File Managment and Organization

One of the most difficult parts of photography is figuring out the best way to store your photographs. I’ve adapted a technique that is a combination of several different variations that I’ve seen from other photographers that I’ve worked with. I no longer have any issue finding any of my work and stay completely organized. I’ll walk you through from import to when I’m saving the final images.

This is a screen capture of my finder of the most important folder on my computer. On my desktop, I have a folder titled “Jobs” which is where all of my photos are stored. Well, at least photos from the past few months. Anything further back from there I backup on another hard drive (but I’ll get to that later). One of the studios that I interned with had folders for each quarter of the year (2011_1, 2011_2, 2011_3, 2011_4) but I liked the idea of breaking my 2011 folder into each individual month rather than have 4 different folders for 2011.

When setting up this system, I created a folder (which you can see under the months) called “Job# – Client Name copy”. Every time I have a new job I duplicate this folder and write in the information there. This way, it saves me time from having to add in all the sub-folders that already exist within that folder. The job number directly correlates to the date however it may not look that way. If we look a the image above the job number for the UO Acrobatics and Tumbling Job is 111108. The first 11 correlates to 2011. You don’t necessarily have to drop off the 20 but I felt like simplifying the number a bit. The second number 11 correlates to the month which was November and the last two numbers are the day. So this job was shot on November 8, 2011. By number the jobs this way they will always be in numerical order and makes it a million times easier to find past projects that I’ve worked on.

Within the individual job folder are three more folders titled “Captures”, “Creative Direction”, and “Deliver to Clients”. The Captures folder has two more sub-folders where I import the files (into the “RAW” folder) and make my selects (which are placed in the “Selects folder”). The Creative Direction folder is used to house any reference materials that the client or I may have for the project. The Deliver to Clients folder is where I save all of my post processed images. Within the Deliver to Clients folder are two sub-folders titled PSD and JPEG which obviously hold the file type that I’m saving my image as. I also have two more sub-folders just in the JPEG folder called Hi-Res and Low-Res depending on the resolution of the images saved.

I know this may seem like total overkill but this is how I stay organized and keep track of all of my photos and files related to my jobs and test shoots. By not staying organized you run the risk of not being able to find an image when you really need to find it. I’m not saying you need to use the exact method that I use. Just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will work for you. However, you really do need to adapt some sort of file management and organization to avoid making your computer a digital cluttered mess.

After I finish a shoot, I come home and import my images via Photo Mechanic to the RAW folder I talked about above. Photo Mechanic is by far one of the best programs out there for importing images. Initially, I was using Lightroom before I realized how slow the process is. Photo Mechanic is so much faster and even allows you to import multiple cards at the same time (which I know is huge for you Wedding and Sports Photographers out there). After my photos are imported I go through and make my selects and move them over into the Selects folder and then I import those selects into Adobe Lightroom 3.  I know Photo Mechanic is much more powerful than how I use it but as long as it’s speeding up my workflow and get’s me to Photoshop quicker, I’m happy.

I use Lightroom to make simple adjustments to white balance, exposure and some other small tweaks before I move to Photoshop. After my photo is finished, I save it as a unflattened PSD to the PSD folder. I know this takes up more space but sometimes I have repeat clients ask me to retouch a photo exactly the same way. If it’s been a few months since I last worked with them I may need a refresher on exactly what I did to the image. I’ll then resize the image to 1000px wide and use the save for web devices option to be used here on the blog and on my portfolio. These images are saved as JPEGs to the Lo-Res folder. Anything I deliver to the client will be saved as a JPEG from the initial file size and be placed into the Hi-Res folder.

My entire computer is backed up onto a Drobo S that I currently have loaded up with 5 TBs. The great thing about the Drobo is if one of the hard drives fails, you files are stored across all the drives so no data is lost. When my project start to get into the 6 month to a year old range I start removing them from my computers hard drive and just place them on my Drobo and another separate portable hard drive.

That’s how I stay organized and a short little bit about my workflow. Hope this helps!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 8:56 AM. It is filed under Blog and tagged with File Management, Organization, Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.