Foto Friday: Organizing your photographs

First of all, I realize that this week’s Foto Friday is filled with words and not images, but that’s designed. For this week, anyway.

It’s because I am coming to photographers (or anyone else) and asking a serious question.

How the heck do you organize your photos?

I currently have three external hard drives (150 gig, 500 gig, 1 TB). My goal — and plan — is to get these photos all organized onto one external hard drive (perhaps a 2TB hard drive?) and keep them all there, as well as get an online backup service to make sure things are safer.

I have so many other things on these hard drives and I hate knowing it takes up so much needed space. That space where I could put photos!

From documents to everything else, I have it on these hard drives.

Here’s my issue — when I shoot, I shoot in Raw and JPEG. The reason being, if something is decent enough on the fly, I can use the JPEG. If not, use the RAW. However, I’m noticing (obviously) that the two files take up a lot more space than if I just shot one. So I’m thinking about keeping it the same, but shooting RAW plus a really small JPEG file. That way, I can use it for a thumbnail to know what I have (when on the computer), yet not take up as much space.

That’s for another day, though.

Here’s my first thought on how to do this whole thing.

I have a lot of space available on my computer’s hard drive. I think I’m slowly going to start moving things around a bit. Maybe I’ll start with the 250 gig hard drive and get everything not photos off and on the computer. Then do the same for the 500 gig HD and then the 1 TB. Once I have only photos on each of these drives, I can see how much space it actually takes up.

In the end, the 1 TB external HD might be good enough. It also might not be, in which case I will have to start looking at getting a 2TB one and making sure it’s only for photos.

I also want to go through everything and find every video I have ever taken and put that on its own external HD. Reality is videos take up a lot of space on one’s hard drive, so to have them separate might be a smart move. Plus, I can then go through them, edit as needed and upload them to places such as YouTube or Flickr.

The same can be said with my photos. As I go through them, my goal is to hopefully start uploading many other things to my Flickr account. In the end, I hope to have Flickr be my personal history in photographs. Utilizing the sets and collections, I’ll be able to have things in one place. That way, if somebody wants to see, say, my Ireland photos, they can click on that collection and see all the sets that make up that collection.

And in the end, those photos will always be there, which is a cool thing.

In the end, my hope is to have everything in a couple of spots, so it’s much easier to access and see. And, truthfully, if anything ever happens to me, I’d like it so these items are easy for people to get or see. I’m quite proud of a lot of the images I have taken and I’d like to make sure these things are taken care of no matter what.

I was sifting through a couple of these older shots this morning for a future Foto Friday post and realized I have some things I really was happy with when I first took them. But that was before my world of Flickr. Though, at that time, I was keeping my Photo blog up to date. (I haven’t recently, unfortunately. Maybe if I get organizing, I can try and get that photo blog on auto pilot and have it automatically update photos for several years!) There are some cool shots that I’d like to start uploading to Flickr and, as I noted, organizing these images.

So that’s my next photo project, of sorts.

I’m sure it won’t be done too quickly. I have a lot of images to get through, check out and see where things belong. But in the end, I think I’ll be quite stoked at the outcome and I will know that things are securely backed up and in a good spot. I hope, anyway.

For future Foto Fridays: If any of you shutterbugs out there have any ideas for topics or themes or anything else I can use for Foto Friday, let me know. I’m willing to try many things, especially for a good blog post! Hopefully I can come up with a list of items I can start working on to try and get some ideas in the bank and have many other Foto Friday stories!