<p>I undertook a massive image organization project a couple years ago and I quickly realized that it involved two different, though often overlapping, tasks: Archiving and Indexing. <br>
I'm quite ruthless in my initial purge of less-than-wonderful images after a shoot, keeping only about five percent of the shots, and then copying only about two percent of those to my "print worthy" collection.<br>
For my archives I do something similar to what Sarah does - move all of my images to thoughtfully named folders and (usually) sub-folders. But in spite of my efforts to keep only the best of the best (or at least the goodest of the good), my archive has grown pretty large, and protecting it physically is a challenge. My current strategy involves backing up the full archive to a pair of mirrored drives (RAID 1, for the computer geeks among you) and replacing the drives every three years. I also copy my "print worthy" folder to a server in another state, just in case "the big one" hits. (I live in California.)<br>
But no matter how carefully I crafted my naming conventions, and how much I info squeezed into the folder names, finding a specific image or group of images in my archives was slow at best, and I sometimes overlooked an image that should have been included in a search just because the subject wasn't a part of the folder name. <br>
So, for the indexing portion of my project, I took to using Lightroom to cross-map similar subjects from different shoots. (Because I'm lazy, I usually only index the "print worthy" images.) Lightroom works great for this, but I understand Sarah's concern about proprietary systems. I'm less concerned about that only because I'm 73, and I'm pretty sure that Adobe will outlive me!</p>
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