Your filing system...

[sharky60]

...just a quick survey if you will.

how does everyone file their photos when it comes to storing them? I'm land locked in Texas and HATE lake diving so I'm pretty much stuck being a vacation diver and only dive once or twice a year and spend the rest of the year editing and re-editing all my pics.

I store my files under folders named for vacation places & dates e.i.: Cozumel APRIL 2007, Grand Bahama April 2004...

Then make sub folders for underwater & land "originals" and sub-folders for "fixed" files.

sometimes I think I should do them a different way so it would be easer to find spacific files, more by catagories... i.e: Fish, reef shots, sharks, sunsets, divers...that sort of thing.

How do y'all file your photoz?

[AndyT]

I get to dive just about every weekend so I open a folder for each dive eg

01 Castle Rocks 2007_09_04
02 Whittle Rock 2007_09_05

I then create subfolders for RAW, PSD, JPEG, 640x480, Movie clips

I also add keywords in Bridge so that I can find similar photos to enable me to do a search when I need to.

[Peter_C]

Not sure my way is the best or if it even works half way well, but I use it anyway.

2007-09-01-02 Monterey diving

Year first so it is falls inline, then month/day and finally location of event, as I have many hobbies.

Sometimes I set up sub categories, but not always.

[Larry C]

All my dive pictures have Diving as the first title, then the mo/day/yr, finally location. My topside pics are generally by location or event, followed by date. A lot of people sub-categorize them by type, as in fish, invertebrate, wide angle, etc. or just do a favorites file, sometimes also divided into type.

[sharky60]

Thanks for the input guys, sounds like most of us use a similar system and coming back to when and were they were taken seems to be more of the way to go rather than by animal or thing catagories.

[kerryw]

I do as most here have said Images -> 2007-Sept -> imagelocation_sequence#_date.jpg

But then for tings like all my fish pictures or that sort of organization i use a separate product IDImager http://www.idimager.com (they have a free version) but their are lots of other similar programs out there (picaso from google i think would even work)

KLW

[KazooDiver]

I use the same method that you are using then, I tag my images for multiple types..example, Cozumel, 2007, queen angel, close up.

that way you can filter for the tag and still be able to have them in an order of location and date.

just my 2 psi

[zahner]

i put every dive in a separate folder labeled with the date, site name and which number dive of the day it was, then image names are dive site + date.

[jcclink]

Rename all files to mo/day/serial (such as 09051234). Last 4 digits same as camera used (D70 in my case).
Main folder for trip - main location (like Indonesia Sep 07) with subs for each major area (Bali, Wakatobi, etc). During the trip I use additional sub folders for each day. After the trip I create Species sub folders & move files into proper location. I find that its alot easier to edit all the pics of a given subject when they're all in one place then to try to find them among a few 1000 shots. Throw out the trash, convert whats left from raw to psd, finish up in PS. Pick gallery shots from these & do dvd slide show. (I'm only a year behind.)

[fpoole]

I currently use the yymmddLocation_a123 (sequential number) A = first card, b= second card etc.

Having said that, I'm currently going through the Book "The DAM Book" Digital Assest Management (DAM) for photographers.. pretty helpful, probably way over kill for one or two trips... It indicates sort of the same thing, won't bother to explain it here, but it appears to be a good reference to get some idea etc..

Hope that helps...

[drbill]

Although I shoot video, I extract tens (hundreds?) of thousands of stills from the video. Each file is coded with the date and dive site:

halibut California burying itself 2007-08-30 HR-a

One copy of the image is filed chronologically by dive site, another according to the subject matter (all California halibut images in one subdirectory under the proper fish family).

I wrote an xBase program to create a database of all my images and can search that to find the stills (and therefore the video footage) I'm lookin for.

[alcina]

I do it easy...

ImagesAug07
-> subfolder "land"
-> subfolder "VR"
-> subfolder "cars"
etc

all underwater stuff gets dumped into the main folder and then the specific shoots get dumped into their respective sub folders.

I use the keywords in Bridge or Lightroom to "search" for stuff. I'm kinda bad at coding the images, but when I do it works a treat ;)

Lightroom is cool coz you can search by camera, lens and all sorts of other things as well as dates, keywords etc.

OH yeah, I don't rename my images usually.

[hvulin]

I use different folders for underwater and land pictures but they all have a subfolder with year and then subfolders like: 2007-08-24-Dive_site which makes:
/my_home_dir/pics/sub/2007/2007-08-24-Dive_site

this is nice for sorting...

[JamesD]

Generally I have

Folder for where/when, example "2007.05.Curacao" (normally don't include the day unless I goto the same place twice in a month which is rare.

Then under that I have two sub-folders, originals and videos (I take quite a few videos with my camera, so need that)

Then I copy all the originals into originals, rename them all to be something reasonably appropriate eg: Curacao.Underwater.Kortape_Point.001.JPG

(so for underwater it's normally placename.underwater.divesite_name.unique_number.J PG)

Then the photos I manipulate and decide are my "best" shots go into the main folder, normally I try to limit this to 36-40 or so for any given folder.