I’m struggling to keep my pictures organized. Can you suggest a strategy for sorting and filing pictures?
Martin Dewhurst, Salford
Brian Says… I don’t think you will be the only one having trouble organizing a growing photo collection. I first encountered a problem when my wife asked me to put a set of 12 pictures of our daughter’s first year into a frame. I soon realized that an organized approach would be essential. My solution has stood the test of time for me, as I’m still using the same filing system 15 years later. It has survived a change from iview Multimedia to Lightroom as my cataloguing software, and one switch from PC to Mac. Whatever approach you choose it has to be simple and part of your standard process for every card you use.
Several software solutions create a folder for each day. This is okay within a cataloguing system such as Lightroom, but not so good if you need to find a file outside of the cataloguing software. I use a folder for each year, and then inside that I have 12 subfolders, one for each month. I then put all the images taken in that month into the folder, though I do have a few subfolders too, one for each camera I’ve used. I also rename the files, prefixing them with the two digits of the year and two digits of the month, then I add a sequential number at the end of the filename.
The key to this is configuring your software to automatically import the files in accordance with your process and then always use the process. I use Photo Mechanic to manage the initial import of files to my storage system, and then import them to Lightroom as I find Photo Mechanic is really efficient for adding metadata to files on import.