Organizing Pictures

Thanks for your patience as I get caught up this week.  I have LOTS of work to do, but I wanted to stop by Mom*tog to answer a reader question.  Today’s questions comes from Sarah:

I would LOVE this question answered because no one ever talk about this:
I would love to have a little run down of your workflow.  Just as a parent who takes way too many pics of her kids…I just don’t have it down.  Do you save all your pics to a disc AND develop them to prints too and put in albums?  Do you just save the favorites and not outtakes?  I think with digital photography nowadays we have way too many photos to manage.  How do you label/organize your pictures on the computer?

This is a great question!  Here’s what I do for my personal pictures:

1)  I have a folder named “Brayden”.  In this folder there are sub folders titled “1 Month” to “15 Months”.  I also have folders titled for special events “Birthday Party”, “Christmas”, etc.

2)  I load the card into the appropriate folder and I view them in Bridge.

3)  I have a rating system that I use, which is just something I totally made up and really means nothing.

     – 1 Star means delete.  It’s out of focus or eyes are closed.  It’s a totally unusable shot.  These get deleted immediately.

     – 4 Stars means it’s a favorite.

     – 5 Stars means it’s okay

     – 3 Stars means it’s edited and ready to blog

I told you.  This system doesn’t make sense, but it’s just what I’m used to.  To rate your pictures on a mac you click on the “apple” button and the number.  So for one star I click on “apple” and the number “1″.  I’m sure you can create labels in other programs too.  The rating system is just s simple way for me to see which ones I want to keep and which ones I don’t.

4)  Every month I back up that months folder onto DVD AND to my external hard drive.  The DVD goes in my fire proof safe.  DVDs make me nervous for some reason so I like to have them backed up in two separate places.

5)  I *try* to print my favorites out each month.  I haven’t been very successful at this and need to get better.

Being a professional photographer I’m a little anal about backing up my images.  They get backed up to DVD, an external hard drive, a RAID drive, and my lab, Pictage, also backs up everything I upload to them.  Weddings and sessions stay on my hard drive until the disc is handed over to the client and then I will finally delete it off my hard drive.  I still have my Brayden files on my hard drive as well, but I will probably have to delete some soon to save some space.  When I go out of town my external hard drive goes to my parents house so if anything happens here I know my files are safe somewhere else.  

How many of you out there do not back your images up to an external hard drive?  How sad would you be if they are suddenly disappeared?  Really sad, right?  External hard drives are SO cheap now.  I use Free Agent drives by Seagate.

You can get 1.5 TB for $185!  That’s SO cheap.  Well, cheap compared to what it was even this time last year.  I have, gosh I don’t know, 7 or 8 of these.

They also have this really cute little portable hard drive.

Although it is $150 and only 500GB, which isn’t a great value.

Whatever your methods for sorting through images is please, please, please (I’m on my knees begging you here!) back your images up.  I’ve had too many people come crying to me saying that their images are gone.  And it’s a lot cheaper to buy an external hard drive now then to spend the money trying to recover the files later, right?  It’s not a matter if computers will fail, it’s a matter of when!

Happy Memorial Day weekend, friends!  Since I’m feeling patriotic here’s an oldie, but goodie of Brayden Bittel last Fourth of July