5 ms·

Ask HN: How do you organize your photos?

3 points by kreeWall 9y ago

Do you organize your folders by year? By topic? By season? Where do you store them? Do you have multiple copies?

niftich 9y ago
Travel photos in folders like 'YYYY-MM-DD Location', non-travel family photos by people, professionally-significant photos in a different hierarchy, incidental photos -- where the topic isn't common to many other photos -- in a catch-all folder. All files renamed by EXIF date. No multiple copies; in fact, aggressive deduplication. Mirrored on a different drive, and an additional copy in the cloud.
- kreeWall 9y ago
  Do you use a software to rename your files by the EXIF date?
  - niftich 9y ago
    On Windows machines, I usually have IrfanView installed as an image viewer, which can do this batch-rename with a GUI. But I have also used scripts for this in the past.
ljsocal 9y ago
Apple Photos app with original, full sized files on iCloud. Periodic backups to external HD. 27k photos arranged in hundreds of albums which are organized in dozens of folders which are organized in 6 master folders + a handful of smart albums ( favorites, videos, screenshots, etc.
navjack27 9y ago
Google photos unlimited storage from my phone. Any pictures I care about I just move to my phone to upload on Google for free full size backup
brudgers 9y ago
I ingest photos with rapid-photo-downloader https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ 1) rapid-photo-downloader handles renaming. I rename using dates + filename because that's easy to automate and renaming with semantic content requires decision making during ingestion. 2) rapid-photo-downloader also will copy the stream to another location as a "backup" while downloading. In the end, I wind up with a set of RAW files that I cull and edit and a set of RAW files that I don't cull and edit. Rapid-photo-downloader is reasonably rapid when working off the SD card. And so the first level of organization is no effort. Which is good because organizing photos is not something I enjoy and not something that I've found ever provides much payback in terms of time saved for time spent. So aside from date, my organization is various "shoe boxes" living on various hard drives and thumbdrives...and some old photos on DVD's...and some older photos in physical shoe boxes. So deeper organization is pretty much ad-hoc and short term with darktable color categories and tags that seemed to make sense at the time. On the other hand, I am not required to make my photos searchable for someone else, so dates work reasonably well because I roughly know when I took the image I am looking for and I can call up a date range of images in the Darktable lightable and visually scan for the ones I am seeking. Well and mostly because I don't have long term relationships with particular images...Usually I prefer to make something better than what I've already done to what I've already made. If I had a really serious business records case for documentary photos, I'd probably consider hard copies and physical filing. It makes records retention and destruction more clear cut...though it would depend on the use case.

3 points by kreeWall 9y ago

Do you organize your folders by year? By topic? By season? Where do you store them? Do you have multiple copies?

Travel photos in folders like 'YYYY-MM-DD Location', non-travel family photos by people, professionally-significant photos in a different hierarchy, incidental photos -- where the topic isn't common to many other photos -- in a catch-all folder. All files renamed by EXIF date. No multiple copies; in fact, aggressive deduplication. Mirrored on a different drive, and an additional copy in the cloud.

kreeWall 9y ago
Do you use a software to rename your files by the EXIF date?
- niftich 9y ago
  On Windows machines, I usually have IrfanView installed as an image viewer, which can do this batch-rename with a GUI. But I have also used scripts for this in the past.

ljsocal 9y ago

Apple Photos app with original, full sized files on iCloud. Periodic backups to external HD. 27k photos arranged in hundreds of albums which are organized in dozens of folders which are organized in 6 master folders + a handful of smart albums ( favorites, videos, screenshots, etc.

navjack27 9y ago

Google photos unlimited storage from my phone. Any pictures I care about I just move to my phone to upload on Google for free full size backup

brudgers 9y ago

I ingest photos with rapid-photo-downloader https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/ 1) rapid-photo-downloader handles renaming. I rename using dates + filename because that's easy to automate and renaming with semantic content requires decision making during ingestion. 2) rapid-photo-downloader also will copy the stream to another location as a "backup" while downloading. In the end, I wind up with a set of RAW files that I cull and edit and a set of RAW files that I don't cull and edit. Rapid-photo-downloader is reasonably rapid when working off the SD card. And so the first level of organization is no effort. Which is good because organizing photos is not something I enjoy and not something that I've found ever provides much payback in terms of time saved for time spent. So aside from date, my organization is various "shoe boxes" living on various hard drives and thumbdrives...and some old photos on DVD's...and some older photos in physical shoe boxes. So deeper organization is pretty much ad-hoc and short term with darktable color categories and tags that seemed to make sense at the time. On the other hand, I am not required to make my photos searchable for someone else, so dates work reasonably well because I roughly know when I took the image I am looking for and I can call up a date range of images in the Darktable lightable and visually scan for the ones I am seeking. Well and mostly because I don't have long term relationships with particular images...Usually I prefer to make something better than what I've already done to what I've already made. If I had a really serious business records case for documentary photos, I'd probably consider hard copies and physical filing. It makes records retention and destruction more clear cut...though it would depend on the use case.