If you’ve been shooting for a couple weeks, months, or years, you probably have accumulated hundreds or thousands of image files. Keeping tack of them can be a nightmare. Let me tell you, it is much easier to spend the time and devise a good image management strategy. The sooner you do this, the better. Depending on how many images you already have, it may take a bit of time to get organized, but let me tell you. It’s totally worth it. I had tried a bunch before landing on one that works for me. It’s pretty simple, but is really effective. Also, it works well with my two favorite image editor/organizing programs (Adobe Lightroom and Google’s Picasa).

My organization structure goes like this:

• Home location for pictures. On my mac, that is in the user file\pictures. On a PC, it is My Documents\My pictures.
  • Inside that location I create a folder for every year: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, etc.
    • Inside the 2009 folder, I then make a sub-folder with the date for every time I take images, and append a quick description. For example, 2009-09-28 – Jordan’s Birthday. This helps me remember the date and reason for each event.

In my example above, the path would be: Users/Jordan/Pictures/2009/2009-09-28 – Jordan’s Birthday

This keeps your photos organized chronologically as well as having a description that is easy to search.

One question I get it, what about using iPhoto on my Mac. I’ve tried it, and personally, I HATE IT. There is one key flaw that I see with iPhoto that will keep me from using it: there isn’t a correlation with how your images are stored on the hard drive that matches your organization in iPhoto. They use this complicated album concept and create low-resolution thumbnails all over the place. I’ve helped dozens of friends try to undo the crap that iPhoto does with their images. And a lot of times, the end up losing their high resolution images because they accidentally saved their thumbnails. Make your life easier, don’t use it!

Look how easy this is with Lightroom.  Just plug in your camera and you get this nice little dialog:

There is an option that lets you pick where your pictures home location is (Copy to). In this example: Users/Jordan/Pictures  (you only have to set this once)

Then there is an “organize” option.  There are a bunch of options that Lightroom gives you, but the second option matches the strategy above. (you also only have to set this once)

Then, Lightroom shows you all the folders it’s going to create and how many images are in each day.

Click OK, and the images are imported onto your computer and put into the right sub-folders. The only remaining step is to add an event description to each folder. You can do this through right click and re-name. You are left with a directory that looks like this in Lightroom, with an identical match on your hard drive.

One final note, and this is personal preference. If I’ve taken images on a trip or something that spanned multiple days, I usually just combine all the images into one folder by doing a drag or drop. But that is totally up to you.