pictures I can't use elsewhere anyway.

For general cataloging, computers make it OH so easy. The key is to get as much data added to each photo as possible. EXIF data is awesome to be able to sort by any number of things, such as date, focal length, camera used, location, ISO, shutter speed, etc. Manually adding in keywords is helpful when you need to find things quickly. Personally, I prefer adding the keywords into the photos themselves vs creating manual folders for the images because then I can use a search to get the stuff I need. If the cataloging gets messed up, that info is still within the picture itself.

Now, where it gets really fun is when the computer is able to determine the content of the pictures for you. While not perfect, you can quickly search your catalog for things you may be looking for that you hadn't thought of manually adding as keywords. What I've found is that the keyword search often gets me in the right direction, and looking at other photos taken in the same date range may have what I'm looking for, even if the AI didn't detect it in the image I wanted.

With your old collection of slides, what I'd probably do is start by sorting by date/event. Then I'd look at each picture and mark it one of 3 things. 1. Awesome picture that is worthy of sharing. 2. Picture that is an important memory, regardless of quality 3. Picture that's nothing special and doesn't convey any special meaning.

The #1 pictures I'd focus on getting scanned and do something with first. These should be high quality scans so you can use the photos later. The #2 pictures could then come next. Since the memory is more important than the quality, I'd probably scan at a lower res so it goes faster. (although the speed difference and storage concerns today is minimal) The #3 pictures I'd safely tuck away because I can never throw pictures away. Ever.