Photo Organization

April-May 2022

So I have been organizing my digital photos from the last 20 years. They are spread across 8 different 1/2, 1, 2, and 3 TB hard disk drives. Some of the interfaces are old, Firewire 800 and USB Mini B, others use USB Micro B. I looked on YouTube for advice on photo organization, but most use Photos on the Mac which is fine, but I want to organize and delete before importing into any software package.

Goals:

  1. The main goal is to review every folder and file on each drive, delete what I don’t want, copy over files I do want to my Primary drive into an organized file structure, then reformat the reviewed drives and use for backups.
  2. Update the primary drive with new images as I shoot.
  3. Back up the primary drive on a consistent basis
  4. Back up files important files to Google Drive or iCloud.

Challenges:

  1. These are old hard drives so different drives have different interfaces, some use USB Mini, Firewire 800, while others use USB 3.0 Micro. They are really slow.
  2. Developing a top level folder naming scheme. This is the most important first step and just gets created organically. I’ve settled on 40 folder names with a few sub folders.
  3. Deleting duplicates. There is software that can ID and help the user with this. I’m doing it manually so far.
  4. Backing up. I initially am getting everything organized onto a Primary drive, then backing that up on 2-3 different drives and storing them in different locations. The incremental backups are the issue. I need software to help with this since the Finder doesn’t seem to be doing the job correctly.
  5. Seagate and Western Digital use this odd USB interface called USB 3.0 Micro. I plan to standardize all my drives in the future on something simple, not sure what, USB 3.2 Gen 2?
  6. One of the drives just randomly disconnects and then reconnects.
  7. Raw and jpeg files. I always want to delete both for any given image, this is time consuming. I also split them into separate folders. I haven’t figured out a good methodology here. I know Lightroom addresses this issue.
  8. Should I name the raw folder Raw, CR2, CR3, RW2? I opted to go with the file extension so I get an idea of what camera shot it, but now think Raw is better.
  9. Should I name video folders, Video, mp4, mov, etc?
  10. I think Raw and Video are best since when putting it at the end, the OS won’t think the folder is a particular file type like foldername.mp4 etc. So when the folder is clicked on, instead of seeing its contents, MacOS treats the folder like a .mp4 file.
  11. Obviously there are some files that could be classified into more than one top level folder category. I haven’t resolved this perfectly, but I don’t duplicate a file and put it in more than one folder. I suppose I could create links, but I know where most of the overlap will be if I can’t find something.

My methodology:

  1. I organically created 40 folders named for the content inside. This has gone through several iterations to get right. I didn’t like the year shot model that iPhoto uses since I may not know the year I shot something when looking for it, but a 40 folder strategy seems to work well so far. There are subfolders below the 40 folders, but I can manually find what I’m looking for pretty quickly.
  2. Create a folder called Review.
  3. Move any files or folders into the Review folder that need to be reviewed
  4. Review each folder and file in the review folder based on date and subject
  5. Copy to the primary drive to the appropriate folder
  6. Delete files from the Review folder until it’s empty.

What I learned.

  1. I have a lot of duplications and images that I don’t want.
  2. Thousands of images I shot that aren’t good enough to enlarge and put on the wall are fine for stock photography. This will take me months to years to catalog everything.
  3. Ripped movies can take up a lot of space so I have a separate drive for them. Not sure how important this is since almost everything is available for streaming.
  4. This is super time consuming. I’ve spent 1-5 hours a day on this for 2 months to get everything organized, backed up, and old hard drives reformatted.
  5. This is a very valuable project and every photographer should do this. Not only to get organized, but I have found so many images I totally forgot about. After viewing everything and organizing and then posting on to my portfolio website, I see what I like to shoot, how I like to shoot it, and what I can improve on. In short, I see how my photography has evolved over 20 years and where I’d like it to go.
  6. After completing cataloging everything, I will import into Photos on the Mac or Lightroom in order to keep images easy to find and view.
  7. The next project will be to scan all of my film negatives and slides and go through a similar organization project.

Image organization assignment:

Most photographers have images spread across multiple hard drives, their desktop computer, laptop computer, tablets, phone, and the cloud. This assignment is to organize ALL of your images into one comprehensive folder naming convention, on one drive, and then to back it up to multiple drives in different locations, and the cloud.

  1. Copy all of your images to a primary drive
  2. Organize into a file and folder structure that makes sense to you
  3. Back up to another hard drive
  4. Back up to the cloud
  5. Import into Photos on the Mac or ? on Windows.
  6. What is the deliverable? List out devices and GB or TB that you are working with. Take a screen shot before and after? What did you learn from this project? How many GB or TB of images did you end up with? How many unique images?