I know I am probably wading into religious territory here…sort of like “what’s your favorite code editor?”, but I’ll go ahead anyway. I’m presently trying to finalize a scheme that I hope will serve me well for a long time.
There are many conceivable naming conventions for organizing photos into directories and files. Everyone has their reasons for their own particular choices, and it’s clearly not a “one size fits all” scenario. I’d be interested in seeing how people here are organizing their work and why they are doing it the way they are.
FWIW, here is my tentative scheme:
Everything under ~/Pictures
No reason/justification for this.
Directory names yyyy-mm-dd_a-few-words-of description_camera
(e.g, 2016-10-08_Haliburton-fall-colors_D7000)
This provides me with the two ways I tend to try to locate photos: when they were taken and what the subject was, and I don’t have to open anything to know what camera was used. If I happened to use two different cameras on the same day/subject, they’re separated for me. I like that. Some might not.
I am still debating whether to use subdirectories to separate raw and jpg. For a camera that doesn’t produce RAW that’s a useless extra directory level.
File names yyyymmdd-hhmm-FileNameFromCamera.LowerCaseExtension
(e.g., 20161008-1437-DSC_0492.nef)
This lets me tie a copy of a photo back to the directory it should be located in, and also lets me locate the photo on the SD card if it has not been reformatted yet.
My main directory is called “Pictures_Raw_Files.” Under that it is yyyy-mm-dd. Filenames are yyyy-mm-dd_hhmmss_xx where xx is a serial number, e.g. 01, 02. This is because illnuse my camera’s auto bracket. I use an exiftool command to copy files from the SD card.
I’ll then add keywords and descriptions in the xmp file.
But these things change often, I currently prefer to have something meaningful in the name (unlike DSC_XYZ) so that photos have better SEO and I’ve always preferred the YYYY/MM/DD folder structure.
Interesting to see that a lot of people like to build out the tree hierarchy with yyyy/whatever or yyyy/mm/whatever or yyyy/mm/dd/whatever. Fast navigation if you know what day something was shot. Maybe a little less so if you don’t, The amount of shooting you manage to get in probably has a bearing on how much tree depth makes sense. All I know is, whenever I’m here typing I’m not out shooting!
@paperdigits Good point about bracketing. Any file naming scheme needs a tiebreaker, but hhmm for the time is going to result in too many ties even without using bracketing.
Wow, the famous flame war from the 1970s/1980s rises again!
My personal favourite is VI – but I am afraid that the best reply would be
“The editor you know is the very best one.”
Re folder naming: Pictures/YYMMDD(/subfolder whenever needed)
Nice to see too that we all use a very similar structure
I have a year directory under a Pictures Directory
2016
2015
2014
then within each directory
YYYYMMDD_event_name
with my RAW and Large JPEG all in the directory
My edited files live in the same directory with a suffix on the end of “cl” or “bw” (depending if a colour or black and white edit resulted from my faffing about)
I have sepparate folders for RAW and JPG, because there are many images from other sources and cameras. The subfolders of JPG are a pure mess.
Anyway, for my DSLR images I have following structure: /home/Fotos/RAW/YYYY/YYYY_MM[a-z]_keyword/
Keyword is something easy to rember like a trip destination, event, project, …
exports go to: /home/Fotos/JPG/camera/YYYY/YYYY_MM[a-z]_keyword/
Tagging is done in darktable and the variables in the export-modul allows to create the same folder structure on the fly without touching the filesystem by myself.
Why they are so?
I think sorting by time is the easiest way and a kind of common sense for all exitisting metadata. The keyword I added lately. Before I only had YYYY_MM[a-z], but without a keyword and tags only the correct folder is sometimes hard to find.
Well I use vim most of the time, because it was the first editor I ran into on my Linux install.
I usually dump the SD card in some “Photos/yyyymmdd Misc”
The first thing is to create a “CR2” subdirectory and move all the CR2s to it
I triage the pics (which means also erasing a good half) and move them to "“Photos/yyyymmdd Proper subject”.
I run a script of mine to create CR2 subdirectories and move there the CR2s from Misc/CR2
In some cases of heavy shooting I use subdirectories (“20160514 Airshow/Spitfire”).
I’m not a date fetishist, so I may eventually coalesce directories with the same subject taken a few days apart. For some subjects (spiders…) I don’t even keep a date, having all the pics I ever took of the same subject together lets me keep the best overall. My favorite photo processing app is rm.
I keep only current year photos on my hd, since LR1 (2007) organized like this:
LR
2016_LR6
| current year + DAM(and version) /// just the prog’s catalog + (preview) data
2016_FOTOFOTOFOTOFOTO
| current year + worst possible nickname I come with - /// photos themselves & xmps
2016
November
11
I always leave camera naming, don’t really care and at least nomenclature does not change, somekind of coherence
All of subsorting is relyed heavily in metadata and some in tags. Tags also trigger automated actions, like comb hair, optimize, strip metadata or move to edits’ folder.
Edited photos would have 2 versions, a full rez tiff and a jpeg, those are the only ones with a suffix added to the original name, like the baby’s new given christian name or a comment. They’re tagged edited and go into a completelly separate folder.
Once in a while this folder’s contents move into LR; before that LR’s year folder was backed up and after, synced.
Once in a while the current year’s folder catalog is backed up and current years’ photo folder synced with ext storage “whole” catalog; new photos are added, many also deleted. Both “whole” catalog file itself and photos are synced, “whole” catalog’s also backep up.
Finally once in a while there are neighbour complains and a redundancy ufo is reported naked behind the bushes.
Klar: I happen to organize like this around lightroom, but I’ld still do the same if I used any other DAM software… at least regarding still images =)
Personally, I like to keep all versions of a photo in one place. I tend to append something to the file name to distinguish the file. Once upon a time, that would have just been _cropped or _edited or something like that, but now that i’m screwing around with a wider assortment of tools simplistic names like that no longer cut it.
Admittedly, this gets messy if you edit a lot of photos from a given shoot, or especially if you batch process the entire shoot. In that case, a subdirectory for a given processing phase is probably the best answer, and using a consistent name for that phase gives the best chance that you can set up the next tool in your flow to look in the right place automatically (either by settings or by scripting). I’m not there yet myself, so I’m still using suffixes on the file names.
I’m also using suffixes based on the programs i used for postprocessinglike: filename _ R _ G _ R
would mean that the picture was processed in RT then in Gimp and then in RT again.
the problem I have is where to keep it. With the other out of camera pictures?
In a Gallery of selected “good” files?
In a gallery of a certain theme?
