With something like 8 GB of new photos per year (and increasing) for my photo collection — and that’s after weeding out the bad shots — I’ve given a lot of thought of the ideal way to manage it. Here are some insights that might be helpful to others new to this:
- Yearly folders: 2009, 2010 …
- Monthly folders inside of those
- Files named: YYYY-MM-DD — Year-Month-Date. This sorts automaticvally under Mac and PC file systems, and avoids the meaningless IMG_0001 filenames that come off the camera.You can use some free tools to set the filename automatically using the EXIF data (some metadata hidden inside the photo which records the date and other details when the photo was taken). Plus, if the photo is emailed or misplaced, or pulled off a DVD archive, it is immediately clear where it belongs.
As a bonus, if you want finer grained sorting, you can name them YYY-MM-DD HHMMSS — yes, that’s right, Year-Month-Date Hour-Minute-Second. I find this works well if I have taken photos of an event, and somebody sends me their shots of the same event. If the dates are correct, they will sort correclty, given you sort of a multidimensional view of the action. Colons between the HHMMSS would be best but are not allowed in names on most computers. (Adding dashes would make it look like a date)
(To take it to the extreme, you could use: YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS NNNN. Some photographers like to keep the four digit number that their camera appends for cataloguingreasons and if they shoot bursts of multiple photos per second. I haven’t found this necessary)
Why this date format? One thing I quickly realized, living abroad in Japan and Germany, was that there are numerous arbitray date formats which are not compatible and are confusing. The YYYY-MM-DD (optional HH-MM-SS) format is the best solution. The year at the beginning tells you you are not working with the America MM/DD/YYYY (or the European DD.MM.YYYY) style. This is also an international standard, ISO 8601, by the way. More people (and companies) should use it. There’s no good reason to have every August sort together in a folder (08-2007, 08-2008, 08-2009…) or to have such confusion that airlines have to type out words for months (18-JUL-2009) to avoid ambiguity. But I digress.
If you need to add a title or label to a photo, I recommend adding it after the date, not before, or it won’t sort correctly: YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS – Birthday party.jpg
Finally, these filenames are helpful for keeping every photo uniquely identifiable, but it is not sufficient. You really need to tag photos wih keywords (IPTC to be precise). You can do this with some free software like Picasa or iPhoto. The filename is more like a backup and organizer, while the keywords enable searchability. Together, you basically have a bullet-proof system.
To sum up, here’s the file system, including the folders:
YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS – Filename.jpg
And here’s what a photo from the Fourth of July, at 8pm sharp, this year would look like under this system:
2009/07/2009-07-04 200000 – Fireworks.jpg
