Apologies for the probably trivial question. Does it make sense to import all pictures from the camera always in the same and unique folder ? Currently I’m using a physical folder per project, but since I also categorize/tag them per project in the DAM, having different folders seems redundant. Thoughts?
Welcome to the forum :-)!
I think having different folders makes sense. You can still use your DAM as you like and search for tags but get a second option for finding stuff especially should you decide to switch DAM software in the future, need to dig up something from a backup etc.
I import to one folder called work. A quick run through, sort out crab.
Then sort, bundle and move „what belongs together“ to i. e. a folder called „2026.04.24 - party at …“. All folders from a year are subdirs of /home/……/Bilder/2026.
Works for me
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I import and sort my photos by date and use a jobcode for further identification. Here you can see how a recent trip was imported based on date and location.
I use a dummy folder for initial import fro my camera’s SD card.
- Import the dummy folder to darktable
- do initial rating and culling
- I have a “basic edit” style with modules I’ll use on every photo (lens correction, Exposure compensation [ETTR], denoise profiled, color balance RGB vibrant colors, D&S lens deblur, D&S local contrast, etc.)
- rating, more culling
- tagging
Then I’ll use darktable to MOVE the photos to their permanent location. Sometimes this is a new folder. Sometimes it’s
For the permanent location, I have a series of folders that are basically “year event”. It makes them easier to find and prevents folders from getting too large. I’ve had a few occasions where the collections module and tags was handy to make a virtual collection of similar images across folders (e.g. beach sunsets taken at different beaches in different years).
Once it clicked - a collection can be a folder, but it can be a cross folder filter - it made finding things a lot easier.
Welcome to this fine forum!
I think it mostly depend on how you like to work and how you remember things when trying to find something back.
I for myself I do not like folders with thousands of files in it.
I do like folders that have names that I recognize and remember.
I mostly make pictures when doing a day trip or traveling.
So for me it made sense to create a folder a day.
The name starts with a date like yyyymmdd.
And then a short description of the whereabouts, project or occasion.
I star all our pictures and tend to use lots of tags organized in a hierarchy.
Mostly no problem finding back a picture among > 100,000 pictures.
I download the folders from our cam’s to the folder structure on our hdd.
Only for convenience I created year folders there, in order to avoid long scroling.
As soon as copied I change the foldername our camera’s applied to something that makes sense to me.
Only clear the card in our camera’s when a backup has been made.
That’s basically it.