Keep your photographs organized.
Since a few days I’ve talked about ways of backing up your photos, I think it appropriate to talk about organizing your photographs, since keeping your photos organized helps to find your well organized photos.
First of all it’s very useful to use a software that helps keeping you organized and even helps you finding your images much faster. Since there are dozens of software packages for this kind of job it all comes down to personal preference and a few very important features that would help you a lot, like:
- Organize by Category, Calendar Date, Keyword, etc.
- Let’s you assign rating and tag
- Thumbnail view
- RAW support (in case you work a lot with RAW images)
- Helps you backing up your photos easily
- Easy E-mail sharing
I have compiled a list of software packages for your organizational need.
For professional users (has a lot of professional features) :
- Adobe Lightroom
- Adobe Bridge
- Apple Aperture (Mac users only)
- ACDSee Pro Photo Manager
For regular users (has all the feature you need for our every day family photos) :
Although you have whatever software you need you still have to know some other things. To be more specific here is my work flow when I come from a shoot:
- Soon after I pop in my memory card into the card reader I create a new folder named like this: ” Year-Month-Day-Specific Number A specific name” (The specific number refers to the case where i have a couple of different shoots). Here is an example, let’s say today I had two portrait sessions with John Doe and Jane Doe, I have two different folders named: “2008-12-20 (1) John Doe portrait session” and “2008-12-20 (2) Jane Doe portrait session”.
- Copy the folder onto my external drive.
- I review the photos and delete the worst of them (Blurry, test shots, etc).
- I usually leave the default names of the photos.
- I import the photos into Adobe Lightroom.
- I tag and rate my photos (5* excellent, 4* good, 3*usable, and the rest receives 1*)
- I back up the photos on a CD/DVD.
- And after all of that I format my memory cards.
As you can see I am a little paranoid, having three different copies of the photos.
Bottom line is experiment, and use what is better for you and not time consuming. Happy organizing. 
