Storage and Organization

[Stefanie Markham]

Good morning everyone.  My question to all of you is about storage and organization.  Most of us have a camera with us every minute of the day which means lots of photographs are being taken.  What are your go-to tips for storage and organization of all the digital images?  Do you maintain backups?  Which guidelines do you use for keeping or deleting images?

[Retired Grunt]

@stef

Here is my method of organization. I have a main folder titled “Photography.” Within this folder is a folder titled by the name of each camera I’ve owned. Within each, are folders titled by dates, a dash and a summary of themes of shots. For example: Photography > FujiX-T3 > 21 dec 2025 – MTaDW, Snow, Car show

Within each of the dated folders, I have another folder titled, “Processed” and any editing I do of the photos, goes into the processed folder.

As for backup, I have a 2TB internal and another 2TB external drive. Uploading from the camera is to the internal 2TB and I also back up to the 2TB external daily or soon as I get done editing. I back up to the external 4TB weekly.

I am running short on space presently.

I will post more about keeping and deleting.

[LightandShadow]

I am not particularly compulsive about storage and cataloging of my phone images, choosing to transfer them to computer only when there is something I know I want or that my wife wants.

Usually, I load my camera images onto the computer when I get home, placing them in folders on a removable drive. The folders are Photos => Year > Month. Sometimes, I’ll add a subfolder (Mtn trip with a month/yr) or some such. Raw files go into these folders and then images with names post processing to into a folder beneath that. So, D:/photos/2025/Dec 2025/prints. The photo folders are backed up onto a 2nd external drive and then re-backed up onto a 3rd. So, I should have all of my images on a primary drive and 2 external drives going back to about 2003 when I first started getting somewhat serious about this.

One thing I have regretted over the years is failing to assign keywords to images. I’m just not that compulsive (or maybe obsessive).

A couple of years ago, I got a Smugmug account. It’s expensive and there are cheaper alternatives. There are a couple of nice features for organizing images: unlimited space (so far). I upload selected finished images into the same year/month folders as on my drives plus I have images in Collections (Mtn Trip Oct 2025) and Subjects (Riverwalks, Wildlife). Separate folders for Requests and Family and close friends (some of our family pics are not for general consumption and viewing). As you may be able to tell, most of my Smugmug images are open to the public for viewing and even downloads. That’s a completely different subject, though.

This organization has helped me quite a lot over the years. It’s sort of amazing to me that I can see one of my images and have a pretty good idea where to look on my computer to find it and its original.

[Anne Hornsby]

Great topic, @stef

I have 4 top-level folders:  Snapshots, Travel, Serious Images, and Composites

–Snapshots –  Family, Friends, including travel photos with family, friends

–Travel – with subfolders for each trip

–Serious Images  – I never know what to call this.  It’s me trying to think about what is a professional image.

–Photo Experiments/Composites

I have 1 lightroom catalogue for each of these 4 folders, except for travel, where I have 2 LR catalogs – before 2021 and 2022 and after.

I’ve read that it’s better to have all photos in 1 LR catalog, but I ran into big problems with this – perhaps because I’m not a LR whiz.  So, under each of the 4 folders, I have a subfolder for the LR catalog so I can find it.

I always back everything up, constantly. Perhaps because our area has idiosyncratic electricity.

I have 1 high-quality backup drive (Oyen, 4 TB, before their prices skyrocketed), and several cheaper backups.

How to Delete.   Oh, this is a tough one Stephanie.  For my Travel folder, I have many duplicate shots of the same thing, and I focus on getting rid of the weaker ones.

Being a bit obsessive-compulsive, I send all delete choices to a back-up drive folder DELETES. This way I can move rapidly through my hard drive photos and send the delete candidates quickly to this folder (both duplicates and plain-old bad shots).

I can look through it later.  Sometimes I rescue an image from the Delete folder because I see something new in it. But for most of them, a second look at some later date sends them to the Recycle Bin. Not sure this is the most efficient solution.

Criteria for deleting:  Good question.  I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on this.

I mentioned duplicates. Also, I think it’s the easiest to delete family and friend photos –  I can quickly see who only has half their head showing, etc.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

I take them straight off the SD card and put them on an external hard drive.

And back up the external hard drive when I’m not feeling lazy.

I used to use an external backup service, but again I’m playing with fire these days

[Pat Garrett]

I load my pix into LightRoomClassic but the the images themselves reside on a 12 TB external drive. I do not file by date because I can never remember what I was doing on that date. I organize by folders in various ways, but generally by subject or genre. I definitely keyword everything which has been a time saver. All my images and my computer are backed up continuously to a cloud service. That proved invaluable when my external started misbehaving and needed to be erased (scared me half to death), but through the service I recovered everything.

[Author]

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