Photo Organisation

Sorry you cannot find the photos again... I am sure they will turn up when you are scrapping something else ... I set my photos in my EHD as: my current (since 2002) photos are by year and month... the older photos are in a folder with the range of years and or seperated by category... my Mom's Family, My Dad's family .. photos of me by decade so 1960's, 1970's, 1980 etc... my brother, my nephew etc. Nature, old house, etc.

 

For over a decade I've been captioning my photos in their metadata. I prefer it to keywords because writing in the caption field feels more natural to me, as someone who loves journaling. I don't use complete sentences but write phrases that describe the photo well. For example, "Rhiannon playing piano in bedroom" or "cherry blossoms on afternoon walk." First I used Photoshop Elements Organizer, and since 2011 I've used Lightroom. So now I just open up my files and search for a term and get all the photos that have that term in their caption or filename. For example, if I search for "piano" or "blossom" those photos I mentioned would appear. It's not perfect but has worked very well for me.

Note: For best results, this needs to be saved to the metadata of the photo so if you switch to a different kind of computer it will still be attached to the photo. I don't do this in my iMac Finder or Apple Photos because the data wouldn't be readable if I switched to a PC (and Apple Photos doesn't save it to the metadata). But PSE and Lightroom saves it to the metadata. The photos I captioned in PSE prior to switching to LR, that was using a PC (I switched to Apple in 2011). I think there are other programs, like ACDSee that allow you to caption and keyword too, but you can only organize within those programs. It's not usable outside the program, so if you want to search your files or switch programs all that prior work is rendered useless. I hope I explained that well.

 

My system is a lot like yours. All downloaded photos are in the Canon Downloads folder. Each folder is year-mo-da. I keep 2 years of photos in that folder. After that I move them to another directory (Images 3). There is a folder for each year and within that folder are folders for each month (i.e. 200501 Jan for January 2005 so it sorts correctly by month). Each daily folder is then put into its correct month folder in its year. So I have folders for 2004 on which is when I got my first Canon camera.

My Images 2 folder is where all the old photos that have been scanned are stored. Most are stored by year/event i.e. 1999 Bateman Wrestling (a wrestling tournament for a cousin's son). There very few folders after 2004 in there since they are the digital photos however there are a few where I have obtained the photos from someone else. I also have a couple of folders for various family branches with the largest one having the photos in folders by year/event.

My Images 1 folder was started back in the 90's and is where all photos were dumped. I have miscellaneous types of photos in there as well, really things that aren't events. For example, a folder with images of all the different apartments I lived in. When I copied Martha's digital cards, I put them in there. So it is just a mishmash of stuff that I have but don't necessarily use often.

I actually worked on more organization after scanning all the negatives in 2020. I'm pretty happy with it now and I can usually find things quickly.

 

I upload my photos to Google Photos so the photos can be tagged with a person's name & the software itself is relatively good about being able to find photos if I search by theme. This is where I look if I'm looking for specific photos but don't remember when they were taken.

My photos are stored on my EHD chronologically. They are not tagged or anything else -- just sorted into folders by year and month.

 

I use Lightroom. My folders are topic-based because Lightroom will automatically sort all photos by date and let me filter them by date across folders. My top level folders are School, Vacation, Events, Holidays, Hobbies, Nature, Animals, etc. with sub-folders for further breakdown, ie. Christmas, Valentines, or Orlando, Beach, Weddings, Birthdays (further sub-divided by person), etc. I also do facial recognition tags, which helps. I have very few key words because the topic, date, and people info is usually enough for me to find things.

And yes, it would take a long time to sort things out if I had started with folders based on dates. However, I used a different photo storage software prior to this for many, many years and it sorted by topics. So I was able to dump by topic into Lightroom. I have 50,000+ photos in there.

 

I think the reason my system works for me is because I don't have continual things going on for kids since I have none. I also have no immediate family with lots of activities. The big events I do have are probably more recognizable because of the date they happened. The days of lots of events for me happened in the last century and were non digital photos so when I started digital, the Canon downloading system on year-mo-da worked best for me. I've kept it through 5 different Canon cameras.

Basically it comes down to figuring out what system works for you. BevG's system would absolutely not work for me, heck, I don't even tag my kits. Tried it. Didn't like it so it didn't work for me. She has stuck with a system she's been using for many years as have I. But whatever system is used, a person needs to stick with it otherwise, things could become very messy.

Organizing of any kind is very personal. Good luck figuring it out.

 

I'm anti-tagging. First, I hate the extra time it adds. Second, I once spent a few days tagging for ACDSee, moved the items, and lost all the tags. (Luckily that was while I was doing a free trial, not after I'd spent months tagging.) I'm sure there are ways to work around that, but instead I just went back to what had been working for me.

I have a folder for each year, and within that I have a folder for each week. (Before I started Project Life I had a folder for each month or major event [any event or day with 50+ photos would get its own folder, like a birthday or vacation], but with my current scrapping flow weeks works best.) I name photos with the info I might use while tagging. For example, "3-21 Ben's 15th Bday" for all the photos from my son's birthday this month. That way if I took some with my phone and some with my real camera, they'll all stay together.

When I first move photos from my device to my computer, I put them in a temporary monthly folder (March 2021) until I get around to sorting them. When I sort them I purge bad photos, make sure everything is named correctly, place them in the correct weekly folder, and then copy the best ones into my "To Be Scrapped" folder. Then the main weekly folder gets moved into its final home, which in this case would be my 2021 folder under Pictures.

 

I have a folder for each year that contains 12 folders (one for each month).

I absolutely love tagging because it's quick and easy. I don't tag every photo but instead one or two from events. This helps speed up the Search process. So DS's bday party photos from 2019 wouldn't ALL be tagged; I tag the bday cake pic (food; birthday; Cal; 2019; home), a nice pic of the kids playing outside (friends; Cal; birthday; 2019; outd [short for "outdoors"]; play; home; party), and maybe opening presents (Cal; 2019; birthday; party). A photo of the kids on Christmas morning 2020 would be tagged Gen; Cal; Christmas; 2020; morning; home; covid [no one had covid, but I tag photos with "covid" if our voluntary self-quarantine messes up how we normally do things].

I sometimes write in the metadata's comments section, which I think is similar to what Michele does. I only write if the story isn't fully in the picture. Like if I make a photo of a cranky kid: I write why they're cranky. If we're on vacation I'll write a comment about where we were, or info about the place if it's significant (either historically or simply to our family).

And I tag the *metadata* because I wanted to be able to search via tags no matter my hardware/software.

But enough about me lol. For you, it might be beneficial to take a moment and think about how you usually arrange your school work on your computer. Do you like to have one main folder for each year, or perhaps for each semester (or trimester, or however classes are arranged lol)? And then what about subfolders: do you have one for each class, or do you like to have all projects/classes mingled in the main folder, with no hierarchy?

Based on how you arrange your school work (or other digital files), maybe you can narrow down how to arrange your photos.

 

I was so focused on condensing my post (yup, that was the short version lol) that I forgot to say that I totally understand the "took them as they came" folder issue. I got my first digital camera in 2003. I would upload photos to my laptop and place them all in a folder titled Photos. I didn't tag. I didn't worry about folders of any type (by date, by year, by month, by event, by person, etc). My thinking was "how many photos can I have? This will be fine because I can SEE all the photos as I scroll."

Big mistake.

In 2009 I'd had enough. I started organizing by year. I thought it would be easy because I assumed all the dates on my photos were correct. I'd just go to View>Arrange and choose "By date." That's when I realized one camera was off on its date and one of my first cameras with a phone didn't even have associated dates in the metadata! *Grumble*

My point is, I feel your pain. Like you, there were times I swore I had a photo but couldn't find it. (And the fact you literally SAW them but then basically lost them again? The worst!) That's when I knew it was time to get organized. It took time, but I'd turn on a movie at night and just organize. I'd also text my mom to ask "when did we go to ___?" She is a huge photo fiend, so she'd check her photo albums to find info for me. And now I double-check my cameras' date/time. (Ohhh, in fact, I should see if Daylight Savings is On in my DSLR.)

 

@Tree City I got my first digi camera in 2002 but I was still using a film camera for most things. I do have some digi photos from back then (a whopping 640x480 size LOL) and I got them sorted into the year/month files probably around 2007-2008. I can tell going through my year folders when I started using my Canon A95 in 2004 (loved that camera) as my digi picture taking exploded! I was done with film by then. I loved the way Canon would download into the Camera Downloads folder and because that camera got set to download into daily folders, I ended up with that decent system that I continue to use today. First thing I do with a new camera is make sure the files use the same naming system as a previous camera and set up the software so it downloads the same way.

I did get upset once because a friend borrowed my camera card to download my photos (a scrapping retreat) and she wiped the card when she was done! I hadn't even downloaded the photos yet and I never wipe my card when I do. Cards are cheap and just another form of backup especially since I got a reader that would read all those old sizes. I don't remember how but she did get me my photos although they are not on the card. This was in 2007. I learned my lesson to never let someone else use my cards.

With Picasa when I'm scrolling through the folder window, I can see the number of files in each folder. Pretty much tells me when I've taken a lot of photos so I know something special happened month. For example it shows that I took 686 photos in May of 2013 and 284 photos in June of 2013. So I know that something big happened in May. Yeah, I took a 2 week vacation that included 2 days in WDW! And, those 1000 photos in February of 2010... must have been the year of the cruise.

I don't take the huge amount of photos that someone with kids/events does so what I do works for me

 

Thanks for the reminder!
And something weird . . . when I went into the settings to change the time on my DSLR it was not just an hour off, it was another half hour off. It's 11 years old and the batteries I have are old too. I wonder if the clock can begin to fail for those reasons.

 

Only 1 of my 3 cameras was not set for DST but all 3 of them had the wrong minutes. One was off 20, one was off 10 and one was off 5. All are fixed now though!

 

My photos are in monthly folders inside of yearly folders.

And I keep an inventory in a spreadsheet. Which sounds like a lot of extra work but actually saves me a LOT of time. There's a sheet within the spreadsheet for each year, and I list the dates in a column (actually two because I "flag" the start of each month in a separate column to the left) and then in the next column I write a brief description of whatever I have photos of. (It took me a while to set this up initially because I had something like 15 years' of pictures, but it only takes a few minutes to add entries every month or two.)

So I might have 50 pictures of our 4th of July celebration, but I'd just have one row that says 2017-07-04 4th of July.

Then I can use the "find" feature in my spreadsheet program to search for something instead of having to click around through a zillion folders.

 

I'm "simple" but I have all of my photos automatically backed up to Google Photos and Flickr. Flickr isn't free anymore (for less than 1,000 pictures) so I went PRO a few years ago. I love that all of my pictures - even on my phone - back up to there. I pay a minimal charge for Google Photos, too. It's just more peace of mind to know that if my computer crashes, my pictures are still there. i have 31,000+ pictures on Flickr. I've been on there since 2008.