Organizing Your Photos: Step Two

These names on these print boxes reflect the most common themes of my personal photography. The matching negatives are in dust-proof binders with the matching titles. It generally takes me no longer than five minutes to find the negative or slide I'm looking for.

Once you've decided what major groups to sort your images into (slides vs. negatives, Raw vs. JPEG, year, etc.) it's time to decide on sub-categories. Your guiding principle should be the same: To choose sub-categories that aid in filing and retrieval. Here's where working with digital files really comes in handy. You can use a basic digital asset management application (Adobe Bridge for example) to assign metadata tags to your images. To search, you simply enter the tag you're looking for and all images with that tag will appear in your image browser. Your files can otherwise be organized by year, month and day. Date information is automatically appended to digital files in the EXIF data, so if you use a date-based system it's always easy to know what folder an image came from and where it belongs.

Things are a bit more tricky for photographers filing 35mm transparencies. In this case I'd suggest sorting them into pages and folders based on subject matter. The larger the storage unit, the larger the category. For example, if you have hundreds of images of birds they might be stored in a file drawer named "Birds," with separate folders for each major species. On the other hand, if you have only a few hundred photos of animals in general, they could all go into a single folder or binder named "Animals."

The trickiest task is coming up with a system for strips of negatives that have several subjects per strip or per filing page. In this case you're not only setting up a system for filing and retrieving negatives, you need to match negatives with prints and vice versa. In my case I use more than one system. Negatives related to specific jobs, such as portrait shoots, weddings, and locations are filed in separate binders labeled as such. The "keepers" are outlined on the file page with a black Sharpie. My personal work is filed by date, with the older stuff in binders labled "1960s," "1970s" and so on.

Again, there's no one right way for everyone. The most important thing is to come up with a system that works for you. It should be whatever helps you find what you're looking for in as little time as possible, but without being so complex that you never give up on it.

At some point I'm going to write a part three, which will focus more on digital organization and back-up. In the meantime, if you're seriously interested in digital sorting and archiving, you could do a lot worse than to buy a copy of "The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers," by Peter Krogh.