Especially for wildlife, landscape, or travel photographers. I am speaking from experience.
Trust me when I tell you that if you do not follow a few simple tips at the start of your photography hobby or if you are launching into a photographic career, there will come the time, and quickly, that you will wish you had done so.
I have been my own worst nightmare when it came to organizing all my images and I knew better but somehow it just slips away from you and before you know it, there are thousands of images that have been dumped onto a hard drive without proper organization.
I am not going to tell you how you should organize them so much as I am going to stress the fact that you should. I have read every photographer’s suggestions over the years as to the best way to structure folders, catalogs, etc. But, the truth is, find your own comfort zone and do it.
I like to keep my life and business as simple as I can, and by doing so I have nailed it down to a handful of disciplined steps that I follow:
- Get a good reliable External Hard drive – (I use the Seagate Backup Plus 2TB Portable) that works with both PC & Mac.
- Good editing and organizational software. (I use Adobe Lightroom Classic Version)
- A good computer with a large screen – (I use an Apple iMac 27” with a lot of space)
My steps toward organizing some 150,000+ images into a sensible working method after all these years was to just create a folder called Photography on my external hard drive and move every image I had made to it. From there I opened Adobe Lightroom (the classic CC version which I will explain why in a future article) and began importing. Lightroom does an incredible job pulling all images into place and sorting by date and year (some setup of course is required).
So, if you are a beginner or perhaps not too far into the overwhelming process of how to create a working structure for your photos then I highly suggest starting off on the right foot. It will certainly save you a lot of headaches and stress not to mention the hours invested.
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