I bought my first digital SLR camera in April of 2007, started using the raw file format shortly thereafter, and quickly discovered how essential an organized workflow is for keeping your sanity from being consumed by a massive quantity of digital photos. Digital photos are easy to take, and even easier to lose — today’s favorite shots can be forgotten tomorrow if they aren’t organized properly, or lost forever if you neglect to back them up.
Getting Photos onto the Computer
Forget plugging the camera into the computer — I use a Sony 17-in-1 card reader
Organizing Photos on the Computer
Both RAW files and my finished JPEG files are organized in folders based on the date the photos were taken. Here is what my “Pictures” folder looks like:
As you can see, I have first split everything up into either Photos (finished jpegs) or RAW. The contents of both the “Photos” and “RAW” directories are identical. There is a folder for each year, and within each year there are folders for each day’s photos. Day folders are named based on the pattern “YYYY-MM-DD Short Description”. The image files that are kept in each day’s folder are also named according to a similar pattern, for example 20080709-keyword-001.jpg.
Search, Don’t Sort
Aside from keeping everything organized in dated folders, I use IPTC meta data to describe each photo. After I import a batch of image files, I use Adobe Bridge to add keywords, titles, and sometimes descriptions to each image file. I do this mostly in bulk — highlight every image in a folder, open the XMP meta data input screen (File → File Info… or Shift+Alt+Cmd+i on my Mac), and type in my keywords. Why waste time putzing back and forth in a sea of files and folders looking for a specific photo a year from now, when I can just search for a keyword?
Backup Everything
Imagine how you would feel if your hard drive crashed, and you lost 30,000 digital photos. Vacations, parties, birthdays, friends, and family… gone forever. My hard drive would probably learn to fly real soon… maybe even a monitor, too. I use both on-site and off-site backups to ensure my files are never lost.
On-site backup is when you replicate your data to another storage medium in the same physical location as the primary storage device (your computer). In my case, I clone my entire hard drive to an external drive nightly. In case of a crash, I can boot from the external drive and restore everything in minutes. When my hard drive crashes, the worst case scenario would be losing a day’s worth of photos (although I would still probably be able to get them back from my camera’s memory cards).
Off-site backup is when you make a copy of your data and keep it somewhere else. Why? Because replicating your data to an external hard drive that sits on your desk can save you from crashes, but not a fire, flood, or burglary. I routinely copy a few weeks’ worth of photos to DVD and send them elsewhere for safe-keeping. Eventually I will get around to buying another external hard drive for this task.
Hardware and Software
Finally, what hardware and software do I use to manage all these photos? My main computer is a Mac Pro with a 500 GB hard drive, which backs up to a 500 GB external Western Digital My Book hard drive
As far as software goes, I browse my photo library with Adobe Bridge, and edit with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. Nightly backups are done automatically with SuperDuper!.
Bridge is great for organizing and working with my photos, but just alright for casually browsing the library. For that, I am patiently waiting for the Mac version of Picasa to be released.
