CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

You look at your inventory of cameras and force all to be unique. Once and done, never to be revisited until another camera is added.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

That would work! Thanks for the idea!

JD750 Loc: SoCal

awesome14 Loc: UK

LR is not a relational database manager. It has 1/1000 the flexibility and power of MySQL or Access. And, it's proprietary, so no one can write front ends for it. My brother, rest his soul, used Access to make the best photo database I've ever seen. I have it now. It's utterly fantastic! It isn't limited by keywords, file names and attributes, and it even had the outputs of image analysis filters, to determine light, dark, percentage skin tone, B&W, outdoors, indoors, % white content, digitally altered, human face(s), human subjects, motion, among others.
Along with image properties, shooting parameters, lens model, body model, and a unique key field to differentiate each image.
But he was a database consultant/manager. He used Access because it runs under Windows, and it has nice automation features. Bit it's far from a commercial relational database. The time you put in up front is the time-saving multiplier you'll reap hence. I can back up his whole database in a series of files corresponding to audio, images, settings, tables, text; macros, VB routines and SQL; so it could rebuild the entire thing in a matter of hours. He has scanned images of our great grandparents, snapshots from point and shoots, negatives and slides from film days.
A portion of it pertains to our family history in images.
But, I guess if you want something simple, Darkrable, LR, and the like might work. But, mostly everything will just get lost eventually, because you forget what you had, or how you categorized it. That may be a blessing and lifting of a burden, because most photos have no particular value. They were great at one time. But interest fades over time, and we move on to the next interesting projects.
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Bill_de Loc: US

Any files I edit as _filename and save everything in Windows Explorer. The _ brings the files to the top of the list within the folder. The folder are named by month and day, while the top folder name is the year. I can search by year, month, day of the month, or subject. No additional software needed.

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

I shoot pro-style bodies but I never need to separate the shots by camera. All the shots in a shoot are in that shoot so they all get renamed with the same ID. If they're not in the shoot, I can just leave them out of the name-changing download (although that involves keeping track of which images are not in the shoot so I generally just include them and delete them after the fact during culling. I can make myself a note download them with a different ID later if they're important). (I use 2-3 bodies myself -- no second/third shooter). So including DateTime in the file names ensures that all the file names are unique (with 0.01 second granularity there's no chance I will be using two different cameras at the same time). And I can arrange them in chronological order easily (although LR does that for me). I don't really care what body is in use. If I did, LR could separate them for me.

Of course the first pre-shoot step is to synchronize the clock on all the bodies.

nervous2 Loc: Provo, Utah

Let me just suggest that you place visits to Mars and Venus at the very end of your bucket list. Stay safe my friend, I would miss your posts.

Xpatch Loc: New York, Antigua, GT.

Photo mechanic is gold standard
LR is good
All require some initial organization the more you do upfront the less to fuss with latter

jrm21

I've gone through different organizational structures over the years. One of the big problems I found is getting trapped in a particular software. If you change software, you have to start from scratch. Not fun with tens of thousands of photos. My current system works (for me) and uses, but does not rely, on third party software.

I am currently using Lightroom, but this will work with just about any software package.

First, I have several LR catalogs. This allows me to keep work, family, band, and travel photos all separate.

All my photos are organized on my hard drive in a similar manner. "Photos" is the top level directory. Inside that is a "master" directory for each catalog.

From there, I organize by date. A folder for 2021. That contains folders for each month (2021-01, 2021-02, etc). If there is a special event with a large number of photos, I make a separate folder for that (2021-08_carshow).

Photos are copied from the camera to the relevant folder. Depending on the situation, I may do a batch rename. For example, I may append "_Rome" to the end of each file name, do differentiate those travel photos from some "Florence" photos in the same trip. I might also create separate sub-folders if there is a need for additional separation.

At that point, things are pretty well organized and can be easily located without additional software.

Lightroom allows my to sync/update folders. All I need to do is open the LR catalog, right-click on the top level folder for that catalog, and all newly added folders and photos will be recognized.

In LR, I add keywords and other information that helps with organization (although that info is limited to use in LR).

From there, I do something a little different. When I export my corrected photos from LR, I do so to a separate folder. Those photos are then imported into Apple's "Photos" app. I find "Photos" easier to use for syncing with my mobile devices and sharing with family/friends. This extra step is not necessary as you can simply export to a folder in your LR catalog and manage everything from there.


I'm more into video these days and have over 10,000 movie clips to organize. For that I use "KeyflowPro2" (Mac only) with the same basic folder structure used for photos. I mention this because it can also organize photos (and other file types). No ability to edit in this software. What's really nice about it is that keywords (tags) you add in app show up as "tags" in the Mac Finder. So while the app offers some great DAM ability, it also passes info along to the Finder so you can find things even without the app.

Greg Biggs Loc: Billings, MT

I use the file explorer. It goes like this.
People/ Family/ Greg, Cinda, Bob, Ed, etc. People/ Friends / Bill, Linda, Shirley etc
Transportation/ Cars, Trucks, Trains, Planes etc
Flowers/ Roses, Petunias, Lilys, Tulips etc
Essentially each Category has sub categories . It has worked for me for many years and so I will keep doing this.

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

What do you do with pictures of Bill and Bob, or Cinda and Shirley? Do you duplicate the images to go into two different folders?

Greg Biggs Loc: Billings, MT

Use initials or last names. If I have multiple pictures of Bill for example I often use either numbers or letters after . It might be Bill Biggs 1, Bill Biggs 2 , Bill Biggs 3, etc.

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

What I meant was if you have photos including both Bill and Bob, do you duplicate the images and put them into both folders People/Family/Bob and People/Friends/Bill?

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

In my opinion (others may differ) key wording is the way to go; this example points out the drawback of subject-based folders.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Ok keywords works for you abd that’s great. But you gotta remember people do things differently organize things differently and that’s ok. We are not machines we are all different. Some people remember dates others remember faces.

Personally I liked his method. It works for him and that’s what matters. And he’s not dependent on aftermarket software. That’s a big advantage.

For the dual category problem you could add tags to files using the OS or simply make an alias pointing to the original file or just put it in the family and friends category.