Organising photo folders - Help!

[Gundus]

Hi,

I'm an analogue shooter, but need some advice in organizing my structure of photo folders after the scan!
How guy's do it? By year? Subject? Month? sub-folders....

Thank you in advance

 

[ctscanner]

Gundus,

Here's how I approach it.

Firstly: everything ties back to the identification of the roll of exposed film, which is normally the Year that the roll was shot, and the sequence number of the exposed roll. For example: the first roll of film that I shot in 2012 would be identified as 2012_01. To that information I would normally add additional information such as Film Type, a brief description of what was on the roll, scanner model and data relating to settings. When I am ready to edit it (if I edit it) I would add additional descriptive terminology such as "Mastercopy_wEditIP" That folder, or image file; would be linked to a Directory that I would also create that would contain all of the scanned rolls for that year.

Above is the basic approach. What I also do is seperate out image-files that I want to apply additional editing too. Once I have adjusted these I would then note that in the file description - something like "CTUS" in my world stands for "Clean, Touch-up and Sharpen". I also seperate out in unique files anything that I have uploaded to On-Line Site such as DPUG.

The Key to all this is to be able to find the image, or images that you want to look at or work on.

Good Luck,

George

 

[StoneNYC]

First if all I use Adobe Lightroom 4 (soon to be 5) which is great for someone like me who doesn't do well with photoshop because its too complicated.

I would however organize my files like this even if I didn't use Lightroom, but within the Lightroom folder, I make a folder every year, then within that year a dated folder for each shoot... here you might remember DOS? It would look like this...

Lightroom/2013/2013_06_11 images of my APUG friends/Images

If I shot more than one film it would be...

Lightroom/2013/2013_06_11 images of my APUG friends/PanF/images
Lightroom/2013/2013_06_11 images of my APUG friends/TriX/images
Lightroom/2013/2013_06_11 images of my APUG friends/Ektachrome/images

The images themselves are labeled by film type, developer, and scan resolution.

So example...

PanF-HC110B-2400.tiff

That would be one example, if I made adjustments it might look like this...

PanFat25-HC110Bpush1s-2400.tiff because I shot at EI25 and pushed it 1 stop.

Within Lightroom you can make adjustments to the images but they are "soft" adjustments because the original file is not touched, only upon export do you get a NEW file (usually in JPG) but the original file is contained so if you decide someday you want to make new changes or go back to the original you have that option. It's a great program.

Hope some of that was helpful.



~Stone | Sent w/ iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Doyle Thomas]

I add my recommdation for Lightroom, the cataloging features are great for organizing. You can setup your files by date then use various flags, keywords, and smart collections to find what you want.

 

[Gundus]

Thank you guy's

 

[StoneNYC]

Thank you guy's

Welcome. PS are you on APUG?


~Stone | Sent w/ iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Gundus]

Yes StoneNYC, i'm on APUG also

 

[Joe Lipka]

While you are busy organizing your scanned negatives, please do not ignore the most important aspect of organized data files - backing up the files you have created, worked on and finalized.

Backing up files is really, really important. Five or six years after you do all this work, some one will ask you to reproduce the work you did. If you can't find it, what good is it?

Hard drives will fail. Make sure your hard work is preserved and protected properly.