Organizing your digital images can be a demanding task. If you ever looked for a certain picture and couldn’t find it you know what I’m talking about. As long as there are only 2.000 or 3.000 images on your hard drive it may be no big deal. But 30.000 or 50.000 or even 100.000 are a completely different story. Therefor you should have a good concept for organizing your images right from the beginning. I’d like to show you how we do it.

The software we use

  • Adobe Bridge (freeware)
  • Adobe lightroom

Of course there is other software available that you can use to organize your images. it is the general approach to organzing images that is important.

Step 1: Transfer the images to a local hard drive

This is quite obvious. However, it can be done in several different ways. Many Lightroom users import the images directly from their camera into the Lightroom catalog using the import function. We don’t do this for several reasons (more about the reasons later). We use the Windows Explorer (or the Mac Finder) to copy the images from the memory card to a local hard drive. They are first copied to a temporary folder for further processing.

Step 2: Select keepers

This step is absolutely crucial. There is, however, a very simple rule: Keep only the best images. For this step we use Adobe Bridge instead of Lightroom because we don’t like to import hundreds or sometimes thousands of images (which can take quite a while in LR) only to delete them later from the catalog because they proofed to be below our standards. Bridge just uses the folder structure of the hard drive which speeds up the process quite a bit.

In another blog post I’ll show you a strategy for selecting the keepers quickly and efficiently. But that has to wait a bit.

Step 3: Renaming the keepers

As a hard rule, no two files in your archive should have the same filename! Most cameras create filenames like

IMG_0001
IMG_0002
.
.
IMG_9999
and than it starts all over again with IMG_0001. Therefor you should rename the keepers in such a way that no filename exists twice. The simplest and utterly fail safe method is to use a Sequence Number, i.e. you could simply start with 000000 and count upwards to 999999. A million different filenames should be about enough for most photographers …

Of course nobody would rename the images by typing the filename manually. We again use Bridge for this job. The Batch Rename function offers a lot of possibilities for renaming the images. It even keeps track of the last sequence number that has been used. When you rename the next batch of files, the counter simply adds +1 to the last used number and counts further upward from there. You don’t even have to keep track yourself.

This last point is the reason why we don’t rename our images in Lightroom. In Lightroom the sequence number always starts with 1 for every new batch of files. If you know how to coax Lightroom to do it like Bridge, please let me know!

Step 4: Copy the files to their final folder

At this point we copy the files to their final destination. That can be al local hard drive, an external hard drive or a NAS. We again use Bridge for this task but the Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder will do just fine.

Now that there are two files of each image (one in the temporary folder that we created for selecting and renaming the images and one in the final folder), you can format the memory card for further usage.

Step 5: Import images int Lightroom

Since Lightroom is our prime editing and organizing software it’s now time to import the images from their final folder into Lightroom

In part 2 we will look at the following topics:

  • Creating a simple but effective folder structure
  • Keywording
  • Collections and Smart Collections
  • Processing of images for external use