Photo Editing Methods of Organizing Your Photographs

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The topic opened by member is to talk about photo editing and post processing techniques. Give the most appropriate help and advice.

Andy Smith

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Sep 17, 2021
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This is an ongoing challenge for may of us, I have folders set up on my HDD named by places, family, macro, published, WIPs, completed on hold, RAW, work files etc etc. I then have these folders in my favourites panel in adobe bridge where I can easily move them, copy them or do basic export / resize and such, with subfolders for years. I then have a couple of external HDD that I back up every so often, and another specific HDD where my Mac time capsule backs up every hour.
Bridge is great for me as I can batch rename images in a few seconds - I usually name them by <> year <> specific place, client, event, person, project <> number
I personally do it this way as I hate folders within folders within folders, and would much rather have all my 2021_Thailand_images in one folder - I can then assign keywords in Bridge to batches of images to make it even easier to search for specific or general images.
It all depends on your work flow how you get things set up but I have folders for RAW, WIPs, completed on hold & then when I am finished with an image I move to the final folder where it will stay and delete the historical copies in other folders.
I only keep specific RAW's that I think I might want to re-edit later.
 
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Helix_2648

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I delete my RAW files as well after I've exported the edited photo as a TIFF and JPG file. But not just because I don't need it anymore but also because I'm stacking a lot of pictures. Would mean I have to save dozens of RAW files for one photo.

So I render my stacks, pre-edit them in LR, export them to PS and save it in a defined folder structure. Either with the scientific name or a name where I've taken the shot. e.g. "Sunset Detmold".

My folder structure is organized like this:

<year>
01_January
02_February
...

In addition I've imported and tagged them in LR. So I could search for "slime mold" to find all of my taken slime mold pictures so far.
 

Jack

Love Macro
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I delete my RAW files as well after I've exported the edited photo as a TIFF and JPG file. But not just because I don't need it anymore but also because I'm stacking a lot of pictures. Would mean I have to save dozens of RAW files for one photo.

So I render my stacks, pre-edit them in LR, export them to PS and save it in a defined folder structure. Either with the scientific name or a name where I've taken the shot. e.g. "Sunset Detmold".

My folder structure is organized like this:

<year>
01_January
02_February
...

In addition I've imported and tagged them in LR. So I could search for "slime mold" to find all of my taken slime mold pictures so far.
So you have big library within Lightroom? Means takes a lot of space as well.
 

Jack

Love Macro
Staff member
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Mar 13, 2020
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This is an ongoing challenge for may of us, I have folders set up on my HDD named by places, family, macro, published, WIPs, completed on hold, RAW, work files etc etc. I then have these folders in my favourites panel in adobe bridge where I can easily move them, copy them or do basic export / resize and such, with subfolders for years. I then have a couple of external HDD that I back up every so often, and another specific HDD where my Mac time capsule backs up every hour.
Bridge is great for me as I can batch rename images in a few seconds - I usually name them by <> year <> specific place, client, event, person, project <> number
I personally do it this way as I hate folders within folders within folders, and would much rather have all my 2021_Thailand_images in one folder - I can then assign keywords in Bridge to batches of images to make it even easier to search for specific or general images.
It all depends on your work flow how you get things set up but I have folders for RAW, WIPs, completed on hold & then when I am finished with an image I move to the final folder where it will stay and delete the historical copies in other folders.
That's makes sense. I should then save some of my raw files too. But sometimes they are huge.
 

Helix_2648

Real-Typer
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Apr 20, 2020
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I delete my RAW files as well after I've exported the edited photo as a TIFF and JPG file. But not just because I don't need it anymore but also because I'm stacking a lot of pictures. Would mean I have to save dozens of RAW files for one photo.

So I render my stacks, pre-edit them in LR, export them to PS and save it in a defined folder structure. Either with the scientific name or a name where I've taken the shot. e.g. "Sunset Detmold".

My folder structure is organized like this:

<year>
01_January
02_February
...

In addition I've imported and tagged them in LR. So I could search for "slime mold" to find all of my taken slime mold pictures so far.
Yes, of course. I'm storing my photos since 2015 and since beginning of 2020 not only as JPG but as TIFF as well. So yes... that's a lot.
 
G

Guest 2059

Guest
I have always used date and description when storing my images. EG.. Shooting on Dec. 1, 2021-birds would look like 12_01_2021-Birds in (Location) These become a subdirectory stored under the year. My Lightroom is stored by years so I don't have to load old images bogging down my system waiting for previews to be built.
 
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Jack

Love Macro
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I also planning to buy a 12tb external hard drive to store my images both raw and jpg, which I believe will be a huge work.