Any tips for organizing a photo, video and document collection?

[KurtNYC]

I am struggling to get all of my photos and video in one, organized place on a Mac (plus an external back up).

After 5 moves, 8 computers, etc. I have slides, prints, negs, stuff on digital cards, stuff that went straight to iPhoto, on and on. I can usually find something if I am looking but I would feel better if I had a master plan on how to get and stay organized going forward.

The best strategy I have thought up so far is a combo of folders by either by date or by source ("35mm" digital, shot by others, etc) and then copies of the stuff I like best and am likely to look for in "Best of" folders. The whole having copies and orginals thing makes me nervous though. iPhoto's inner workings still elude me enough to make me unsure I am getting the best out of its organizational features.

What has worked well for you?

[northoftheborder]

1. I hope your get some answers to your questions: I have the same ones.

[NV Whino]

2. When you find a good system, let me know

I can tell you what I do, which is not to say it's the best way or even a good way.

I used to file by subject matter, but didn't find that too satisfactory.

For the last three years I've filed by date and tagged with key words. Folder for year containing folders for months. I use Bridge to do that. I sometimes add * to the front of a file name. That brings it to the top of the list.

On a Mac you can create smart folders, which might work for your "best of" situation. The smart folder holds an alias of the real file. So your best photos are easily found yet linked back to their real resting place in a date or subject folder.

[rdking647]

3. heres what i do

#1 i use aperture instead of iphoto. im not sure how iphoto organizes thing but i know how aperture does

every time i shoot something new i make a new project for it.. sometimes more than one. for example i was just in new orleans for an event

i have 3 projects for it. 1 is general new orleans photos,1 is street musicians and the 3rd one is for the actual event.
on the left side of teh screen (the inspector) i have a series of folders. vacations,wildlife, etc....
i move different sets of projects into these various folders.

in addition because i tend to take a large amount of photos i create new librarys for each year. the previous years librarys are all stored on an external hard drive,only the current year is on my macbook drive

as a 3rd step i export all the photos ive rated 4 or 5 stars i(from each library) into a desktop folder called the best. i then import this into the current years library in a project called the best. this way i have all my best shots on my macbook at all times

[sir pball]

4. I organize digital stuff by date and scans by batch.

Anything digital I just let Nikon Transfer handle, it creates a new subfolder named the date of transfer. It's essentially how I grew up with film (stored in Print File sleeves in a binder, labelled with the date and maybe subject) so it's natural and comfortable to me.

Scans are divided into negatives (Mom's stuff) or slides (Grandpa's). The slides were fairly well organized, so I can keep those arranged by subject, but Mommy Dearest just chucked the uncut rolls of film into a big box so I just make a new folder every 500 images. Her slides were organized, but the image quality is just so much better from the negatives that it's worth the annoyance of having to pick through them in Lightroom to find what I need.

Oh yeah. Use Lightroom. That's really the only concrete advice I can give; beyond that, it's all up to what works best for you and your subject material.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. I just did this project a few months ago.

I organized by subject matter and the date with some key words on external hard drives. It's not perfect but it got everything off the DVDs and into some form of organization, so it's a lot easier to find what I'm looking for. I've got topics, subtopics, so on, so forth. The organization looks like a giant outline, like sentence diagramming or something. Lol.

My main problem is I have a hard time throwing anything away unless it's just really awful.

[rdking647]

6. im the same way

thats why i have a full TB of photos

[Blue_In_AK]

7. I haven't got quite that many,

But still enough that I had a cupboard full of DVDs. It's so nice now not to have to dig through them whenever I'm looking for something. I also reminded myself of a lot of nice pics when I went back 10 years to organize them.

[ManiacJoe]

8. I think organization comes in two parts.

Part 1 is how you use directories to organize your files on disk.
Part 2 is using a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) for key-words and searches.

On disk I tend to organize by something like type-subtype-event-date:

travel
+ china
---+ 20100730
+ Ireland
---+ 20120601

National_Parks
+ Grand_Canyon
+ Yellowstone

Sports
+ soccer
----+ 20130803
+ beach_volleyball
----+ 20130630
----+ 20130712
----+ 20130720

For DAM, I am still working on this. I have both LightRoom by Adobe and ACDsee Pro, both do key-wording and searching. The catch with the hi-end DAM software is that they now have really good editors in them.

Since I tend to do event-type photography, I normally post the pics to the web for browsing and sales then burn them to DVD then delete them from my hard drives without key-wording them.

For personal pictures, I don't tend to do much key-wording and have not done much with them as far as management goes.