Photo Organization

i just use folders in windows. By year, then by month, then all together if they're just random everyday things, or sometimes i make folders within the month for birthdays or whatever. I rate photos as 5 stars if they are awesome and i know i'll want to scrap it, but thats about it. Pretty simple, but it works well for me :)
 
Since I already use ACDSee for my scrapstuff, I use it to organize my photos as well. I use a folder structure in which I tag the ones I want to scrap, per page. I used to tag the people and the colors in them as well but that became too time consuming.
 
I'm another Lightroom user. Love it!! Not only do I organize my photos (and scrap stuff) in LR, but I do 99% of my photo editing in LR, too.
 
Aperture here. It's very similar to Lightroom, but exclusively an Apple product (and cheaper). :)
 
i use a folder structure in windows. i used to do year, dateeventwho but now that i am doing pl i am using year, weeknr and if i have a special event year, weeknreventwhomonthday
hope that anybody can understand this :-D

i thought of using pse organizer for organizing but it simply is too much work. i tag all my scrapstuff in acdsee and that database is much too huge to be annoyed with additional photos.

i didn't know that i could rate my photos in windows but this is not usable for me as i shoot in raw and they are not displayed in windows explorer.
but the thought of rating them 5 star is great, so that i can come back to it when i search for photos for scraping. have to think of it.
 
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Thank you all for your input. Today I am going through all of my wonderful SSD kits (many of which I still need to unzip). I didn't scrap much last year but I want to make it more of a priority in 2013. I'm thinking that organizing my kits and photos will help with that. Thanks again everyone!
 
I use windows too. I organize them by year then month. I do tag people religiously, but other than that, I forget. Christmas and Birthday gets tagged pretty regularly, but even then I miss some. I did just start backing up all my photos to the EHD, a memory card and Shutterfly, so now when I scrap with a picture I can either delete it from my computer (if I know I wont use it again, like specific event photos) or move it into a scrapped folder I also have within each month folder :)
 
So I have to ask - do you that have Lightroom also organize your kit folders in this? I just got lightroom and a little loss on how to start working with it.....
 
I organize photos in Lightroom as that is where I do nearly all my photo editing. Import, tag, star & edit all in one place.

I keep meaning to use it to organize by scrap stuff but I never seem to have the time to get around to it. Now that I spend a part of out holiday break purging the heck out of my scrap stuff I'd like to go back & tag the previews of what is left but I am reluctant to add more to my already large collection of tags.

I organize my scrap stuff by folders - kits, alphas, templates, shapes, fonts, etc. The alphas are broken down into subfolders by type & the templates by designer as well.
 
I have LR and love it for my photos. I did try using it for my digi stuff, but it was not a good solution. LR does not see or import png files. So, if you want to use it to tag your kit previews, you can do that. But if you want to tag all the supplies, you would have to convert your png's to tiff's (or psd's). I think there are a few posts over at thedailydigi talking about the preview method. Also KaylaLamoreaux has a series posted on her blog about using LR for your digi stuff.

And before LR, I use PSE Organizer for my photos -- I had no trouble with it and it is very similar to LR for tagging. But searching in LR is so much better.
 
i just use folders in windows. By year, then by month, then all together if they're just random everyday things, or sometimes i make folders within the month for birthdays or whatever.

this is exactly what I do! and I have done this for at least the past 5 years :)
 
don't use lr for scrapstuff because the database is not as efficient and will slow lr down. also if you do a lot in lr it is better to have a new database from time to time. don't ask me how. i only know that when i used lr for a month and did a lot of retouching, lr got unuseable for me.
 
I used Windows. I create a folder for each month. Then in that folder I try to name individual folders either by week or by event. So Week 1, Week 2, Juli Birthday, Football week 1, etc. I don't tag photos though and if it didn't take so much time I would. There have been many times I've been looking for a certain photo and can't find it.

I do the same for my kits actually. I have a folder for each store. Then a folder for each month and in there go the kits for that month name - designer name. I use Windows search to find specific items.
 
don't use lr for scrapstuff because the database is not as efficient and will slow lr down. also if you do a lot in lr it is better to have a new database from time to time. don't ask me how. i only know that when i used lr for a month and did a lot of retouching, lr got unuseable for me.

I've heard that, too. However, that hasn't been my experience. I use LR to organize my photos, digi supplies, and completed layouts and have for probably 18 months. I do 99.9% of my photo editing in LR and have almost 100,000 images in LR. I switched to LR because it would be more efficient than what I was using (Windows Photo Gallery, I think). Except for one time within the last week when tagging was running slowly, LR has been smoking fast for me even with such a large catalog. And I'm not sure what was going on then; I restarted LR and it was fine.

I think a lot of it depends upon the settings you have in LR, how often you optimize the catalog, and how full your hard drive is.

The only time I've made a new catalog in LR is when I switched from LR3 to LR4. I kept a copy of the old catalog and made a new one for LR4. That was about six months ago, I think.
 
i use a folder structure in windows. i used to do year, dateeventwho but now that i am doing pl i am using year, weeknr and if i have a special event year, weeknreventwhomonthday
hope that anybody can understand this :-D

i thought of using pse organizer for organizing but it simply is too much work. i tag all my scrapstuff in acdsee and that database is much too huge to be annoyed with additional photos.

i didn't know that i could rate my photos in windows but this is not usable for me as i shoot in raw and they are not displayed in windows explorer.
but the thought of rating them 5 star is great, so that i can come back to it when i search for photos for scraping. have to think of it.

Alina, when I was using Windows, I was able to find a codec online for my camera that would enable me to view the raw images in Windows. I think they're available for most cameras.
 
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lucky you :-) i used the retouching tool and other ones a lot. i think that this makes the programm slow. but it might have been added to my then very old computer. i don't need lr now. maybe when i get deeper into photography later.

I've heard that, too. However, that hasn't been my experience. I use LR to organize my photos, digi supplies, and completed layouts and have for probably 18 months. I do 99.9% of my photo editing in LR and have almost 100,000 images in LR.
 
Alina, when I was using Windows, I was able to find a codec online for my camera that would enable me to view the raw images in Windows. I think they're available for most cameras.

oh wow. that would make life much easier for me. thank you! i will search for that.
 
argh. i found everything but my windows 7 won't let me install it. this may be the case because i use acdsee and it has locked the codec. but what do i know :-D maybe i will find a solution to that later.
 
argh. i found everything but my windows 7 won't let me install it. this may be the case because i use acdsee and it has locked the codec. but what do i know :-D maybe i will find a solution to that later.

Bummer, I hope you can get it to work :(
 
I am another one that doesn't "tag" anything cause I totally don't grasp the concept :(

I tag everything, or I try to anyway, because it's so much easier to find things that way. If I want to find pictures of my 2 boys together, I can search for photos that have both "Robert" and "Steven" tags. If I want to find photos of my kids with my parents, it's easy. If I want to see all of Steven's soccer pictures, I can do that, too. As I go through, I tag all the boys friends, and all of our family friends. The pets are tagged, as are things like "school" and "scouts". Last week, I was looking for a particular photo of my boys playing Pokemon - I hadn't tagged it yet and it took a long time to find the photos. If I had tagged those photos already, it would have taken about 15 seconds to find them. I have over 45,000 digital photos, so tagging helps me a lot. I also use a star rating - 3 stars means it's a photo that I want to make a layout about. That helps when I want to scrap, but don't have particular photos in mind.
 
I am another one that doesn't "tag" anything cause I totally don't grasp the concept :(

i couldn't scrap without tagging. it would make me a two kit scrapper. i haven't tagged photos but i really have to take a note somewhere of photos i want to scrap.

tagging makes no sense for itself. when i want to find a paper in pink i use my searchbox and can find the most fitting pink paper that i have.
also when i am in an obsession about a new kit that i want to buy, i can hold myself back when i search through my stash what i already have in that color, style, pattern. sorry, designers :-D

i often take part in 30 min challenges and find the coolest additions to the page through my searchbox.
this makes scrapping fast fast fast!
 
Oohh I do not organize my photos at all with any software....lol! I have folders dated with the month and year. I did try tagging before but it just got to be a pain and take too much time :(
 
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