Organisation

Sometimes, when I look at fellow photographer's harddisks (to be precise, the chaotic mess that is their photo collection on disk) I remember that it was exactly the same for me back then... and that I should write a blogpost to share my way of organizing my photos today.

But I just found out - I don't have to. It's not a big surprise that - once more - Brandon Oelling already covers all aspects of organizing a photo collection in his excellent blog. It's a four parted series of articles, for easier navigation I directly paste the links here:

1. Data {Part 1}
2. Folders {Part 2}
3. Filenames {Part 3}
4. Derivative Files {Part 4}

Other than that, I can only add: use keywords, keywords, keywords (for the Picasa users: tags, tags, tags!). Building your own keyword "library" in Lightroom can be bothersome, but it's totally worth it because it is SO easy to browse your photo library by keywords, set up smart collections that really deserve that name, etc. etc.

If you're publishing your photos on some photo sharing service like Picasa Web Albums or flickr, you can do so many nice things with tags/keywords! Like searching for them. :-) Want to see my personal favorite abstract photos in my Picasa Web Album? You can search for combined tags like "fav,abstract" in Picasa Web - and use the result!