New external hard drive and question

dick

I found a great treat under my Christmas tree; a 160 GB external hard drive to store photos and music. I also got the PCMCIA/fireWire adapter to speed downloads.

My guess is that this is a topic that many will have opinions and tips to share and I want to hear them all. The question is what type of a file/folder structure do you use to keep your images sorted and stored?

I use a scheme now that works on my internal hard drive but now I have a clean slate and I would appreciate any suggestions from the group to develop an even better system.

Thanks in advance.

dick

ian408

Dick,

You've probably solved this by now...

I've used a simple year/date system that seems to work well. Create a folder
for the year and then in that folder, month/day folders. I usually give the
month/day folders a descriptive name like "Peet's Coffee -- Jan 1 2006".

Ian

W.W. Webster

dick wrote:

.... now I have a clean slate ... I would appreciate any suggestions from the group to develop an even better system.

I download each 'roll' into a folder following a naming convention which goes 'YYMMDD <short description>'. This effectively sequences the folders in ascending date order and provides a 2-5 word short title to enable me quickly find what I'm looking for.

I keep both original and related PP versions of files in the same folder, using a suffix -a, -b, etc on the original filename to identify the files which have been worked on for print, slideshows, or update to Smugmug, etc.

USAIR

I pretty much do as Ian does

2006>
Jan>
Cincinnati>
01-07-06
Northern Ky>
01-07-06
New Years Eve Party>

Kids>
01-07-06


Seems to work "OK" I guess
But I have sold a lot of photos lately and I need a better way of cataloging photos...
I have a hard time finding photos I need.

Anyone know a better way ...software program?

Fred

dick

Thanks for the advice, while I have not yet settled on a system these suggestions are along my line of thinking.

It's nice to have all of the new space.

ian408

USAIR wrote:

Anyone know a better way ...software program?

Fred

Somebody was mentioning key words in smugmug. That sounded like a good
idea.