How do you organize your images?
I recently ran into a issue with hard drive space on my laptop. To be honest I am not the most consistent person when comes to photo management. Okay maybe the better way of saying it is, I suck at deleting photos.
To give you an example, I still had over 30 raw photos of that bird pictured above. I took those a year ago. I do not see a reason why I should be keeping so many raw images of something like that. When I first got started in photography I took some photos of my buddy’s old truck. Most of the pictures where either over or under exposed, I still had all of them. Over 200 raw images of crap.
I know there is a difference in what I keep when it comes to paid gigs where someone might come back wanting another print. But I haven’t had very many of those. Most of my photography has been for my own enjoyment. Other than it helps me get more gear I find it stressful.
Maybe part of the issue is that storage is so abundant now. I don’t think about the problem until something like filling up my laptop happens. After which I move the data to the NAS that use at home, but now after doing that so many times and not being consistant with where I put the data my photos have been spread all over the place on it.
If I was this disorganized with my files at my day job, I would’ve been fired a long time ago.
Over the past few days I have been re-organizing my images on the NAS and I have started over with a fresh Light Room catalog. While I am at it, I am converting all my raw images to DNG and deleting the old raw files. I am also going through and removing the images I consider to be crap.
However I still find myself struggling to come up with a good folder structure.
I would like to here from my fellow steemians. What do you throw away and what do you keep? Do you throw away everything except for the best photos? Or do you keep everything and just throw it into the cloud? I also want to know how you keep your images organized. There has to be a better way than what I am doing.
Great question! Ruthless editing lol! Think like an editor and delete, delete, delete! I will write a post on taming your image catalogs... in the meanwhile here is what I do... Master catalog has one main directory think of it as a photos go here folder. Then set up folders by year in that directory. Each shoot goes into a folder by date and shoot name e.g. 2018-02-06_Shoot Name. Once the images are imported... delete all bad images, keep 2-3 of the best of each different view of the shoot and delete all duplicates. Then back up the images that you really care about on external drives in case your hard drive dies or your mother board fails...
Hope this helps!
I love the cardinal image! And the truck image is cool - nice perspective!
So you are labeling each folder with the shoot name and date, instead of the default way light room just uses the date. I think that might have been part of my issue, I don't remember dates well. Thank you for the advice.
I am going to have to practice the "think like an editor". It can be hard to narrow down photos to 2-3 shots.
Yes - you can use Lr's default date hierarchy and then add the shoot name when the import is complete... The dates are useful, however adding the name allows you to simply 'know' what is in the folder without having to open it and look... Also think like an editor can become easier if you think "How much would I pay for this image" or "where would I hang this image"...
If you'd pay nothing for it... throw it away - lol
If you wouldn't hang it anywhere... throw it away - lol
I like the idea of throwing it away if I wouldn't spend the money to print and actually want to hang it.
That's a great start... if you think like that you will start to think like an editor. It is a useful skill!
For my last post for #mypictureday I found it very difficult to choose photos to post. Especially since I wasn't that thrilled about any of them. I think I have it narrowed down to two keepers out of about 270 photos.
Good job! That's the way to do it.
Okay, its official now. I am an idiot.... I was deleting images I didn't want from my last outing and somehow deleted the photos that I had flagged as picked from that group. I had taken somewhere close to 700 pictures and was deleting the ones I didn't want. Lightroom was having trouble keeping up and I guess I had selected them and didn't know it.
Luckily I still have the jpg's from it, but really wanted to keep some of the raw's. I hadn't done the back up yet because most of the 700 were trash.
It might still be in the trash if you haven't emptied it.
The trash was the first thing that I checked, it had some of the ones that I did want to delete in there. But no sign of the few that were keepers. Because of how many I deleted I think they were permanently deleted. I don't think it is worth trying to run a recovery tool.
Do you regularly backup Lr upon quitting the program? Is it possible that you have a backup after the import and before you deleted? If you do you'll be able to easily go back to that version. If that's not the case, you'll have to get out there with your camera again!
I don't think I backed up between the time of import and deleting. I have already written them off as a loss.
Hey man, most of the time, I delete the not-so-good images right after transferring them to the PC and before importing them in Capture One for editing. Then, I keep the RAW files of those that I have edited and delete everything else. To give you an example, during one of the beer photo shoots, I took more than 200 images. When I finished, I had less than 20 RAW files.
Now, folder management is a whole different story :) I am simply terrible at it. I have folders named with a theme and a date, with a date only, with "Sort out", "New folder", "New Lens test"... It's totally fucked up, and I need to find a way to fix this mess.
I have heard good things about Capture One but have never taken the time to try it out. I had started using LightRoom because there was a plethora of tutorials on it.
So far my favorite folder name that I found on my drive was "Stuff". There was even a "Stuff2". I don't know what I was thinking. Now that my photos are gathered in one spot I am working on few folders a day.
Thank you for taking the time to tell me about your process.
lol - stuff! like miscellaneous ; )
haha yeah I had one of those too.
Well - I am a Lightroom teacher so if you have any other questions I'm happy to answer : )
Later you might be thinking twice about offering that info up :)
Open to hearing your thoughts on that.
I just meant it as I could be bothering you with all sorts of question and you might get tired of it.
On the other hand I probably just need to buy a book or something. Any Suggestions?
The first pic is very nice!! :)
Thank you. I baited the fence posts with seeds for a few days and waited for the birds to show up. Just happened to start raining when the cardinal came.
Wow! I would like to have your patience and tenacity! Good job!
A lot of times it seems as though it's a waiting game.
😂
can someone please help me out..... is there any steemit app or everyone is using it with browser
There is a steemit app that people use but I haven't tried it. I think it is called esteem. I just use the browser.