Last week I talked about digital decluttering for a bit. I mentioned organising your digital photos into folders, and today I want to share how I organise mine. I think I’ve got a pretty good system down now that works well for me, and it may just help some of you get your photos in order. I have three major folders for my photos: my personal photos, my MUA photos, and photos for Loepsie. Let’s go!
Personal Photographs
I go through phases of taking lots of photos, and then I’ll take barely any for months or even years on end. Especially now that I take loads of photos for the blog, I tend to not take as many private photographs, except for at events or on holidays. I still like to keep the photos that I take well organised.
The big “Photos” folder is organised by year. I found this is the most convenient way to categorise them in the long run, when other categories would get out of hand. You could also choose to make folders of, for example, “holidays”, “parties”, “sporting events” or make a separate folder for each family member and categorise the photos into years one level down.
Here’s a look into my “2014” folder, which I divided into months. In each month’s folder I keep all the photos of that month that make the cut (I sort through the photos on my camera before I file them), and if there are many of a certain day or event I’ll make a separate folder within the month.
This is my August folder, where there aren’t any loose photos but I have two folders for major events; one holiday and one summer camp with the kids at the scouting.
Makeup Artist Photos
I’m currently starting up my business as a freelance makeup artist. Building my portfolio involves a lot of photo taking, and there’s some designing involved of the website, businesscards, etc.
My big folder is devided into “Portfolio”, “Raw Portfolio” and “Website”. My businesscard designs are currently floating around, but should probably be assigned a folder as well.
The “Website” folder contains any promotional material or photos I use for the website that aren’t end products.
The “Raw Portfolio” folder contains all the photos I take when I do someone’s makeup, or all the photos I receive from photographers after we do a shoot. I will later make a selection from these, edit them (resize & colour correct, mostly) and copy them into my “Portfolio” folder. Again, bigger shoots are divided into folders.
The “Portfolio” folder contains the best photos from all the shoots & sessions I do. Not all of these end up on my website (by far) but I have a larger selection of good photos here that I could potentially show people.
Loepsie
The last folder is for everything related to Loepsie, both the blog and the channel.
The folder is divided into two folders, “Concept” and “Published”. I also have my basic administration in this folder.
The folders are pretty straightforward. In the “Concept” folder, I keep photos for posts and videos that have yet to be published, all in their respective folders. There’s also an “Other” folder for any random photo material.
The “Published” folder contains all the photos from posts that have already been published. Before the photos make it here I will have deleted any photos that I didn’t use and don’t think I’ll ever use in the future. I migrate folders from “Concept” to “Published” once a week.
I’m very satisfied with this system, it always allows me to find whatever I’m looking for quickly and keeps all my photos separated.
How do you organise your photos?
I categorize my photos into two folders: "events" and "photo series". "Events" is for trips, parties, and more personal things, while "photo series" is more for my own projects, for example my blog. Inside those folders I just have a folder for each moment, and I always put the date in the title of the folder as well, so that the folders will be sorted chronologically (for example: "2014-12-16 scrambled eggs" or "13-08-03 sweden") :)
I have folders for each "event" in which they were taken. In the name I have the date (yyyy/mm/dd), the name of the event and then the topics I can find in there. For example, the photos of my trip to my Santa Maria island is like this: 2011-08-00 – Santa Maria – Self, Friends, Landscapes.
00 means it was more than one day.
I do this because:
– If I separate pics by topics folders, I won't get to see all the pics of one day together and be like "aaahh yeah, that was a great day."
– On the other hand, I do need to have pics organized by topic. For example, I live in a beautiful place and more often than not I want to show photos of here to my internet friends. To avoid losing time opening and closing every folder to see if there's landscape photos in there, I wrote in the title. That way, I can simple go to My Pictures folder and write "Landscape" in the search bar and it will give me all the folders with landscape photos.
I also have a folder for friends pictures (like cute selfies that they send me and I like to keep) and my pets folder, that is organized by animal type then by pet haha
If I need to take pictures for a project, I'll keep them in Arts&Crafts folder in My Pictures.
Haha as you can see, I can't be bothered with naming my photos either :P There's just too many!
Actually, very similar to how you do it, with the exception that I obviously am not a blogger or even a fashionista. :) Basically by "topic" (i.e. my dogs, scenery, …), then by year, then months. Also, I do not drag around crappy pics, those get deleted immediately. The one thing I have been procrastinating for ages is to name each and every photo something descriptive, but with as many digital pictures I have, that would keep me seriously busy for a VERY long time. Might have to push that out to retirement or something … LOL