Get Your Files Organized - April Letter from the President

Thank you all for your kind words about my article last month "An Ounce of Prevention" about backing up your precious image files so a hard drive failure won't mean losing all of your images.  In the process of discussing this topic with many people I discovered that not a lot of people have a file organization plan, but have somewhat randomly put files in directories/folders and consequently have a very hard time finding groups of images let alone specific images.  This month I would like to share my methodology of organizing my image files on my computers file system which of course is replicated on an external hard drive.

I generally organize my files by year, month, day and subject in a hierarchical folder structure. Usually the way I shoot images matches up with this methodology, but on the occasions it doesn't work I have  some techniques to reorganize the images to fit this model, usually be creating some additional folders.

First at the beginning of every year I create a new high level folder for the year:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I create folders for the month as a subfolder of the year.  At the end of the year there will be 12 subfolders, one for each month.  Then within each of the months, all the different subjects or shoots are separated into separate subfolders.  So for the month of March, here's what my folder structure looks like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the picture above only the March folder is expanded, there are lots of subdirectories under January (01) and February (02), but they are collapsed.  Since the file system uses string sorting of the names of the folders I specifically use ("01", "02", "03", etc.).  This way the months will sort chronologically.  If you use the name of the month, they will sort alphabetically (April, August, etc.) and if you don't use the leading zero your months will sort incorrect in some file systems (not all).

Now within a specific shoot, further divide the directories.  I have a sub directory for my Photoshop files (call PSD) and one for my JPEGs call JPEG and I leave my RAW files in the top directory  (Example 03_09_2008 - US Botanical Gardens).

I use the following format in naming my folders with individual locations or subjects, they are named using the format of (MM_DD_YYY - Shoot Location or Name).  This naming convention again supports chronological order of my images inside the month folder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two major advantages to organizing your files with this technique.  I can search for images by location using the search dialog and I can browse chronologically for images. 

Searching for images that I shot at the US Botanical Gardens can be found by searching for "*Botanical*."  * is the wildcard symbol for searching in Windows/DOS based operating systems.  If you add the dot "." at the end it will find directories or folders only and not files.  If I'm browsing chronologically I can find shots I took last fall at the Balloon festival by looking in the September (09) and October (10) subfolders in 2007. If you are comfortable navigating in the Windows command prompt, navigate to the root of you image files and type the word "tree" and you'll get a tree depiction of your directories which may help you find directories if you don't know exactly when you took the images you are looking for.  Here's the output of the "tree" command:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how you will organize your files.  Remember there is no right way or wrong way to do this.  The best way is a way that works for you.  There are more advanced techniques such as using keywords through Photoshop, Lightroom or another program.  This technique takes considerably more effort, but if you have huge libraries of images this may be an appropriate technique for you.

Scott Musson