How do you save pictures on your PC (or Mac, or else)?

The My Picture folder is growing out of proportions and I would like to know how people are storing pictures on their computers and why they like or dislike the way they do it:

What folder structure you use (do you sort them by year,  date, topic, etc.)?
Do you rename pictures or keep the default camera name? And do you add a date to the file name?
How do you tag them?

The good thing is that with metadata and programs like Live Photo Gallery it is becoming easier and easier to find and tag pictures. Still I believe a good folder structure and file naming convention could make it much easier along the way especially when dealing with large file collections.

Thank you for your input.

First off, I categorise them according to what they are.

If they're stuff I've done for B3TA, Fark, or some Photoshop competition they go into a "Photoshops" folder.
If they're photographs of stuff I've taken with a real camera, they go in the "Photos" directory
If it's a contrived wallpaper I made in Photoshop in 30 seconds it goes under the "Wallpapers" dir, along with a 24-bit raster bitmap copy of the file for Windows.
And so on for each type of image

Under "Photos" I have a directory for each group of photos, typically taken on the same day, using the ISO-8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD) and a few words on what the occasion was.

If it was something that span several days (like holiday shoots), I name the folder with the date of the first picture, then put photos for each day or occasion in their own folder (provided there's enough to justify it).

Not exactly hard unless your My Pictures dir is full of sequentially named DSC**** files

Yes, I'm one of those people who don't see the point in an Indexing Desktop Search if your filesystem is already impeccably organised.

JPGs from my point-and-shoot and processed pictures (as JPEGs) from my D40 go in My Pictures\Date, where date is formatted like 2007_09_30.  Raw files from the D40 go in My Pictures\_Nikon D40\Date.  Screenshots and such just get dumped into My Pictures until I get tired of wading through all the crap and move or delete them.

I keep the filenames as they were on the camera, but I use Picasa and Lightroom for image management, so I rarely see the filenames anyways.  I use Lightroom exclusively for the RAW images and Picasa exclusively for working with the JPEGs from my P&S (this is why I keep the Raw files in a separate folder from all the others--  Picasa doesn't render color correctly with Nikon Raw files, so I can just tell Picasa to not index the folder where the Raw images are).

I have not yet gotten into the habit of tagging images on my computer.  I do tag images that I upload to Flickr, but I do that online, so my local copies aren't tagged.  I do use Picasa's albums and Lightroom's Collections, though, to sort out pictures from different events/places/trips.

I save my pictures as png or jpg on an external drive.

I use mostly use Picasa to catalog those pictures.
A majority of my pictures are culled off the web( no xxx)

Photos taken with my camera go into a folder per month like 2007 09 September.  They're then named and tagged.

I've got seperate folders for wallpapers, avatars, any other things etc.

I mainly sort my picture by subject matter. It really depends on subject but some just get named as 001, 002, 003, etc. Others get named with things like Daisy1 for the first pic in the folder of my pet. But regardless of name, I do give specific folders for specific subjects. I even have a "misc" folder for things that don't fit anywhere else. I guess the thing that means most to me is getting the directories organized.

W3bbo wrote:

Not exactly hard unless your My Pictures dir is full of sequentially named DSC**** files.

That's me.  I just dump pictures into the My Pictures folder.  Though I'm not sure why I even bother keeping them since I never look at them ever.  Too busy making new pictures to look at the old ones.

Folders as:
YYYY-MM(-DD)-Occasion

Pictures taken from flash card in stead of WIA
Renamed:
YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-OrigName-ShooterName

That way you can shoot picture with multiple digital camera's and still be able to browse or view them in chronological order. Don't forget to synchronyse the clocks
The tool I use for renaming them is called Total Commander and the function is called Multi-Rename tool.

I bought an external drive to have them stored on both internal and external drives.

Peter

iPhoto, not necessarily because it is a fantastic app - but because it manages its own hierarchy and keeps originals, so I don't even have to think about it.

Why should users still have to think about hierarchies?

Like everyone else, photos I've taken go in YYYY-MM-DD (reason) folders.

Which is made all the easier because the camera can put them in date-named folders as I go along.

I never bother renaming the photos, there are two reasons for this
1: x64 support still doesn't work for sony's .ARW raw format. And so renaming them is a pain.
2: I never look at the files in explorer anyway... Lightroom is where all my photos get dealt with. I'd probably just let lightroom import them from the camera too, but I started with the folder thing, so I'll stick with it.

There simply isn't enough of any other kind of image, so they get dumped in "My Pictures" wallpapers get a "Wallpapers" sub-folder though.

I have a bunch of folders like "Internet stuff", "Screenshots", "Photos", et cetera. If something doesn't immediately fit a description, I just pop it in the My Pictures root. When Live Photo Gallery RTMs, I guess I'll just save them wherever the importer wants to save them. Because, as Rossj said, I shouldn't have to think about where I put my pictures, my computer should find them for me. Vista's Photo Gallery is excellent in that regard, I can't wait for Live Photo Gallery to arrive so I can use it on my XP notebook too.

 

I'm using Vista, so I just let Photo Gallery store and sort them by date.  It's all automated for me now -- just plug in camera, hit the 'OK' button and it does the rest.
I may (or may not) add tags as I go along.

So far my wife and I haven't had a problem with space -- if we did, I'd archive off to DVDs, or a removable hard-drive, or something. Maybe even buy some on-line storage.


Herbie

iPhoto 08. Events.

Expression Media. Thank you Mix.

I organize them them same way Live Photo Gallery does except I just keep the same file names that the camera uses. Once Live Photo Gallery RTMs I'll start using it and have it rename the files according to subject. Live Photo Gallery's import is a huge improvement over the basic wizard we currently have.

I work on other people's computers all the time and sometimes they are stuck using some kind of annoying free photo organizing
(more like dis-organizing) and importing application that came with their camera and I ask them "Where are you're photos, I want to back them up before I re-install the OS" and they open up some stupid clumsy app and say "my picture are in name of program".

I tell them "no, there are no photos in a program, photos go in folders". They have no clue where their photos are and sometime I find them deeply nested away in C:\ProgramFiles..... somewhere.
AARRRGGHHH!!!! Olympus had a program that did that and it's horrible.

I wish I had a way to teach the basics of making folders and moving around files to everyone, that way people would be better organized and wouldn't get as frustrated using computers.

Relying on special software and not knowing where your important files are stored is not a good thing. It's YOUR STUFFF, take care of it and be aware of where it is and if you have a good backup of it.

But then the user would just use Microsoft's photo importing wizard and the user would never see those wonderful value-added features running down the right side of the screen! [C]

(I've since stopped using Olympus Master.)

Good 'ole ACDSee