People who take a lot of photographs on vacation or on their travels and even professionals like me need to have a method they use to store their images. I have met a number of people who travel a lot and shoot thousands of images. If they use an Apple computer, Apple forces you to use their own proprietary software called iPhoto. Many people swear by this, but I find it somewhat cumbersome. You have to download all your images from your camera to iPhoto and then import them to an editing software package like Adobe Lightroom in order to work on them (or edit them in iPhoto, which is a completely different program from the industry standard – Photoshop). I prefer to download them directly to Lightroom where I can label them, sort them, and edit them all in one shot. So, whatever package you use for downloading and editing your images, you still have to have a method for saving and storing them.
Nothing can be more frustrating than wanting to show someone a recent image that you have made and not being able to locate it quickly on your computer or tablet. I see this happen time and again to beginners and some advanced amateurs alike. So, I’ve developed an almost foolproof method of storing my images.
Let me begin with the notion that as a professional photographer of over 30 years experience, I treat everything I shoot as if it were a job. Even things I shoot for myself get the same treatment.
• Begin each year with a folder labeled “PHOTOGRAPHS2014” (or whatever the year is)
• Give everything you shoot that year its own folder set up as a sub-folder of the year – that way, you will know that you shot all those pictures in that folder in the same year. This eliminates the need to put a date on each image. That will be done automatically as a preset in Lightroom or Bridge anyway.
• Use an external drive with enough storage to cover several years. One of my 200GB externals has stored ALL my jobs for 4 to 5 years! That’s every single image I’ve shot during that time. One of my 500GB (1/2 TB) drives I think is up to about 10 years worth of images now. And, I often edit each image and make a new subfolder called “Edits.”
How To Store Your
Digital Photographs
by William Lulow
Growth & Funding Strategist