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Anonymous12/22/25, 11:08No.4489705Organizing your Photos
How do you do it?
I've been getting more active with my photography for a few years now and it's starting to get messy.
On my hard drive I have my pictures in different folder by year and month, so it's quick and easy to just clear out my SD card.
Then in Lightroom I pick the images I like and want to use and put them in a collection. However usually I make one collection per "set" and very rarely group any of the collections. Only have a group for shooting at protests, one for portraits and a few for some multi-week trips I took that resulted in multiple photo-sets.
In my context a set is just a collection of images with a similar theme or from the same day that I post on social media or send to friends or whatever.
Having an ever growing list of collections seems like a problem waiting to happen, especially if I want to go pro one day, so I was wondering how you guys manage it? The only thing I've seen online that might be a good idea is maybe grouping my collections by location to make them a little easier to sort through when I end up visiting the same place multiple times.
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Anon12/22/25, 15:27No.4489722
From top level down>Settings in-camera
Use 4 folders. 3 for normal use and 1 for tests/ignorable photos. Normally devided either by different days of shooting or regular intervals at a long event
>Import RAW files to NAS pool1 (and ooc jpegs/video if applicable)
- YYYY
- MM-DD (of import) [event name/theme name if applicable]
- FOLDER1/FOLDER2/FOLDER3 from in-camera structure
- Files have metadata that show when file was created aka the day it was taken if it is different to the MM-DD folder date
>Cull here, import good RAWs to local storage Working Folder
>Rsync local storage RAWs to seperate NAS pool2 for backups
>Return to local storage working folder
>Edit & Save JPEGs from RAW
>Edited JPEGs go into same folder as backed up RAWs on NAS pool2
- YYYY
- [Landscape | Astro | Urban (etc.)]
- MM-DD
>burn DVD-R Archival Grade (Master) with the new backed up RAWs/Edited JPEGs whenever I can fill one for the purpose of archiving or every 3 months.Once I got in the flow it's pretty seemless. I have some days where I shoot several thousand photos, and some where I shoot ten. The structure is logical and predictable with only the edited JPEGs going into a folder system that is subjective (themes instead of dates etc.)
>Having an ever growing list of collections seems like a problem waiting to happen
I would always fall back to the more predicable YYYY-MM-DD format. Of course this only helps you pinpoint when the photo was imported/created and nothing else, but a bit of manual perusing is not particularly perilious.
>The only thing I've seen online that might be a good idea is maybe grouping my collections by location
If you're appending GPS info to your photos, then sure. Otherwise I see this as more of a hinderance than a benefit.I also organise film negs but my volume is so low that I just mark each binder sheet with the date of completion and a unique number that I also put into my digitized folder so I know which is which.
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Anon12/22/25, 15:51No.4489728
Year > Session / Event
Monthly doesn't really make sense to me (and is just bad if you ever can't recall which month an image was from)
I do usually have two Snapshot folders for everyday type stuff, one for fist half of the year and second for last half
I'll usually have a Misc folder too for files I'm tinkering around with (think studio comparison tool)All exported files end up within the same Session folder so I don't really have to bother with viewing through LR/C1 if just browsing finished images.Switching to individual session folders instead of importing to one massive LR catalogue has been the best change I've made for both organization and workflow.Trying to link / group up "similar" images from different sessions always seemed like a waste of time to me.
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Anon12/22/25, 16:02No.4489730
I export to a google docs folder called export. Photos are named YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.
I print maybe 2 dozen photos a month and put them in a photo album in order with labels, that's my real organization method.
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Anon12/22/25, 19:18No.4489776
binder full of negatives (as well as a box with a bunch of older ones I haven't scanned yet), and then digitally all the scans are just in one big folder on an external and the ones I bother to edit/convert to jpg live in folders by yearits probably not the best system