I know there is a thread about "kit" organization but now I want to know about photo organization. I am terrible and can never find the photo that I want to use when I see a kit that I must have. Show me how you guys do it!!!!!!!!
Sigh.... I need help here, too. I keep my photos by year, and by month, so as long as I know WHEN something happened, I can find it. But there are a lot of times I think something happened in a different month than it did. Or something happened towards the tail end of the month and into the next, and the photo I want is in the other month than the one I am currently in. I don't have any tags on my photos yet, but thought that might be an option... but who wants to tag 300GB/10+ years of photos? Not me....
I use 2 tools. Since I used to be one of those Creative Memories consultants, I used their photo organizer & editor tool. I still do, however, it is now Forever's Historian. It creates a database of the photos and allows you to organize by multiple ways. You can create categories (folders) and tags (keywords) for whatever you want and nested as deep as you want. It also sorts automatically by date. You can also do facial recognition and tag by person. Each photo is only in there once, but it can have as many categories & tags as you want. I keep my jpg files in there. I use Lightroom for my raw photos. Lightroom can pretty much do the same thing - store your photos by date (year/month), then create collections and keywords. Lightroom can also do facial recognition now too. I have not used these features in Lightroom as when I am done editing, I export the jpg and save it in my other system. Cheryl (@gonewiththewind) did a video series on this topic this summer. I could not find the links but someone else might post them? So what kind of organization might you do? One of my categories in Events, with sub-categories like Christmas, Halloween, State Fair, etc. So when I have all dates selected, I can click on Christmas and see all the Christmas pictures across years. If I want I can narrow the date range or narrow it by a person tag. I also have Nature, then flowers, trees, animals, plants, parks, etc. I have school years, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts (with sub categories like Cookies, camping, meetings). Then of course, Vacations, with sub-categories by place. I have pet categories, weather categories, sunrise, sunset. You get the idea - really how ever you want to find things.
p.s. When I got Lightroom, I briefly thought of moving everything over to it, but I did not want to re-do all the work of tagging and organizing 45,000 photos. If you are just starting out, Lightroom is very good too.
Almost right away after I got my first digital camera I figured that renaming my files consistently would be important for scrapbooking so I've always renamed my photo files as I'm uploading them in the format YYYY MM DD custom filename. I've done it with different programs over these many years. Then I organize my photo file structure like this: Year>Month>Day. Yes, every day I take pictures (which is every day this year - Yay Project 365!) I have a folder for that day. So if I remember approximately when something was, it's pretty easy to find those folders. But what REALLY helps is that I use photo software that lets me caption photos AND embeds that caption in the photo metadata so it stays with the picture even when I move on to other programs or upload it to Backblaze and Smugmug. First it was Photoshop Elements Organizer. Then in 2011 I switched to Lightroom. Captioning my photos is such an important part of my photo processing routine because later when I want to scrap something specific, I can do a search (even in Finder; I don't have to even open Lightroom) for whatever it is, and I get lots of results. It's not perfect. It depends on how thoroughly I've captioned my photo. But it works really well.
I am the world's laziest photo organizer- I let Lightroom do almost all of the work for me. I have Smart Collections set up for each week, which really helps with Project Life but has also become my main organization. After setting up the date ranges in each Smart Collection, all I have to do it import photos and they are automatically sorted into the week they go into. That's it. I don't tag (at all). I don't really have any other folders (I used to, but I don't keep up with them any more) since I can pretty much find what I need just by date. For instance, if I need pumpkin photos? Those will be somewhere in the October collections. It may not work for everyone, but it definitely works for me!
@rdjrneace Had an entire series about photo and supply organization with Lightroom in the summer as part of TLP's Summer School 2016 . . . that forum is closed, so that's why y'all are having trouble finding the links to the videos. I added them into the Learning Pad and stickied them to the top so you can find them easily! Lightroom: From Workflow to WOW Videos
SO while I totally agree that Lightroom is the bomb dot com- I don't utilize it like I should. I keep my photos in folders by Year, then Month & then a "scrapped" folder inside that. As far as searching for something- I LOVE google Photos! You just upload the last few years & then you can search by person, location or sometimes even an object. I think I searched my google photos the other day for "games" when I needed a photo to do a family game night layout! I don't use google photo as a source of backups- so I only chose to have the small file size which allows for unlimited storage. I already have my pics on an EHD & then backed up through Crashplan, so that doesn't concern me. BUT I love it for finding a topic or a specific photo I have in mind then know which folder to hunt it down in!
It's been my project the last yearish. And here's how it works for me: I've tagged every photo this year with the person. If it's an event, I add that too. Sometimes I add another tag like electronics (Kindle, TV, computer, video games, they all fall into this) . Then, at the beginning of the year {not so much in the summer} I also went to my earliest photos in my collection which happen to be my first digital ones. I tagged them. I did this by setting a timer for 15 minutes. Sometimes when I was done the 15 minutes, I would do another 15. The result is every digital photo from 2001-2009, and 2016 has at least the who. Most I've added another general keyword - water is pretty encompassing and gives me a spot to look for water for photos. Starting at the smallest folders gave me a huge boost to keep going. And now that we are settled, I'm going to get back in the 15 minutes in LR habit. The why for me: all my photo folders are year only. I don't do months or days because I don't remember which day it was and I hated having vacations in two month folders. When I think of a story, I think of the person involved. When I need to narrow it down more, I use the additional keywords. I also love telling then and now. And I loved being able to quickly pull photos for DH and I over the years for a layout, or photos of relationships for my kid. {sadly, those are the not as tagged ones yet}. As I tag, I also mark photos 3 stars that I know I want to scrap. So, when I sit down and don't know what to scrap, I can tell Lightroom to just show me 3 star photos, and off I go. Most of my extra keywords are for the purpose of CT and finding photos for a specific kit type.
Me? I'm pretty much like @scrappyjedi though I do batch tag things with country and then also state and sometimes city. People I don't tag since the # of people in my photos is pretty limited. I also rely on iCal to check when something happened and/or our Quicken files! Don't laugh...I can get dh to check Quicken by location or general date when I want to know ...where was that restaurant that...yada yada. Plus he enjoys the hunt! The only photos I'm really trying to tag in a better way are the scans of old photos...gah. They aren't in LR yet because I am still thinking through folders by country, my name to designate time frame...i.e. maiden name, name during first marriage and afterwards, and name since 2nd marriage. Now that I say that I realize I have sorely neglected scrapping these. Most all my scrapping outside of PL is now of recent photos of my grandchildren often snatched from Facebook.
@bestcee Yes, we can do anything for 15minutes. Often I still amaze myself how little time some things do take. When I'm avoiding something the time requirement always seems HUGE. Bit by bit, bit by bit...things can get done.
I wouldn't laugh at all. I use my Google Map history to do this! I love it. I've also been known to check our bank transactions for little details. Oh, tricky. I can tell you, one of my brother's had a name change when he was adopted. I've chosen to scrap with his pages as each name in the correct timeframe. I'm also adding a page with the adoption about the name change. I'm tagging all his photos as his current name though, so I'm not looking through multiple tags for photos. I have also done the same with my high school friend - through her maiden name, 1st married name, and current married name. I figure that was her name, so I use it. Tagging? I use her current name that she uses.
Ugh my photos are only organised into Yearly folders, dated and sometimes I will keep big events in a separate sub-folder if I think of it. I don't have any system of finding the RIGHT photo for a page .... I just scroll through them all looking! No help at all I'm afraid!
There was a website I ran across http://www.saveyourphotos.org/ They had 30 days of tips. I think if you "take the pledge" they send them day by day in email. They also have a blog.
No tools used here.. when my son was born I just took to saving month by month originally in separate folders but when he turned 1 I went to yearly - so we are up to 7 now, then for christmas and birthdays I have separate individual folders for each yeah... and all are saved on disk also just in case, would really be devastated if I lost my photos!
I do folders by year, then month, then if there's enough picture of one thing or event, that gets it's own folder in the proper month with description and date. All the misc photos just go in that month. VERY simple and it's worked for me for forever!