How to Organize Your Digital Photos

03/17/2014

GUEST BLOG:
By Jeremy Martel of JM Photography
Introduction

This is the structure we use to organize all our personal photos and this can be duplicated on a Mac or a PC. From this structure we view our photos using either Preview, iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom but this structure serves as the core of all our images.
The Structure
The library structure that that we use is made up of 4 different levels, the root folder, the year folders, the event folders and the photo files themselves.

The Process
Select the Location

Your first step is to select the location on your hard drive where you want to store all your pictures. The most common place on a Mac would be your Pictures folder and on Windows 7 it would be in the my pictures folder.
Create the Root Folder
In your pictures folder create a new folder called Digital Library. If you would like to tag any of your folders with a colour right click and select the tag colour from the contextual menu.

Create the Year Folder
In your Digital Library folder create a folder for the year your photos were taken in.
Create the Event Folder. In your Year folder create a folder for the day your photos were taken on. Formatted YYYY-MM-DD Description.
Upload your Photos to your Event Folder
Upload your photos from your camera card to the event folder you created and delete any unwanted or damaged photos (photos that are blurry, or incorrectly exposed) as they will only take up extra space on your computer and add distraction when you are viewing your photos.

Multi Day Vacation
For example if you went away on a 5 day vacation to Hawaii, then create an event folder for each day that we were in Hawaii. For simplicity we labeled them day 1, 2, 3 and so on, however you can add further description if you would like to.

Complex Single Day Event
A complex single day event is an event that has multiple activities or locations in which you could be taking hundreds or even thousands of pictures through out the day like at a graduation or at a wedding. In these situations we add sub folders to the 3rd level in our structure. From the event folder we further break it down into sub events. For example at a graduation, you would have groups of photos from when they are getting ready, from the ceremony and from the reception at the end of the day. To ensure the sub event folders order themselves chronologically we append them with a number.

Cheers
Jeremy & Jennifer
For more information on JM Photography you can go to their website at:
http://www.jmphotos.ca/