DAM - Digital Asset Management : How to store your photos on your computer

[ricktas]

This is a very well written, interesting, and informative article on how to store your photos so that in the years to come you can find the photo of 'than sunrise a few years back'.

http://capturetree.com/10-common-mistakes-in-dam-workflow-robert-edwards

Great for the beginner as they start cataloguing their ever growing collection of photos, right through to the advanced photographer. Being able to easily and time efficiently retrieve a photo from your catalogue is invaluable

[fenderstrat1963]

Thanks for posting that Rick - it was an interesting read. I've only recently started to get serious about using metadata for categorising images. It takes some discipline (well it does for me), but it's paying off when I go searching for images.

[pgbphotographytas]

Thanks for sharing this. I have just been working on trying to restore some photos for a person I know who lost them when they deleted them by accident. If they had a backup then this would have never happened....

[stevo01]

Nice article although I have never understood the need to store images in folders by date, I prefer storing them by the location with folders for countries, sub folders for states, then sub folders for cities, then locations within cities. That way I can store the images at whatever level I want. I then use Lightroom to let me search by date if I need to, as the date is stored as meta-data on the file anyway. I use keywords as well although I don't over do the keywords. I also have Lightroom rename the files on import to the date the photo was taken followed by a sequence number (e.g. 20121225-001, 20121225-002 etc.).

With this structure if I ever have to restore my catalogue I have the images stored by location, the file has the date the photo was taken, as does the meta-data for the file, so at the very least I will know the location and date the photo was taken.

[Warbler]

Nice article although I have never understood the need to store images in folders by date

Have to agree with you on that.