Organize Your Photos

[LaurentMartin]

Most photo organization experts like ScanCafe etc. agree that the main steps to the process include:

• Gathering and consolidating
• Purging and more purging
• Sorting and labeling
• Digitizing where needed
• Creating, sharing, enjoying

 

[Billy Axeman]

I don't use exotic organizing software or a cloud service to minimize dependencies as much as possible. That will ensure the data is accessible in the long term.
No stringent purging either because disk space is abundant and judgment what is good or not changes in time.

 

[nmp]

Not related to Digital Negatives...

 

[dmr]

Backing up, backing up, and backing up some more!

I don't use any "organizing" software other than the file explorer. I do one folder/directory per month for each camera and the scanner. I do regular backups, plus once a year I get one of those portable drives and copy it all to that and keep that in a safe place away from home.

 

[slackercrurster]

I'm doing it now. I had 103,000 photos taken over the last 6 years that were piling up. Been going through them since late Dec 2018. What a mess. Am getting a feel for how to do it, but still very time consuming. From the rate I'm going I think it would take 1-1/2 years+ working on it in most of my spare time. So far got through about +/- 3,000 photos. Many require some post processing before I can decide to keep or not.

Storage is an issue due to budget. I'm trying to figure it out as well. I'd like some of the new SSD drives, but too pricey for me for the large ones. If I hit the lotto I will buy one of these.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1339611-REG/wd_wdbnfa0400kbk_nesn_my_cloud_pr4100_40tb.html

I had bought a SSD drive at Walmart and it was broken right out of the box. My regular hard drives have proved pretty reliable.

But maybe I'd do better with some separate drives for back up. I've been using separate drives all along, but it would be nice to have it all in one box.

I just put the photos all in one big file called Master Portfolio. Within the Master Portfolio I have 130 sub categories for the photos. I also have separate files for books I've done. Other than that I don't get crazy with labeling or organizing.

In addition to my own photography I have half a million feet of small gauge film that needs organizing and scanning and working on. And about 30,000 items in my archive of old found photos and ephemera that needs work.

...just too many jobs, no money and limited time to chip away at it.

 

[juan]

4TB external drives powered by usb are now only about $100. I backup my photo files to one of those, then store it in a bank safe deposit box. At $20 per year, that’s far cheaper than cloud storage.

 

[Billy Axeman]

Is anyone using digiKam as an organizer?
https://www.digikam.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiKam

 

[Billy Axeman]

Not related to Digital Negatives...

Perhaps a better place is Misc. Hybrid Discussions.

 

[GRHazelton]

I use Lightroom for both digital and film images. LR allows adding subject headings, with care these can be organized to allow searching and recovery easily. The digital and film images are stored in a RAID I array, backed up to hard drives in hot-swap drawers, and to Carbonite. Film negatives and slides are kept in proper files, keyed to the image numbers in LR. Thus LR serves as a catalog and "contact" sheets for film negatives.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Curious. What does anyone do with 100,000 photos? Do you think you can get rid of duplicates? Any not worth saving? I mean, gee, are you ever going to look at them again, much less other people? Wouldn't it be better to just take the keepers and put them all in one small folder? Then burn it to a CD?