How do you organize your photos?

greenpea

Do you have a system for how you name, create, and organize your categories and subcategories? How about galleries?

As I add more and more pictures to my smugmug site and create more and more galleries, it is starting to get a bit unwieldy and it is time to do some fall cleaning on my smugmug site and the first step is to re-organize my galleires. (If it were not for star explorer, I wouldn't be able to find anything on my own site.)

So I wanted to find out what other smugmuggers do?

What is your system for organizing photos? What % of your galleries do your images do you figure you have public vs private? How do you decided where you will put a picture?

Just looking for advice from others.

Thanks!

JenGrace

I organise my galleries into categories and on the homepage display by category. Keeps the page looking a bit cleaner, IMO. Haven't really needed subcategories yet.

greenpea

JenW wrote:

I organise my galleries into categories and on the homepage display by category. Keeps the page looking a bit cleaner, IMO. Haven't really needed subcategories yet.

I've got almost 10,000 images uploaded to Smugmug. So to be able to find that one picture of say Mount Rainier, I have to figure out where I put it... Was it my National Parks category, Nature category, Vacations Category, etc...

So to slightly re-phrase the question to the smugmuggers out there, do you upload the pics to a common gallery where you have 100s of photos, or do you have 100s of private galleries that you copy pictures in and out of? How do you keep the photos straight, by subject or by date? Or do you only keep a few photos on your smugmug site, and just keep all your photos on your local hard drive?

NikonGirl

Greenpea--
I use IMatch to organize my photos. It works great for me.
http://www.photools.com/

I am not a professional, so you probably want some input from those folks. But with IMatch, I can find any picture quickly - whether it's on my hardrive on stored on a CD.

I don't upload every picture to Smugmug - just those that I want to share with my friends and family. Of course, that's is practically all of them!

richW

I make use of the category > sub-category > gallery style
I shoot mostly high school sports and events so it's not that bad for me.
Category - Football
Sub-Cat - Varsity
Gallery - Game 1, Game 2, etc.....
I follow the same file structure on my hard drive, so I'm able to locate the files easier.

I shoot with a Canon and I end up with a file name like "img_12345.jpg"
SmugSearch doesn't handle the under_score too well so I rename the files removing the img_ and replace it with a folder number.
So I end up with a file number like 80012345.jpg
This enables me to be able to search for the file on smugmug and my computer easier. Also it minimizes the chances of duliplicate file numbers.

BTW. I really like your index page and how you iFramed the google maps.
Nice pictures too......

greenpea

NikonGirl wrote:

Greenpea--
I use IMatch to organize my photos. It works great for me.
http://www.photools.com/

Thanks NikonGirl, I'm acutally using Photoshop Elements 5 to organize my photos. With over 20,000 images on my harddrive it does an amazing job of sorting through them and organizing them.

richW wrote:

BTW. I really like your index page and how you iFramed the google maps.
Nice pictures too......

Thanks Rich. Its actually the index page that made me realize I need to reorganize things. It doesn't do a very good job of reflecting everything that is on my site.