
Ask HN: What's your personal document management system? - amingilani
We accumulate a lot of important physical &amp; digital documents as over our lives. And, as I&#x27;m beginning to realize, it can be a bit overwhelming to manage.<p>What do you do to organize, both your digital and your physical, documents? It doesn&#x27;t have to be an uber cool document handling robot you&#x27;ve built, but some of your practices might help other people (and me) improve their own.<p>I&#x27;ll answer first:<p>1. All my physical files (degrees, healthcare records, old photographs, land ownership records, identification records, marriage certificate, etc) go in one big file without any real organization. Every &quot;person&quot;, though, gets their own file — unless it&#x27;s a record with multiple people, that goes in my file for no real reason.<p>2. Scanned copies, or digital documents are organized into categories &quot;educational&quot;, &quot;government&quot;, &quot;employment&quot;, &quot;tax&quot;, &quot;misc&quot;, etc. and are named according to the person, issue date, and classification. Etc: amin-government-id-2013, amin-education-bsc-transcript-lse-2015, etc. These go in my Google Drive and my Keybase private folder. Some also go in my Google Photos in a separate album because they&#x27;re essentially just photos and my wife can access them easily there through shared galleries.
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sangy
i had the same issues especially with photos. As a phd student working in the
lab and field, i took many photos over a week that spanned several categories
(lab,field, testing, sample prep). many photos belonged to more than one
category. at the end of the day (figuratively), i would just sort photos by
date. now i am working on cloud platform with interfaces with a mobile app. i
sort photos on the upstream end as i take them with my phone camera, by
appropriately tagging and captioning them, and i manage on the web platform.
photos can have multiple tags, can be sorted spatially on a map as well as by
time. very very convenient and excelling documentation for my phd work

