Photo Organization

If I was in the same situation, I would start with the current pictures and work my way backwards. I create folders by events or activities and label them first with the date (yyyymmdd) followed by a dash and then the person who it is for and a short phrase to remember the event or activity. So for example, I would have 20220220-xyzBirthday as the folder name, and then underneath it I would have all the photos from that birthday celebration. Or another example, 20220118-abcBasketball. The nice thing is the folders sort easily by date just by sorting by name.

 

I have my photos set up by Year>Month.. if there is something special I put a folder in that month folder ie: Zoo and then the zoo photos from that visit... When I scanned slides, I did it by segments and have a folder for that.. Scanned Slides>MomNDad (for example) .. under my name ScannedSlides>Christa>1960s I split it via decades s I knew about how old I was at the time of the photos... I did that for both sides of family, my brother, my nephew and then anything I have prior to actually filing them on a current basis ie all my photos prior to 2002 which are various I put in a folder that way.

It works for me!

 

Let me show you my folders, and then I'll explain:

The years 2001-2022 were set up because that's when I got my first digital camera photos. These are my main photo folders, and the easy to organize ones.

Camera Uploads & Canon: Old DSLR photo folders from my old laptop. I haven't taken the time to make sure that those photos are in my folders above. I'm pretty sure they are, just need to verify. (I'm adding that to my organize list). Once upon a time, I let the Canon program move photos and it named by date 2011_02_04_4273 now I let everything name by image, I prefer that naming scheme. Also, these are folders that are YYMMDD with a folder for each day. I hate that.

FF Photos are Friends and Family photos. Photos that other people have given me, not of other people. This is where I dumped the photos my sister had when she reformatted her laptop and emptied her Dropbox (Side note, she was trying to find them last week, glad I have them!). My Brother's Norway trip (he used my camera, so I ended up with a copy of his photos), Grandma's recipe book that was scanned. Those random things people give you and you aren't sure how to file them. I have lots of hard drive space, I'm willing to buy more, and I backup in multiple places so I end up being the family archivist in a way.

Life as we live it - old blog photos and posts.
Matthew's camera - Munchkin's photos. The quality is not always the best, so I put them in one spot. Plus, I only want so many copies of video game screens, eyes as the main photo, and weird angles of my butt.

The next bunch are all scanned items. Since the scanner doesn't use the real date, the scanned ones go here. As I take time, I go through these photos in Lightroom and organize them. I add any year that I know, even if it's a year range like 1990-1995. And any key words or description in the metadata. Since they are a disorganized mess, I don't like them in my regular year photos.

For my Dropbox photos, I set Lightroom to move them from my Dropbox folder to my photos, so inside the years since 2017 it looks like this: (I reset my camera every year to start at 0001 again so my photos are all in order by number. (side note: I've been using the RAW+JPEG setting on my camera, that's why it looks like every photo has a duplicate. And the XMP is Lightroom keywording the photos).

For 2014, I have a B folder because I took more than 9999 photos. I know, it's a lot! But I was working on learning how to use my DSLR better, and we had a summer vacation with my family, and 4 is a really fun age to photograph.
For 2016, I have a B folder because I got a new DSLR in April. So, the new DSLR photos are in the second folder.

I'm working on organizing my scanned photos into family's (Mine or Nick's). So, I have a folder for each last name (Smith and Jones). And I drag and drop from the scanned folder into the last name folder. That way, I'm emptying out the scanned folder, and organizing a little. I don't know if I'll break scanned photos down by years, or just keep my tagging process in Lightroom. (These folders aren't in Lightroom right now.)
Just beware! If you add photos to Lightroom - only move them inside Lightroom. Otherwise, Lightroom will get confused and it's a big mess. I organized my basic structure before I brought them into Lightroom.

 

@bestcee yours looks like my EHD for photos

 

Are your EHD and computer different? Mine are the same organization structure.

 

I only store on my EHD. I do not store anything on my laptop/computer.

 

I have a folder called Digi Scrapping that resides on my C drive and several EHD have backups of it. I don't store any of my digi scrapping stuff in the Documents folder or Dropbox.

The folders within Digi Scrapping are:
Canon Downloads
Digital Layouts (you can guess what's in here)
DSKMU (acronym for Digi Scrapping Kits Most Used and has folders for stores and my retired designers folder that I still use kits from)
Fonts (I lost fonts many years ago when a computer died so I now keep a copy of all my fonts that is not in the Windows folder)
Images 1
Images 2
Images 3

Canon Downloads is self-explanatory. I only use my Canon cameras to take photos and every time I get a new one I set it up to transfer photos in the same format that I used with my first Canon camera. I use the format of each day having its own folder, i.e. 2022_02_22 and all images from that day are in that folder. I keep about 2 years of photos in this folder. Then they get transferred to "Images 3".

Images 3 has a folder for every year starting in 2000. I got my first Canon in 2005 but was getting photos on disk when developing film starting in 2000. So those photos are in the 2000 to 2005 folders. Each yearly folder has a folder for the month and all daily folders from the downloads folder is moved to the applicable year/month folder. I title the folders as "201901Jan" so they sort Jan to Dec.

Images 1 is sort of a catch all folder. I have folders for various scrapping retreats I attended and photos were shared among the attendees. A couple folders are photos that Martha shared with me by letting me download from her camera card. A lot of the other folders are just for miscellaneous photos that really aren't event specific and may have been shared by other people.

Images 2 is the main folder (besides the download folder) that I use. As I scanned photos that thankfully had been sorted by year/event into envelopes many years ago, I made a folder for the photos. I use the "year event" for the title. For example, the first folder is titled 1965 Gatlinburg and is photos from a vacation taken in 1965 to Gatlinburg Tennessee. The bulk of the photos in this folder are from before 2005. There are a few folders more recent that have photos in them shared by others. I also have some non dated folders that are for specific people or groups of people. When I spent the time to scan a bunch of negatives I had, I dumped them all into a scanning folder to sort later. I have a folder for me, another one for Dad and another one for Mom/Dad/me. The folder for me has various photos of me and a sub-folder of all the photos that I scanned from the albums Mom did of my childhood. I started the one for Dad so that I had a bunch of photos that could be used for a slide show at his funeral visitation. I set it up in March os 2016 not expecting that I would need it just 3 months later. Actually made that part of funeral planning go smoothly. The Mom/Dad/me folder has all photos of just the 3 of us from 1955 to 1996.

I have at times refined the Images 2 folder. At one time I had all U of Miami football photos in one folder. Because I had the actual photos already scrapped traditionally, I could go through and sort those photos by year and game attended.

Thankfully, Mom was very organized with photos by putting photos in envelopes with the date on them. So for many I at least have a year for the older photos. For some negative scans I have had to guess on the year but since they are 30 to 40 years old being off by a year or 2 doesn't really matter. LOL

Also, if I do take photos with my phone I either send it to dropbox or lately have been emailing it to myself. I then put those photos in the Canon Downloads folder for that date. All phone photos have the date in their name so that helps.

I have been using and refining this system for 15 years and find that it works for me. Probably won't work for most people though. I found that I really like having all my digi scrapping stuff and photos in the same main folder on my C drive so I don't have to go looking in multiple places when moving things to a new computer.

 

I totally get this and understand!

The thing about Lightroom (and Bridge) is it reads your folders right where they are (just like AcdSee). So, I did the same as you. I organized my folders first and then brought them into Lightroom. I still have a few folders above that aren't in Lightroom's catalog because I want to go through them first. You can import as many or as few folders as you want at a time. So, if you got 2019-2021 all sorted out, you could import them to play around with Lightroom/Bridge and see if you like it.

Sidenote: I would totally recommend playing with Bridge and Lightroom with just a few folders at first to see which one you like before you commit to one. And a few folders makes it less imposing.