
Ask HN: How do you organize your photos? - kreeWall
Do you organize your folders by year? By topic? By season? Where do you store them? Do you have multiple copies?
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brudgers
I ingest photos with rapid-photo-downloader
[https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/](https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/) 1)
rapid-photo-downloader handles renaming. I rename using dates + filename
because that's easy to automate and renaming with semantic content requires
decision making during ingestion. 2) rapid-photo-downloader also will copy the
stream to another location as a "backup" while downloading. In the end, I wind
up with a set of RAW files that I cull and edit and a set of RAW files that I
don't cull and edit.

Rapid-photo-downloader is reasonably rapid when working off the SD card. And
so the first level of organization is no effort. Which is good because
organizing photos is not something I enjoy and not something that I've found
ever provides much payback in terms of time saved for time spent. So aside
from date, my organization is various "shoe boxes" living on various hard
drives and thumbdrives...and some old photos on DVD's...and some older photos
in physical shoe boxes.

So deeper organization is pretty much ad-hoc and short term with darktable
color categories and tags that seemed to make sense at the time. On the other
hand, I am not required to make my photos searchable for someone else, so
dates work reasonably well because I roughly know when I took the image I am
looking for and I can call up a date range of images in the Darktable
lightable and visually scan for the ones I am seeking. Well and mostly because
I don't have long term relationships with particular images...Usually I prefer
to make something better than what I've already done to what I've already
made.

If I had a really serious business records case for documentary photos, I'd
probably consider hard copies and physical filing. It makes records retention
and destruction more clear cut...though it would depend on the use case.

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niftich
Travel photos in folders like 'YYYY-MM-DD Location', non-travel family photos
by people, professionally-significant photos in a different hierarchy,
incidental photos -- where the topic isn't common to many other photos -- in a
catch-all folder.

All files renamed by EXIF date.

No multiple copies; in fact, aggressive deduplication.

Mirrored on a different drive, and an additional copy in the cloud.

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kreeWall
Do you use a software to rename your files by the EXIF date?

~~~
niftich
On Windows machines, I usually have IrfanView installed as an image viewer,
which can do this batch-rename with a GUI.

But I have also used scripts for this in the past.

------
ljsocal
Apple Photos app with original, full sized files on iCloud. Periodic backups
to external HD. 27k photos arranged in hundreds of albums which are organized
in dozens of folders which are organized in 6 master folders + a handful of
smart albums ( favorites, videos, screenshots, etc.

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navjack27
Google photos unlimited storage from my phone. Any pictures I care about I
just move to my phone to upload on Google for free full size backup

