How to Organize Your Digital Photos

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This blog post is for all of you who are on the struggle bus when it comes to organizing your digital photographs. Do you ever have someone ask you for an image or a gallery and you have to wrack your brain to figure out where in the world it is located at? Or, how did you even name the folder? Is the folder named “Vacation Dayz” and yet you cant remember the year you went on one? Or, is the folder named “Blue Eyes Blue Skies”? If this example sounds like you—then make sure you take some notes. Let’s get your hard drive squared away so that if you, your company, and/or employees need something—they know exactly where to look.

Let’s say that you have a new hard drive and you are down right determined to make this bad girl an organized dream come true. The first thing that you want to do is make a folder with the year on it. In this case, the year would be “2020.” Please make sure that this is the first thing that you do. In the future, when you are in the new year, you will then make a new folder with the year “2021.” This keeps things in each fiscal year. Simple enough, right?

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For photographers, the next step would be to make certain folders within your 2020 folder. My hard drive has folders named “Engagement,” “Weddings,” “Family,” and “Boudoir,” along with other types of sessions that I do. Now, let’s say you just shot an engagement session and you want to transfer your RAW images to your hard drive. Within your 2020 folder, you will find your “Engagement” folder to click on. Within that folder you will make another folder that states the DATE and NAMES of the people you photographed. For instance, mine would say something like “02102020 Jessie and Sam.” After you make this folder, click inside it and make one other folder named “RAW”— this is where you will place your RAW images from the shoot, and then you can upload into your Lightroom module.

Why do it this way? Let’s say that it is 2025 and someone has reached out to see if you still had images from someones engagement session from 2020. All you would need to do to find it is ask the person when the session took place, and the names of the couple. It will be in timestamped order, so super easy to find.

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For business owners (especially in the wedding industry), your first step will be to make your current year as a folder. If you are starting out in the year 2020, your first folder in your hard drive will be “2020.” Now, within your 2020 folder you will have folders that should correlate with the type of work that you do. For instance, if you are a florist you would have folders that are named “Weddings,””Bridal Sessions,” “Styled Shoots” and “Events.” These types of folders will hold all of your photos from the event (either from your mobile device and/or the photographer that photographed the event).

Let’s say that you set up a wedding at a local Country Club, and your team took cell phone images of their set up. You would theoretically want to keep these images in case a bride comes in later and asks for a certain set up that you did at said Country Club. And, what if you dont receive professional images from said event? You would have these mobile images to go back to. So, lets find the best way to store them. In this case, you would go into your 2020 folder, then click on your “Weddings” folder and within that folder you will make another folder. This new folder will have the DATE, NAME OF VENUE, and NAME OF COUPLE. An example of this will be “10152020BrierCreekCC_JessieandSamDundermifflin”. Now, inside the newest folder you want to make a new folder named “Mobile,” and once inside your MOBILE folder, you will upload any photos that were taken at said event.

What if the professional photographer sent you images from this event? EASY! Go to your 2020 folder, click on the folder that the event correlates to (Weddings, etc.), then find the DATED folder of event and click on it. Inside you would have already started a folder named “MOBILE,'“ but now you want to make a new folder. This folder will be named the title of the professional photographer. If you were storing images by my company, then this folder would be named “Fancy This.” This way, there is no confusion when you share the images later. ANYONE can look at this folder and know who the photographer is to give credit to. If you are receiving HIGH-RES and LOW-RES images…then, you should make 2 separate folders within this folder. Yes, always make a new folder. These new folders should be named “Hi-Res” and “Low-Res.” Upload your corresponding images into these folders.

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And, as a bonus—feel free to upload a Word Doc that has all of the vendors that were part of the event, into each folder. It can even be a screenshot. This way, when sharing later (or if you are doing a #throwbackthursday post) you will have all of the necessary information.

See? Everything in one place. Super organized, and you can talk anyone through this over the phone if need be (looking at you, business owners). The best thing about this is that you know exactly where everything is.