Tips for Organizing and Storing Your Photos

Storing and saving photos — but how?

You’ve collected a whole pile of photos over the year and you can’t see the wood for the trees anymore. Time to bring some order to the chaos. When you regularly go out with your camera, you gather lots of photos you may want to use later. All those folders on your computer or hard drives — but how do you keep everything organised?

Archiving by type of photography

When you work a lot with photography, both privately and for work, you can archive your files in several ways. You can choose to organise your archive by photography type, such as portrait, landscape, and macro. If you go to the Hoek van Holland beach, for example, you can store those images under landscape. The downside of this system becomes clear when there’s too much overlap between your main folders. If you work in niche photography, this system can of course be neat and structured. But it’s time for another way to archive.

Organising photos by date

Another way to keep your archive tidy is to sort by date — the day on which you took the photos. The main folder is, of course, the year in which the photos were taken. Under that, you can create subfolders per moment, such as 31012020 Hoek van Holland or 20200131 Hoek van Holland. If you choose the second format, your folders will remain in chronological order; otherwise, the sorting will get mixed up.

Distinguishing between private and work-related photos

If you have a clear distinction between the types of photos you take in your private life and for work, it’s useful to reflect this in your archive as well. You can do this, for example, by adding an extra subfolder after the year — one for work and one for private. Under private, you might store family moments or holiday photos. Under work, you can store assignments and portfolio work.

Subfolders

Whether or not you want to distinguish between work and private, subfolders are always useful. But how do you organise them most effectively

Subfolders by date
To find your photos by date, it’s easiest to start with the date — in the American format: the year first, followed by the month and day. This keeps all folders in a logical order. By adding the event or location afterwards, your archive will always be clear and easy for you to navigate.

Subfolders by event
When you create folders based on activities, subjects, or events, there are a few important things to keep in mind. It’s helpful to describe the title in such a way that you immediately know which photos you took at that moment.

Subfolders
Of course, you can create even more folders within your subfolders to make things even clearer for yourself. For example, you can place your selection in a separate folder, or store edited photos separately from all the originals. You can also distinguish between file types, such as RAW, JPG, or JPG for web. But that’s a personal preference. Give it a try and see what works best for you.

Don’t forget: back up!

This may sound familiar: you’ve just transferred all the photos from your latest wedding shoot onto your computer, and the next morning it won’t turn on. All your photos — gone. This can have various causes, but it often comes down to a faulty hard drive or a crashed computer. A hard drive failure or computer crash can happen at any time, but losing your photos can be prevented with a good backup. Time to tell you everything about creating a proper backup. And besides making a good backup, using the right equipment is just as important. We’ve gathered the best hard drives for Mac, external hard drives, and internal hard drives — saving you the search!