I organise all of my files in a very simple, but very powerful hierarchy of folders on my hard drive. The folders can easily be archived onto other media and backups can be taken at any point.

I have a folder for each year. The folder format is: YYYY

In the year folders I have a folder for each shoot based upon the year month and first day of the shoot. All of the digital originals and film scans for that shoot go into this folder. The folder format is: YYYYMMDD_Location_Subjects_OtherInfo

In the shoot folders I have a folder where I keep all edits, in my case PSD files. I DO NOT catalogue edits. The folder format is: EDITS

© Ben Anderson

Digital cameras do pretty well at giving your photos unique file names, but some will re-use the same filenames after counting though a particular range. By storing your shots in ‘shoot folders’ as described above it’s very unlikely that you’ll get duplicates in one place that will overwrite one another. Cameras insert a lot of metadata into the headers of your files, this metadata can describe exposure, time, date, image resolution, camera model, and much more, all of this is information that your catalogue software will import.

Film scans on the other hand contain none of this information, if you’re lucky you will get the scan date/time and scanner model. It is VITAL that you use a numbering system for your scans. I use a very simple but, again, very powerful system which I will now describe:

I store all of my negatives in film binders, be they 135, 120, 4×5, or 8×10. Each binder is numbered, the first being 0001. The negatives are inserted into archival film pages. Each page is numbered, the very first page being page 00010001 (the first 4 digits are the binder number – this stops pages being put in the wrong binders later), each individual frame is simply the frame number on the film. So, if I scanned frame 9 on film page 1 from binder 1, it would be named 00010001-9.tif This makes it exceptionally simple to locate an original film frame from a scan.

Every time I add original files into a ‘shoot folder’ that folder gets imported into Iview MediaPro – it’s just a drag and drop, the tool itself only ever keeps one catalogue copy of a file so dropping the same files in more than once does not create duplicates in the catalogue. This means that if you ever forget to add something you can just drop your entire folder structure in again, all the missing content will get added.

Now that my catalogue knows about the files, I want to record some additional information about them.

Star rating – Each photo gets a quality rating from 1 to 5 stars (* -> *****), you can use this later to thin down the catalogue, or simply to pick out your best images.

Colour coding – At import time I generally do not assign a colour code, I do this as I work though processing the shots from a shoot, here are the codes I use:

Yellow – This is the default colour, it means that the image has been tagged, starred and, obviously, colour coded, but no post processing has yet occurred. Assigning this colour as I process the images makes it easy to identify any images I’ve missed – especially handy when importing files from the past that I forgot to add, the newly added images will have no colour coding.

Green – the image has been post processed (so a PSD should exist in the EDITS folder)

Red – the image requires some post processing/is of interest.

Orange – the image has previously been post processed but needs working over again

Tagging – this is where the real power of a catalogue lies, by tagging effectively you can easily and effectively search your files for common elements. I tend to add names, objects, film type, location, and anything else I think might prove useful later.

Now that you have catalogued all of your originals, how do you exploit it? Easily, whenever you make an edit, make sure you follow your naming convention, keep the original filename or add the name as a tag to wherever it gets uploaded. Write the filename on the back of your prints. It can’t get much easier than that, now you will always be able to quickly find the original media for any of your edits.

If you take a LOT of photos, perhaps you are a pro or have simply just been shooting for a LONG time, you can split your catalogues into smaller chunks, each catalogue can contain just a year, a month, or even a single shoot. IView allows catalogues to be catalogued, so you can create a master file for the rare occasions where you need to search your entire body of work (or a smaller subset)