How do you organize your Videos and Photos?

[LoudThunder]

In a recent posting, one of our members was asking about suggestions for storing his files. A lot of respondents gave wonderful suggestions; include remote drives, online storage, large Hard Drives, and Solid State Drives.

Suggestions About More Storage Options Wanted

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space. So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me...

mavicpilots.com

One thing that hit me was the SIZE of some of these suggestions, with suggestions of needing Mega-Terabite size drives.

There was also a lot of suggestions on only keeping those files worth keeping. And that's where this posting is going.

Once you have decided on whether you want to keep that video or photo, how do you organize all those hundreds and thousands of files. Are using the File system on the Drives to set up year, destination, event, photos, videos, etc… which requires a lot of documentation to catalog the contents.

Perhaps you are using some software/database system that catalogs a particular photo or video, such as "your trip to Yellowstone National Park and you videotaped a bear in the woods on a rainy day when a rainbow came out and the bison started to graze with a wolf lurking nearby as your kids watched…

Your database might list this video under so many categories: date, places, event, parks, animals, bears, wolves, rainbows, bison, kids, etc… making it so much easier to find…

Inquiring minds want to know…

 

[Johnmcl7]

Not particularly well I had to admit as my system started over 20 years ago with my first digital camera and I've tried to keep it entirely independent of any software so it purely uses the file system for organisation. I'm mainly a photo person and it is something I need to rethink as it's getting more difficult to find photos, I've been thinking it's time to look into tagging files.

For photos from the cameras the original go together in a single large folder for that camera model, when they're processed they are then put into a separate gallery area with their own folder named yyyy-mm-dd_Eventname so they're easily found. With cameras being much faster, having way more photos and time having passed I'm starting to forget which camera did what so that's what I'm planning using tagging for.

For video they also go together in a folder for that specific device and then a renders folder for videos I've put together while the drones get their own folders for each outing which is dated and named.

 

[Lister]

There are software tools that purport to organize your pictures for you (usually employing a database) but I've found them laborious to use. If you're not conscientious about updating the data, they become useless. You also need to guard the master database file carefully. If it's lost or corrupted, you're toast.

With manual management, like I use now, the key is to name each directory so that its contents can be identified by its name. The same goes for files.

I have had quite a few cameras over the years. I organize their images by Camera, date and subject matter.

Still camera originals go on an "Images" drive and look like this:



Each "_importing directories" directory is organized similarly, but with a brief explanation attached to the subsequent directories. I called them "_importing directories" because I used to "import" all my files into Lightroom.




Each shoot inside the particular camera's directory has the same structure.

Note the date structure. Using the conventional US date notation (22/10/2020, for example) will not result in effective sorting by the computer.

Each new filename including those new files derived from a camera original, contains a descriptor AND the original filename that was created by the camera, like the JPG files shown here.



If derived files contain the original camera's filename, they sort together. This makes it easy to return to the original file.

Adobe Bridge has an extremely valuable feature called "Collections". Without disrupting your file structure, it groups files in any way you want. "Alaska" for example, or "cats", or "White Vans in the Desert". All you have to do is drag a file into a "Collection". Nothing gets moved, nothing changes, but the collections are organized the way you want.

Google is a good storage system for images, but is expensive given the size and number of files I have to manage. In fact, Google is so smart, it learned the names of my cats, but that's another story.

 

[Eagle Eye 62]

In a recent posting, one of our members was asking about suggestions for storing his files. A lot of respondents gave wonderful suggestions; include remote drives, online storage, large Hard Drives, and Solid State Drives.

Suggestions About More Storage Options Wanted

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space. So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me...

mavicpilots.com

One thing that hit me was the SIZE of some of these suggestions, with suggestions of needing Mega-Terabite size drives.

There was also a lot of suggestions on only keeping those files worth keeping. And that's where this posting is going.

Once you have decided on whether you want to keep that video or photo, how do you organize all those hundreds and thousands of files. Are using the File system on the Drives to set up year, destination, event, photos, videos, etc… which requires a lot of documentation to catalog the contents.

Perhaps you are using some software/database system that catalogs a particular photo or video, such as "your trip to Yellowstone National Park and you videotaped a bear in the woods on a rainy day when a rainbow came out and the bison started to graze with a wolf lurking nearby as your kids watched…

Your database might list this video under so many categories: date, places, event, parks, animals, bears, wolves, rainbows, bison, kids, etc… making it so much easier to find…

Inquiring minds want to know…

I have a system, although it probably needs to be broken into sub categories now. I just have master folder and folders for each individual shoot or project. It works to a point but need a little cleaning up now because it is so many folders.

 

[LoudThunder]

What a great bunch of replies. I tried organizing my digital photos when I bought my first digital camera in the late 1990s. In the beginning, it was a relative simple matter. I had a database program that I bought (do not remember its name) but it allowed me to attach various labels to each and every photo. If for instance the photo was of my grandson, fishing, and it was on a boat on a lake; I could attach "boy, fish, boat, lake, the date, the day, the weather, whatever…" to the photo and when I needed a photo of a boy, a boat, a lake, a fish, or whatever, the data base would that photo and every other photo that met the search criteria…

As you might guess, that process was very labor intensive and I had to go through each and every photo to properly catalog it. That did not last long and now the photos and videos are filed away on my various hard drives using the File Manager file names and it is a mess. "Vacation in 2021", trip to zoo, etc…

Don't follow my lead, I have three batches of "Trip to Grand Canyon" and only two are discernible because some of the folks in the photos did not yet have gray hair and in the others photos their hair is now gray… And since I have sometimes tried to straight up the mess, the dates in the are not to be trusted…

Once again, thank you for your responses and keep those replies coming as we have much to learn.

 

[chiangmaicharlies]

Not particularly well I had to admit as my system started over 20 years ago with my first digital camera and I've tried to keep it entirely independent of any software so it purely uses the file system for organisation. I'm mainly a photo person and it is something I need to rethink as it's getting more difficult to find photos, I've been thinking it's time to look into tagging files.

For photos from the cameras the original go together in a single large folder for that camera model, when they're processed they are then put into a separate gallery area with their own folder named yyyy-mm-dd_Eventname so they're easily found. With cameras being much faster, having way more photos and time having passed I'm starting to forget which camera did what so that's what I'm planning using tagging for.

For video they also go together in a folder for that specific device and then a renders folder for videos I've put together while the drones get their own folders for each outing which is dated and named.

Being a photographer for most of my life, I simply incorporated my drone pix and videos into a system of my own which is entirely independent of any software. Tagging can get awfully complicated and my system will obviously only work most effectively whilst I am alive - though any competent person would be able to work it reasonably well.

 

[JavaJack]

I own a post production company, so I have a lot of drive space and back-up solutions to tape (LTO) My biggest beef with my Mavic 3 is that every time I reformat the drive for my next shoot, all the files recorded have the same name. DJI_0001.mov, etc. If multiple files from multiple shoot days are brought directly into an edit system they all have the same name, DJI_0001.mov. If I back these files up and want to recover them, there are many, many DJI_0001.mov’s. This is ridiculous and I’ve contacted DJI several times with this concern. My Mavic 3 Cine is supposed to be considered Pro, but does not have continuous file naming like my Inspire 2, for instance. The only solution is to rename every movie file as it’s brought into our system. I’d love to get support from others for continuous file naming to avoid movie files with redundant names.

 

[BigAl07]

I offload into a "RAW" folder on my desktop and once there I create specific folders on the storage drive with names which include "Client, Job, Date, Special Details.... In addition to sub folders I use a file naming scheme that also give me a great deal of detail about individual files: (Interior, Exterior, Aerial, Fly Through . . .)
JohnSmith_123 Main Street_Anytown_OCT26_2022_AERIALS(01)

If I have any images that are of special use (Fall, Holiday, ETC ETC) I make a copy and drop it into a set of folders for re-use or re-sale later.

All media is off loaded to long-term storage after 6-months to a year freeing up local storage.

I've never even bothered to look into TAGS but I can totally see where doing a search on a large amount of data would greatly benefit from an accurate and thorough "Tagging System".

 

[Smooth Rhythm]

Thanks for some really good replies!

 

[paparatzy]

That did not last long and now the photos and videos are filed away on my various hard drives using the File Manager file names and it is a mess. "Vacation in 2021", trip to zoo, etc

I shoot approximately 10,000 on average photos per year for Real Estate. Fortunately I started using the file naming 221105-(house number)-(Agent Last Name), which the computer sorts by year by month by day. It is efficient and works well.

You could add tagging photos in order to find a subset of categories. But as to your dilemma, I highly suggest an app “Name Mangler”, which easily allows dragging in a bunch of photos and has many options for changing the file name. There are other apps available as well but that might keep you from going through photos one by one.

 

[Merrillie]

Finding a solution that works for you is probably different for each one of us.
Sorry my answer below is long winded.
This is the system that works for me and my workflow. I would now shoot over 30,000 photos a year between my landscape, sport and stock photography.

I use Adobe Lightroom Classic and all photos and videos are cataloged in that along with the metadata.
You can have 1 catalog or many, I prefer a new one for each year.

My images and videos are stored on my computer and in Lightroom by year and location, so Photo Albums < 2022 > Avoca Beach PLUS a section for sorting eg 2022 > To sort > Avoca Beach - when they are processed and uploaded they get moved to the main folder.

This filing system works for me as my website uses Categories and Location and I also upload to Flickr which I have sorted in Albums by Location . Note: Flickr also has the advantage of allowing you to download the original back again, Pro accounts are not limited by storage or how many you upload. I have 46,000 photos up there.

I have the current year 2022 on a small portable 4tb Hard Drive connected to my laptop and it is the drive I primarily work from, it is small enough to cart around with my laptop when away.
I have a 10tb Seagate Hard Drive that also gets connected to my laptop when I am at home and it contains all my photos and videos.

For Backups I have Bvckup 2 Pro on my laptop (an affordable solution) and I have it set to monitor and backup all changes on my 4tb hard drive and update them on the 10tb hard drive. It is fast, seamless and easy. I have it also set to backup the Lightroom Catalogue and documents etc.

I know hard drives can fail so at the end of each year I also save the current year onto a 3rd hard drive that isn't connected to my computer except when doing the backup.

I used to use Google Drive for Cloud backup until I got too many photos and the storage costs were going to be expensive. I also tried Backblaze which took weeks to upload and sync all my photos, then I got a new laptop and accidentally deleted the Backblaze storage and I couldn't be bothered to do it again. I tried OneDrive but syncing that many photos to cloud storage was getting annoying. Hence the in-home solution.

If something happened and I lost everything at home I have the highest quality jpg and the videos on my website that I sell and even more that I don't on Flickr. I can live without the Raw files if that was the case.

This year I also changed the way I import the files to be by year in their filename as the drone filenames were going back and starting at the beginning and I was ending up with duplicate filenames. So now when I import into Lightroom I have it setup to rename my files on import to the date first eg. 20221120-DJI_0087.DNG