How to Organize Your Images
As photographers, we take hundreds of photos at each photo session. Furthermore, we always have a camera at hand and love to photograph unique moments wherever we go. Yet we can’t edit all the pictures we take and send them to our clients. We can’t print all of them either.
Whether we prefer to photograph our family, people, nature, insects, or touristic locations, we all face the same challenge: how to organize our images in order to find what we need fast and be efficient in selecting the best shots?
Some photo editors provide digital asset management and promise to solve our organizing problem. Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, Luminar AI, and Exposure X6 are complete photo editing solutions that provide smart tools for organizing images. But even with these advanced tools at hand you still have to figure out a system that works for you. The following tips aim to help you create a routine and stick to it. Develop your own workflow, set of keywords, and folder structure. Photography is a personal expression and so should be your photo organizing system.
Organize images based on a meaningful structure
The first step you should do is to create a meaningful structure for your folders. Many photographers choose to organize their photos based on time and location. However, you can use a more personal approach and organize your photo albums based on client, event, season, or subject matter. Remember that our mind are good at remembering locations and events. So this structure is not so far-fetched. If I asked you about any specific image that you captured, you will likely be able to tell me, where you took it. So if you organize your photos by locations, you have a very good starting point when you want to find that particular shot in your library.
If you need more details, then find out the next relevant detail. Choose significant criteria that will help you search for the right pictures. For example, if the first level is the country, then the next level might include the specific location, or the year or event. For instance, if you have images from multiple trips to Sweden, it makes sense to organize your images with a folder structure like:
Sweden\Malmo
Sweden\Stockholm
If on the other hand, you prefer to organize your images by year, then the next level in your hierarchy could be the a more specific part of the year, like this:
2021\Spring
2021\Summer
Alternatively, you can also mix:
Sweden\2019
Sweden\2020
Should you use smart albums, collections, and keywords?
Digital asset management systems provide virtual albums, tools for adding and editing metadata, and tools for classifying photos based on rank, color labels, or keywords. They act as an interface between the folders on the disk and the editing workflow. Capture One, for example, has the Library tool, which includes Catalogs, Sessions, Projects, Groups, Albums, and System Folders. It also has searching, rating, and tagging functionalities and tools for sorting your photos based on date and keywords. Adobe Lightroom has the Collections tool, which also allows you to group photos from one or more folders based on different criteria.
Collections and smart albums are great for organizing your images by genre or theme.
For instance, you could make a smart album with all the images that you keyworded with “Landscape” or “Macro”, so you can view them all in one collection or album. You can also limit these folders to only show your star-rated landscape photos.
Both Capture One and Lightroom as well as other photo editors with digital asset management save you time and help you edit your photos consistently. You can create criteria based on your regular subject matters (e.g. flowers, winter, the Smith family, etc.) and use virtual collections and albums to edit a group of photos. There are other advantages too: comparing images across folders, customize filtering, working with metadata, and so on. It may take some time to learn all the features your photo editor has to offer but in the long term, it well worth it.
How to Cull Your Images
Culling images can be a long and frustrating process. Most of the time, you’re either too permissive (select too many photos) or too critical (select too few photos).
Creating a workflow and a list of criteria helps you spot the best photos fast. Furthermore, if you work for a client, you need to see the photos from their point of view and aim to create a photo series with a narrative. The following tips will help you cull your images faster and more efficient:
Keep or reject
Once you go through your images, you should adopt a keep or reject mindset. If an image is a keeper based on the levels of evaluation below, then flag it immediately, and move on to the next. If an image is not good enough, then reject it or remove/delete it immediately, so you don’t have to look at it again.
A useful approach is to first take a quick round of discarding all the bad ones where you have missed focus, or the exposure is bad, or where the subject is closing her eyes, looking away etc.
Delete or reject those, so these images are not seen in the next round of culling. Even if the subject is extremely cute or funny, if you’ve missed the focal point, don’t keep that picture.
Take a closer look at what is left
Evaluate sets of similar images and choose the best ones from each set. Don’t choose too many similar photos to send to your client or print. You also don’t want 10 photos of your kid smiling, in the exact same posture, expression, just because you fired 10 shots to be sure to have a keeper. If you have 10 keepers of the same situation, get rid of 8 of them.
You want to have a wide variety of photos, from environmental shots to close-ups. When you photograph events, you may want to choose photos that cover the entire event and add a temporal dimension to your photo series.
Use a program that allows you to look at thumbnails and evaluate multiple photos at once. It will save you a lot of time and help you spot the best photos. Once you find something you like, add a star rating, color or a keyword or move it to a collection. If you set up a smart album/collection you can make it automatically look for all star-rated or keyworded images from a specific folder.
Begin editing the keepers that you moved to the smart collection or album. Select and edit more photos than you need. You never know where a gem is hidden. You can change your opinion on an image after editing.
Export Folders
The export folders should have a meaningful structure too. Use a separate folder system and don’t overwrite the original images. You never know when you may need to edit them differently. Also, it’s a good idea to keep a reference to the original image name into the edited image name to allow you to trace it later on. For example, you can keep the same folder structure and give meaningful names to photos, and include the intended use in the filename. For instance, if you intend to use an image on the web, it is a good idea to include it and the pixel width in the export naming like: “DSC-3523 web 1200px.jpg”. In that way you can always recognize the file on your hard drive. Remember the exported files don’t go into the editor, so you need to be able to know what they are intended for, right from the folder on your hard drive.
Photo editors with digital asset management allow you to export multiple images at the same time. Edit photos from the same photo session using a consistent style and export them to the same folder. You can use different editing styles to create an atmosphere and give your client choices (e.g. dreamy and romantic or black and white photos). Sort exported photos based on the editing style.
Backup
When you gather thousands of photos, storing them in a safe place becomes a challenge. The best thing you can do is to create periodic backups in multiple places. For example, along with your laptop, you can use an external hard disk and manually backup your files once every month. Or you can use online storage space and backup your photos in the cloud (e.g. Adobe Lightroom subscription comes with cloud space) or other virtual drives (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, One Drive, Box). Don’t forget to backup editing projects and edited images too.
As you may start to need impressive amounts of storage space, a minimalist approach comes to the rescue. Don’t save all your photos. During the culling process, delete the photos that have absolutely no value. Photos that are blurred, have subjects in awkward positions (e.g. cropped at the edge of the frame), too much ISO noise, with bad compositions, or a poor dynamic range shouldn’t be kept. They will only clutter your device and slow you down, or overwhelm you.
Concluding words
Keeping your images organized in a meaningful structure helps you focus on important tasks such as taking amazing photos and editing them. Declutter your workspace by learning to cull your images, backup important photos, and get rid of the useless ones. A complete photo editing solution with digital asset management may be a good investment. Yet if you don’t create a system that works for you, no photo organizing tool will do it. As with everything in photography, create stories. Even when you organize your images.
Author Bio:
Peter Dam is a Nature Photographer and the owner of Photography-RAW. A growing photography blog, where you can find tutorials, free photography ebooks. Peter writes about everything from macro photography to finding the most suitable photo editor.
