sard

I always arranged my photos in folders based on Topics:
Family - subfolders (sister visiting, girlfriend)
Friends
Travel - vacation pictures - subfolders (different locations then by year)
Work - photos taken when I travel for work - subfolders (different locations then by year)

This worked when I just had a digital camera.

Now I have a digital camera, cell phone and work cellphone plus my wife takes photos too and wants to store them in a central place (so there will be multiple naming formats)
Plus I have 2 kids now so I take a lot more pictures.

I kept up the folders based on topics but I added a folder for my daughter.
Now that I have my son its getting tougher because there are photos where both are in there.

My friend told me not to divide by topic but instead by year.

Also my iPhone number scheme has flipped so now my photos are down to lower numbers which is screwing up the sorting.

How do you all handle the naming format issue and then the folder structures.

Thank you

sama

I actually make is just main folder by year and sub-folders, yyyymmdd - location and topic
this keeps the folders in date order automatically

​​​​​​For me it's just wife and me, do not so huge pile of people taking photos.

CPRich

Ah...Content Management and naming conventions. Always an interesting topic.

Unfortunately, the answer almost always is "it depends on what you are trying to achieve".

Pro's often focus on dates because that's the first thing they'll ask their client when looking for a photo - "when was this". That's because every client would be a different name, location, etc., etc - so they'd have thousands of folders with just one shoot each if they used something else.

My only suggestions would be to google "photography naming conventions" and read several of the thousands of opinions on the topic and see what works for you.

Personally, I find this one of the main reasons I used Lightroom over what others may suggest as a "Raw converter". While LR does that, and does it well, the Digital Asset Management feature is a lifesaver. When I import/download new photos from a card, they get a name that includes person, location, and month/year. But much more importantly, the get metadata tags that detail exactly what I was shooting, that goes along with the EXIF. If my daughter is looking for a HS marching band photo, I can search for her name, "band", and "marching", and narrow by date, camera, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, etc., etc. in seconds.

I realize that's overkill for most, but that's the answer for how I handle it.

Need

I kind of gave up sorting them a few years back. Now I find the pics by date or geo tag, or just google object/people recognition. Every pics from every phone in the family auto back up to the same google photos account. I could search for things like banana and every picture with banana will pop up.

The_Diamond_Z

I just saw this posted on YouTube yesterday, there are a lot of helpers in Lightroom Import that I didn't know about. It may provide some ideas:

Peoriaman1

I have a laptop I download many of my photos onto; it was a Windows 8 laptop and then it upgraded itself to Windows 8.1 and finally Windows 10. The trouble is, every time it makes an update, it changes the way it files new downloads. I had a bunch that just seemed to disappear - I couldn't find them anywhere - and eventually I discovered the computer put them in "Music". Stupid, but I should have caught it when I did the download.

One of these months I need to put everything back where it belongs.

reft

Prior Flyertalk Travel Photographer thread on "workflow" included some posts on a couple of different ways of organizing.