What filing system do you use for storing digital photos?
My current system is basically date-based (so I’d have a subdirectory called something like “2007-08-21 Photos of my arse”) which makes it quite easy to find what I’m looking for. However, I then keep photos of Bernard in a separate subdirectory entirely, with a subdirectory in there for each month (so that I don’t end up with an unbearable number of files in one directory). The exception to this is where I have a bunch of photos from a holiday or something, where it makes more sense (to me) to keep the photos of Bernard and the rest of the holiday photos together.
Anyway, I’ve been wondering if this is really a smart solution. So tell me all about your system.
9 replies on “Filing digital photos”
Basically identical, except mine is “20070821 Photos of my arse” and I don’t have a Bernard directory.
Mine is along the lines of “Stuff from camera” “more stuff from camera” “Photos to sort out” “Place we went to last year” “Another place we went to last year” “Photos of hatchling” “Copies of photos of hathcling in different sizes possibly” “Photos of hatchling that may or may not be duplicates of photos in other two folders” “Graphics project I was working on two years ago” “Random stuff I nicked from the interweb”
My filing system rules. You should totally check out the shoe boxes full of print photos from Ye Olde Tyme Afore Dygytal Wood Carvynge.
Mine is not even that good. It’s 119 – Rugby and Liverpool Trip
Where 119 is 118 + 1 and 118 is Birthday drinks and bbq
I need to improve it. I’m thinking of iPhoto or Aperture.
I create a folder for each month (“2007 09”) and then when I retrieve photos from my camera the Fuji photo-managing software creates a new folder for that day (“2007_0922”) and stores them all there. Within *that* I typically create a folder called “Flickr” into which go selected photos after I’ve fiddled about with the colours and contrast. And then all the folders and subfolders get thumbnails on the front to show what’s inside (http://flickr.com/photos/bentbacktulips/1424585718/).
All this is clearly an elaborate ruse to fool the world into believing I’m an organised person.
Sounds like I’m already pretty much optimal.
For those who are interested, I plug my camera in and then run the following script:
#!/bin/bash
mkdir /mnt/x/pete/photos/`date ‘+20%y-%m-%d’`
mv /media/sda1/dcim/100ncd40/*.* /mnt/x/pete/photos/`date ‘+20%y-%m-%d’`
umount /media/sda1
This is my photo-managing software, basically.
haha. yours is already the best, Pete. Quelle surprise.
Porn/
Not-porn/
Not at all organised and I’m also currently scared of a hard drive death eating all the photos.
Simply organised by camera/date photos copied to computer/date of photo.jpg
which is less than perfect when my son comes home from school asking to take in some baby photos. Whilst I remember the rough date, that doesn’t actually match the month (or even year!) when I got round to uploading then to the computer. So make a Bernard Baby Photo folder now for that essential school project in 5 years time 🙂
I’m permanently worried about hard drive death too, but that’s another blog post. I basically do a backup to CD-R each time I have 700MB of unbackedup photos.
I tend to upload photos to the computer on the day that I take them, so that’s one less thing to worry about.