I found a system to organizing my photos that has made all the difference. I have 572 pictures a week to organize. Okay maybe not that much. But maybe sometimes that much. Here's what works for me, it may work for you too, it may not, or you may be able to implement pieces of it, you decide!
This is how I organize my personal photos. I have a different folder for my TLP photos. (It's literally called TLP and has the name of the shoot as the folder than a folder for JPG's that I export, pretty simple because I can always find those pictures by family or business name).
Some housekeeping before I dive into the organizing:
Okay so I store everything on an external hard drive that is constantly plugged into my computer (because Macs have no storage and it's a safer option in case of a crash).
Every few months I move the photos from those past few months onto another external hard drive, I plug that hard drive and store it in a fireproof safe. I still keep the photos on my hard drive that is plugged in for a year or 2 for easy access and I haven't needed the space. So now they are on 2 drives and one of those is kept safe in a literal safe.
There's so many other ways you can keep your photos safe, cloud storage, all that jazz that you decide what is best for you for permanent storage.
Every year I create a folder on my external hard drive that is named after that year, "2021" "2020" etc.
I then open that folder and create 12 more folders, one for every month, "1 January" "2 February" "3 March" etc.
When I import my photos I save them in the folder of the month they were taken. I then create a subfolder with a name that describes what the photos are from. For example if I'm saving Easter photos I would open up the '4 April' folder and then create a subfolder called "Easter" and save them there.
For photos that I take of my boys just around the house I create a folder called "At Home". Almost every month folder I have has a "At Home" subfolder.
It's great to be really descriptive in these folders named so that when you're searching in the future you know exactly what is in each folder. Usually I am able to ballpark around what month the picture I'm looking for was taken and within a few clicks I can find it. Another option is to use the find or search bar in the external hard drive folder and if you remember what the folder is titled you can search for that.
I choose to store my RAW images and my edited JPG images. If you're not taking RAW images on a DSLR then this wouldn't apply to you.
I keep the RAW images in their designated folder as discussed above. I then create another subfolder that I title "_1JPG" that I export the edited JPG images to. I include the underscore and the 1 simply so that always shows up at the beginning of the folder when I sort the files by name.
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