One off photos and friends pics - How do you organize them

So I have a organizing system thats working for me. Everything is organized by "YEAR\ MONTH-DAY-EVENT"

 

Now there are those one off photos that don't fall into a specific event. For example I took a picture of a huge

bottle of wine at a restaurant that had a friends name on it. There were no other photos taken that night. Or for

another example I took a few pics at a bar on a random night. How would you organize these photos?

 

Also how do you all organize photos taken by friends\family. For example, when we have out of town guests stay

with us we usually exchange photos before then leave. Do you all just mix them in with your own collection or

keep them separate?

 

I would love to hear everyone's take.

 

Thanks - Jason

Jason, I'm a wedding photographer, and I just maintain separate folders for recent weddings, completed weddings, family photos, portrait sessions, etc. With family photos, I like to create folders for each year, and then place all the photos from each event in the appropriate year. I name the sub folders with a unique name, such as, "Kids at Park June 08" or something like that. As long as it's a system you understand, it really doesn't have to be too elaborate. Keeping your files backed up is really important, though. You can get a Carbonite subscription that will automatically back everything up on your computer via the internet connection for $50 a year. That's cheaper and more reliable than maintaining a separate hard drive, or burning everything to CD.

 

I'd also recommend trying out ACDSee Pro 2 as an image management software. It's only $130, but does SO much for organizing, editing and adjusting, batch processing, and maintaining your photos, you'll wonder how you got along without it. You can find photos by many methods, you can rank photos, and find them by their ranking, you can search for all the photo folders you accessed on a certain date, etc.

 

You can download the free trial by googling them, and it's fully functional for 30 days. They even have a couple of less expensive versions you can try too, but the pro version is the most feature-rich.

 

Good luck!

Thanks for the information Steve. Ive been using Picasa to organize all my photos. I know its not a professional application, but I am by no means a professional photographer.

 

So you didnt really say what exactly you do with your one off photos and photos taken by friends. I would love to hear your thoughts. But thanks for the other info.

Well, with onesy-twosey photos, you can certainly organize them in a miscellaneous folder, or in separate folders for each one, just to keep them in a single place, maybe on your computer desktop for easy access. That's pretty straightforward to do. Picasa is fine for what you're doing. Good luck!

Thanks Steve.

 

Anyone else have any suggestions on the friend photos?

Make a separate folder and call it "friends". I also have a "best" folder for what I consider my best and a "print" folder which contains

images I have printed. I also maintain a list with a general description and I can highlight certain images.

Jason,

 

I have a folder named "friends," and a handful of sub-folders under it. Most of my friends photos are in the main friends folder. But the subfolders are for friends I've spent a lot of time with and have a large number of photos. There are only six sub-folders, and they really help the organization.

 

I have a "miscellaneous" folder like just about everybody else. And there are several subfolders there as well. One of the subfolders is "misc_non_people." That's where the wine bottle photo would have gone in my system. This contains photos of cars, accident scenes, christmas trees, birthday cakes, etc. It does not contain pet photos -- there's a separate "animals" folder.

 

I have a large family, so there are numerous family folders: family_daniel, family_[wife maiden name], family_[mom's maiden name], etc. This got a little tricky when I tried to figure out where to put a photo that contained people from more than one family group. So I created a folder named family_mixed_groups.

 

I have five grandkids by two daughters. Each grandkid has his or her own folder. There are also separate folders for more than one grandkid from each kid, and another one called "all_grandkids" for photos that contain grandkids from Column A and Column B, if you'll forgive the cheap pun.

 

Will