HOW DO PHOTOGRAPHERS ORGANIZE THEIR IMAGES?

Keeping your images organized is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself—especially during an age where our digital photo albums are growing in size by the THOUSANDS. Seriously, we all have thousands of important images just floating around from cell phone to laptop to cloud service. How are you supposed to keep track of them all?

Jennifer has been a photographer for over 25 years and during this time she has developed an organized and easily searchable system for storing and accessing her images. She has been handling thousands of images for years before most of us as she started her photography career during the age of analog photographs. This has given her a unique perspective and skill set for keeping track of not only digital images, but print negatives and CDs as well.

So how does a Photographer with over 25 years worth of both analog and digital photos keep it organized?

Start by digitizing all of your important analog media. Jennifer originally scanned all of her film negatives onto CDs, and as technology grew so did her system. She later upgraded to secure servers that could hold all of her past analog work, as well as the hundreds of thousands of digital photographs to come.

But not all of us are professional photographers with hundreds of thousands of photos and a secure server, so what can you do? Put everything onto a hard drive, and then make a copy of that hard drive! Aggregating all of your images into one place is a great way to start.

Back up your files

Aside from creating multiple backups of all of your images, the most important part of Jennifer’s photo organization system is the naming conventions. She developed a system for naming all of her images as the very start of her career and has stuck with this system ever since. This makes it easy to go back and search for any client’s photographs in any year over the past two decades.

Come up with a naming system

If you are not a photographer yourself, creating a name for every single one of your images may be a bit tedious. Instead, you could take this advice and use it for tagging your images. In software like Adobe Lightroom, you are able to give your images a keyword that will be written into the metadata of that image. So if you later search for a keyword, you will find every image that has been tagged with that word. We recommend tagging your images in a similar manner to the way Jennifer names hers. Always include the date! This does not have to be as specific as the day, but at the very least including the year will save you a lot of time down the road. If you know the month that is even more helpful! Going in and tagging by the person or event in the image after that will give you plenty of information to help you find your images later on. This process is tedious and time-consuming (that’s why we’re here to help you do it) but your future self will thank you!

Always be sure to make backups of all the work that you do!