Screen Shot of my Lightroom Library Organization Structure (Left)
To be a photographer in this digital age, you have to be organized, there's just no getting around it. In the "old days" of film, negatives and prints could be filed in folders and filing cabinets. Hard copies of your images still can be filed, but the majority of our material these days is digital and therefore it's on a computer or hard drive somewhere waiting for whatever hard or soft copy future you may have in store for it. The question is, how do you find an image when you want it? To do this quickly and easily you MUST be organized. There are probably as many ways to organize your digital images as there are ways to create a filing system - no one way is the right way. I'll share with you the system I've created for myself and you can adopt it or adapt it for yourself. My only firm recommendation is choose an organization system and stick with it. Trust me, if you change it, it will only make your life more difficult when to want to find an image later.
My organization system is primarily date driven and after that it's "Who, what and where" driven. I start with the year, then the month and then the date, followed by who and/or what the subject of the shoot was and where it was shot.
Image in: 20120513 America's Cup Venice Italy
I also set my camera to record the date the same way Y/M/D so everything is in sync. The camera will also follow the date with the time that the image was taken which can also be very helpful when you're trying to find one image taken within a burst of 5 or 10.
20100529_010113_Blue Angels Jones Beach NY
This image was take at 1:03:13 p.m. on May 29, 2010 in Continuous mode and the picture before and after were not as good as this one. Just one thing to remember, when you move between time zones remember to change the time on your camera(s) as well, but never change it in the middle of a shoot, you'll want to shoot yourself later I promise.
On the topic of organization, I have one more recommendation to share today. When I truly embraced digital photography as a new vocation 4-5 years ago, one of my greatest frustrations was that I had images, ones I considered quite good, strewn across various computers (a desktop and two laptops) and in a variety of software applications like Picasa (now Google+) and Shutterfly. It's taken time and perseverance but I now have all of my images managed through a single computer and catalogued in Adobe's Lightroom. I highly recommend Lightroom for any photographer as it was created by photographers for photographers (and I promise you I get nothing from Adobe for saying this). Lightroom is a fabulous organizational tool allowing you to know where any and all of your images are at any time. You just have to remember to always manage your inventory through Lightroom (never directly on your hard drives). It also has incredible processing tools virtually eliminating my need for other software like Adobe Photoshop Elements or even the monster Photoshop itself. Lightroom has great tools for processing Raw images, and it also allows cataloguing and further processing of JPEG images.
Over the last 4-5 years, I've taken tens of thousands of pictures, retaining an average of about 8,000 a year. If those numbers don't convince you that organization is critical nothing will, but it's required if you only shoot hundreds of pictures too. I know you're going to want to find that winning picture of the bald eagle soaring over a glacier at dusk in Alaska on a moment's notice, so create an organization system and stick with it, you'll be very glad you did.