By Rob Sheppard
Filing your accumulating digital images can be a challenge. There are lots of good ways to file, but not always good ways for you. I now use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom almost exclusively for downloading images from a memory card and for organizing my photos.
Lightroom offers a lot of tools for filing, but they are only tools. Ultimately, the filing system is up to you. I strongly recommend to folks when I do workshops on Lightroom that they follow a system that makes sense to them based on how they file anything. You simply need a structure or digital workflow. I often use this analogy:
- Set up a storage room for your photos - this is a master folder on your hard drive for all of your image files - it can be the existing Pictures folder or something else. I use a specific Digital Photos folder on a separate hard drive from my main computer.
- Set up cabinets to hold your photos in that storage room - these are subfolders to the master folder that allow you to group photos into certain categories that make sense to you; for me, that works if I use years.
- Set up cabinet drawers to hold your photos in the cabinets - these might be the folders that hold your photos as you import them and are subfolders to the “cabinet” folders - an example might be a folder that holds images from a trip to a specific state - this might mean if you travel a lot, as I do, that these folders are all based on state and dates - but there are lots of ways to categorize these images based on what, how and when you shoot.
- Set up folders in the cabinet drawers to hold your photos - these might be subfolders to your “cabinet drawer” folders - they might be based on specific days within a trip, for example. I don’t need to go to this level most of the time.
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