Should You Organize Your Photos
Creating a photo filing system to organize my photos was one of the best things I ever did when I started my freelance career. It makes finding photos easy and keeps me from wondering, ‘Where and when did I take that?” Creating a photo filing system to organize you photos will bring you a host of benefits.
In most of my communications in this newsletter, I usual address the spiritual side of photography, but many readers tell me that want to learn more of the practical side of photography as well. One thing people ask me, is how can they better organize all of the countless photos they have taken? It seems many people have “piles” of photos they have taken which get lost in some sort of digital black hole.
Where Did that Photo Go?
Most amateur photographers have lots of precious photos stored in unorganized, random folders on their computer’s hard drive. Some people even store their photos on their SD cards or phones. Not having an organized photo filing system can become very chaotic over time, and leave you with no quick and easy way to find your photos. And I definitely do not recommend storing your photos on your phone or SD cards. That is a recipe for disaster I’ll address in a later post.
We all find it easy to locate for a great photo we took six months or a year ago, but time flies. In 5 to 10 years you’ll be wondering where that original file of that awesome photo went. Not having a way to organize your photos can make it difficult to find favorite photos you shot years ago. Creating an efficient system to organize your photos will help you access and find photos easily, no matter when you shot them.
Professional use various categories in creating a system to organize their photos. I recommend that you use five to seven of these categories to file and store your images. If you use too many, your filing system may get overly complicated. You can create a filling system using:
- Year
- Month
- Day
- Place
- Sub folders for larger shoots
- Subject
- Occasion
- By rating
- By Device/camera
- By Camera settings
- By type (landscape, wildlife, macro, cityscape, etc)
- Image number
- By client
Use a number of these categories to put together a filing system that works for you. In my nature photography I utilize about six or seven of these categories.
How I Organize My Photos
This recent photo I took in the Great Sand Dunes National Park is filed this way in my file system, “2407-GSD-02-07.” The “2407” represents July 2024. Next, I give all my photos a three letter code for the place. “GSD” stands for Great Sand Dunes National Park. Other codes I use include
- GNP-Glacier National Park
- RMP-Rocky Mountain National Park
- SNY-the Snowy Mountain Range Wyoming
- SBL-San Isabel National Forest
- FTF-Fontenelle Forest (one of my favorite local places)
- You can make you own codes for you own places
The “-02” is the folder number. I try to keep less then 80 images in a folder. If I have lots of images, I make sub-folders based on the day, time of day, particular spot within a park or natural area, subject and in other ways that I can break the shoot down into manageable folders.
Finally, the “-07” is the image number based on its rating. If I have 50 images in a folder, the best one is number 1 and my least favorite is number 50. So photos with the image numbers 1-10, are generally my favorite photos in a folder at the time I edit them.
I do add additional information to the folder name, such as subject. This photo happens to be in a folder titled “2407-GSD-02 Sunrise day 2” From the Great Sand Dunes I also have a folder titled “2407-GSD-01 Day iPhone.” Yes, I do use my phone for convenience sake to take quick photos. Today’s phones do take quality photos, but I still keep them in separate folders from my professional camera images.
God rules the world through order and not chaos. We can see His order when we look at the natural world and the laws of science. He created us with brains that like order. Order helps us keep track of things, find them when they are lost, de-clutters our brain, gives us peace, helps make sense of the world and so much more. Storing your photos in an organized manner will give you a sense of peace knowing that when want a photo, you can find it.
