Organizing your photos - desperate

[The Snark]

Do you have some method or methods of filing and accessing your pictures - in computer folders and actual photos in albums? Any tips or tricks? Filing methods? Computer programs? Step by step methods to get and keep your images identified and accessible? ANYTHING?
I've let my mess go for far too long. Random titles, random folder names. Obscure names chosen by whims. Copies so the dates aren't in order.

And another project - aspect. Scanning photographs to digital storage. What is your preferred scanner? Any particular special settings? Tips and tricks there?

Addendum. Around 3500 film images in albums and loose, all heaped into a cardboard box. Digitally. a tree of folders seven or eight deep with brilliant labels like Pics, More, People, Extra etc. Unholy mess. And several hundred digital duplicates with different names, ranging from raw to resized to enhanced and edited. all sprayed randomly among the --- about 200 folders.

 

[HeartBum]

All my photos go to Instagram. Even if they’re not decent (looking back I notice the older ones were pretty poor due to lighting) they can then be archived if I don’t want them public but they can still be viewed by myself for nostalgia.

Create a private profile if you don’t want it public and upload to your heart’s content. Great free method of photo storage imo. If you upload as a story then you can sort by date also, or create different stories for different species.

 

[Rick McJimsey]

I have a separate M.2 drive installed in my PC which serves as a backup for all of my photos. I have my main edited photos and the photos I work with on my main M.2. I organize based on category i.e. "to be edited", "fully edited", watermark or no watermark, to be converted from raw to tif etc etc. I have thousands and thousands of photos, so this helps a lot.

 

[The Snark]

@Rick McJimsey Thanks much. If I may ask, generically speaking, how do you name and order your files and file structure?

To give you some idea of what I am dealing with -> A hypothetical. Say you have 30 years of photos that are in the folder All Pictures. Inside are around 100 sub folders that have mostly been named by a whim at the time the pictures were brought into the computer. Inside those sub folders are sub sub folders, again named at a whim along with around 1200 pictures that you wanted to work on or didn't know where to put them. So your folder tree is now about 6 or 7 levels deep and the entire All Pictures contains around 72 GB of images.
How to sort them? By thumbnails one by one? Dates? General context? I'm looking for a methodology here that simplifies folder naming and categorizing the images Some way to find images either using Microsofts pathetic search ability, or a program that displays images and allows for them to be easily moved between folders, all neatly displayed in preferably a single screen.

And then, I'm looking at digitizing the box of of printed pictures. Suggestions for how to scan roughly 15 pounds of photos, maybe a best bet scanner, and any tricks or nifty ideas??

 

[TheBigEmail]

Are we looking for something like this? http://www.mjbpix.com/automatically-move-photos-to-directories-or-folders-based-on-exif-date/

 

[Edan bandoot]

computer folder, the good ones that are edited also to instagram, but i haven't edited any recently so havent been posting much either.

 

[Albireo Wulfbooper]

I am not awesome at practising what I preach, but when I go into my organization flurries, here's what I do.

For unedited photos, I have a folder for the year, with subfolders for events (like if i went on a camping trip or a hike where I took a lot of photos), and anything that doesn't fit into a specific event gets sorted into separate photos by theme (like wild arthropods, pets, landscapes, etc). If I'm feeling really energetic I'll tag the photos with relevant info like genus/species. These live on a backup drive. Mostly I don't change file names for my original photos, but if I edit a photo I'll save it with a new (and relevant) name.

Edited, renamed photos go into a totally separate directory on my main drive that's theme- and event-based like the within-year photos, but since they're not separated by year, this is where I can see, for instance, all my arthropod photos in one subfolder. I'd probably sub-sort these by order or class if I had more time and energy but I have a job to go to and cats to pet and I occasionally like to sleep.

 

[CanebrakeRattlesnake]

So I keep all my photos in a folder on my desktop with tons of sub folders. There are different folders for years (2017, 2018, 2019, etc.) and then within those year folders, MORE folders. There's a folder for pet videos, wildlife videos, and then a folder called "Keep" where I put all my good photos in before deleting the rest. And within the Keep folder, all the photos are organized in folders with the date I took them. All the really good ones get uploaded on Tumblr, Flickr, etc.

Like so:

 

[The Snark]

So I keep all my photos in a folder on my desktop with tons of sub folders

The Picture Tools comes with Win 10. I have 7. Nertz

 

[Nicole C G]

Do you have some method or methods of filing and accessing your pictures - in computer folders and actual photos in albums? Any tips or tricks? Filing methods? Computer programs? Step by step methods to get and keep your images identified and accessible? ANYTHING?
I've let my mess go for far too long. Random titles, random folder names. Obscure names chosen by whims. Copies so the dates aren't in order.

And another project - aspect. Scanning photographs to digital storage. What is your preferred scanner? Any particular special settings? Tips and tricks there?

Addendum. Around 3500 film images in albums and loose, all heaped into a cardboard box. Digitally. a tree of folders seven or eight deep with brilliant labels like Pics, More, People, Extra etc. Unholy mess. And several hundred digital duplicates with different names, ranging from raw to resized to enhanced and edited. all sprayed randomly among the --- about 200 folders.

I probably can’t help with this lol. I have 10,000 photos of Jumping spiders and the little organization I have isn’t helpful lol.
I’m usually organized but the whole jumping spider photography thing caught me by surprise.

 

[The Snark]

I probably can’t help with this lol. I have 10,000 photos of Jumping spiders and the little organization I have isn’t helpful lol.

Sounds like you're in the same boat. Leaking, no rudder, only one oar and it doesn't do what you want it to......

 

[Arthroverts]

I organize all my photos by session, with location (if it’s an excursion, I’ll put species names if it’s photos of my collection), who I’m with (if applicable), and date in the title; a typical folder name for me might be “Rim of the World w/Smotzer June 15 2022.”
I usually remember where I find something (probably because I haven’t taken enough pictures yet), so finding what I want from there is fairly easy.

Thanks,

Arthroverts

 

[The Snark]

@Arthroverts Thanks. Now all I need is a time warp to go back 30 years and implement that methodology before it gets completely out of control. My bête noire is a sub folder with the unique name Photos. Within it resides around 80 sub sub folders with labels that I'm willing to attribute to left over remnants of my drug days / daze. Eyes? Little girl? Faces? Temples? (Huge) Horizon? ..................

 

[Arthroverts]

Well, you know what they say…
“There’s no time like the present!”

In all seriousness I understand what a Herculean task organizing everything would be. Perhaps it might be better, considering time spent vs. the reward, to just keep your new photos organized.

Thanks,

Arthroverts

 

[Europus Gigantus]

Oh, Snarky-poo, I so totally hear you. Digital picture files are a nightmare. Before digital, andd my now adult children were in school, they always had projects that required family or vacation photos, so I now have a bunch of letter sized envelopes with pictures sticking out that more or less keep that era in a sort of kind of if I can remember what drawer they are in kind of system. Then we got the first I guess Smart phones and took a lot of random pictures of work and vacations and stuff. That was okay, you could file things by date at least...until you got a new phone that didn't file the same way, then another phone, and another and god knows where the pictures are kept, then came the Cloud and before I knew it, all my pictures were floating around somewhere up there...and then the worst part, we had to change from Windows to Android and I think I will just give up and be happy to have one picture of each family member, a dog, a cat, and one picture of every spider I've kept. One thing that really did help with my printed family pictures, was I found a cousin who was delighted to take them off my hands and scan copies of the few special ones for me. And also, I realized I am seldom alone when I take pictures so I know someone else has a copy of that same incredible rainbow. So, then it just boils down to my spider, mushroom, and amphibian pictures. Tomorrow I will find those and put them on a hard drive. For now, I think my Ambien is kicking in...good luck with your situation, Snark!