I think probably every photographer reaches a point in his or her craft when they realize they simply no longer have a handle on what to do with the multitude of images they are producing. It isn't just the digital photographer who has to deal with this dilemma, though as a digital photographer, I know how difficult and frustrating the task can be.
My first piece of advice to all photographers is to start organizing early. There is nothing worse than finding yourself knee deep in photos with no plan of how to organize your creations in a way that will allow you to find what you want when you want it.
I'm going to focus mainly on digital organization because that is what I know. However, there is no reason why a traditional film photographer cannot use the same types of strategies to keep their work organized.
So you know what I'm dealing with, let me share my set-up with you. I have a Canon Digital Rebel (a 6.3 mp camera). This means my photo files are huge. I use three 256mb compact flash cards for the Rebel. I have an older Gateway laptop with a 20 gig hard drive and a CD writer. I also have a 20 gig X-drive (portable hard drive/card reader writer). I recently added an external DVD burner to my set-up to take advantage of the higher storage capacity of DVDs.
When I shoot photos, the first thing I do is transfer the files from the compact flash cards to the X-drive. This way I keep an unaltered version of all my photo files separate from my computer. After I make this transfer, I then copy these photo files to my computer hard drive. I use Microsoft Digital Image Suite, which includes a great organizational program called Digital Image Library. This program will automatically change the name of files as they are transferred to the computer. I keep the unaltered photo files in dated folders and rename them to reflect the subject of the photos. Digital Image Library numbers the files sequentially for me.
As you can see, I already have my photos in two places. I'm pretty paranoid about losing files, so I keep them in many places to reduce the likelihood that one catastrophic event will destroy my collection.
The next steps in my workflow involve working on individual photos and that is actually a topic for a later article. Suffice it to say that at the end of the workflow I usually have three versions of the photo in three separate file folders. I save one file as a .tiff in case I want to edit it again later. I save one file as a .jpg in order to take it to a photo lab for printing, and I save a third file as a small .jpg for use on the web.
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